Unknown malware poses a significant cybersecurity risk and can cause significant harm to both organizations and individuals. Malicious code can gain access to confidential information, corrupt data, and allow attackers to take control of systems if it goes undetected.
Learn how to avoid these situations and effectively detect unknown malicious behavior.
Challenges in detecting new threats# While known malware families are more predictable and can be detected more easily, unknown threats can take on a variety of forms, posing a slew of detection challenges:
- Malware developers employ polymorphism, allowing them to modify the malicious code to create distinct variants of the same malware.
- There is malware that has yet to be identified and does not have any detection rulesets.
- Some threats can be Fully UnDetectable (FUD) for a period of time, putting perimeter security at risk.
- The code is frequently encrypted, making signature-based security solutions difficult to detect.
- Malware authors may employ a "low and slow" strategy, which entails sending a small amount of malicious code across a network over a long period of time, making it difficult to detect and block. This is especially dangerous in corporate networks, where a lack of visibility into the environment can result in undetected malicious activity.
New threat detection# When analyzing known malware families, researchers can use existing data about the malware, such as its behavior, payloads, and known vulnerabilities, to detect and respond to it.
However, when dealing with new threats, researchers must start from scratch, following the guidelines below:
Step 1: Use reverse engineering to analyze the malware's code to determine its purpose and malicious nature.
Step 2: Examine the malware's code using static analysis to identify its behavior, payloads, and vulnerabilities.
Step 3: Use dynamic analysis to observe the malware's behavior during execution.
Step 4: Use sandboxing to isolate the malware and observe its behavior without causing harm to the system.
Step 5: Identify potentially malicious code using heuristics based on observable patterns and behaviors.
Step 6: Examine the results of reverse engineering, static and dynamic analysis, sandboxing, and heuristics to see if the code is malicious.
There are numerous tools available to assist you with the first five steps, ranging from Process Monitor and Wireshark to ANY.RUN. But how do you draw a precise conclusion, and what should you focus on with all of this data?
The solution is straightforward: concentrate on indicators of malicious behavior.
Surveillance of suspicious activities is essential for the effective detection
To detect threats, various signatures are used. A signature is a typical footprint or pattern associated with a malicious attack on a computer network or system, according to computer security terminology.
Behavioral signatures are included in this list. It's impossible to do something in the OS without leaving a trace. We can determine what software or script it was based on their suspicious behavior.
You can observe the behavior of the malware and identify any malicious behavior by running a suspicious program in a sandbox, such as:
- abnormal file system activity,
- suspicious process creation and termination
- abnormal networking activity
- reading or modifying system files
- access system resources
- create new users
- connect to remote servers
- execute other malicious commands
- exploit known vulnerabilities in the system
Microsoft Office is launching PowerShell, which appears suspicious, doesn't it? Pay close attention when an application adds itself to the scheduled tasks. Something is definitely wrong when a svchost process runs from the temp registry. Even without signatures, you can always detect a threat based on its behavior.
Eventually, cybercriminals can use unknown threats to extort money from businesses and launch large-scale cyberattacks. Even if the malware family is not discovered, we can always deduce the threat's functionality based on its behavior.
Using this information, you can create information security to protect against new threats. Behavior analysis improves your ability to respond to new and unknown threats while also strengthening your organization's security without incurring additional costs.