Battlefield malware and the fight against cyber crime

Relatório apresentado à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para o cumprimento do programa de Pós-Doutoramento em Ciências da InformaçãoOur cyber space is quickly becoming over-whelmed with ever-evolving malware that breaches all security defenses, works viciously in the background without user awareness or interaction, and secretly leaks of confidential business data. One of the most pressing challenges faced by business organizations when they experience a cyber-attack is that, more often than not, those organizations do not have the knowledge nor readiness of how to analyze malware once it has been discovered on their production computer networks. The objective of this six months post-doctoral project is to present the fundamentals of malware reverse-engineering, the tools and techniques needed to properly analyze malicious programs to determine their characteristics which can prove extremely helpful when investigating data breaches. Those tools and techniques will provide insights to incident response teams and digital investigation professionals. In order to stop hackers in their tracks and beat cyber criminals in their own game, we need to equip cyber security professionals with the knowledge and skills necessary to detect and respond to malware attacks. Learning and mastering the inner workings of malware will help in the fight against the ever-changing malware landscape.N/

Security Posture: A Systematic Review of Cyber Threats and Proactive Security

In the last decade, several high-profile cyber threats have occurred with global impact and devastating consequences. The tools, techniques, and procedures used to prevent cyber threats from occurring fall under the category of proactive security. Proactive security methodologies, however, vary among professionals where differing tactics have proved situationally effective. To determine the most effective tactics for preventing exploitation of vulnerabilities, the author examines the attack vector of three incidents from the last five years in a systematic review format: the WannaCry incident, the 2020 SolarWinds SUNBURST exploit, and the recently discovered Log4j vulnerability. From the three cases and existing literature, the author determined that inventory management, auditing, and patching are essential proactive security measures which may have prevented the incidents altogether. Then, the author discusses obstacles inherent to these solutions, such as time, talent, and resource restrictions, and proposes the use of user-friendly, open-source tools as a solution. The author intends through this research to improve the security posture of the Internet by encouraging further research into proactive cyber threat intelligence measures and motivating business executives to prioritize cybersecurity

Ransomware and Malware Sandboxing

The threat of ransomware that encrypts data on a device and asks for payment to decrypt the data affects individual users, businesses, and vital systems including healthcare. This threat has become increasingly more prevalent in the past few years. To understand ransomware through malware analysis, care must be taken to sandbox the ransomware in an environment that allows for a detailed and comprehensive analysis while also preventing it from being able to further spread. Modern malware often takes measures to detect whether it has been placed into an analysis environment to prevent examination. In this work, several notable pieces of ransomware were placed into sandbox environments to discover how they might obfuscate themselves for evading analysis and to determine ways they propagate. The goal of the work is to identify and understand these how these obfuscation and propagation techniques function in a sandbox, so that mitigation methods can be developed

System Detection and Prevention of Malware Wannacry Distribution Using Short Message Service

Internet network is not something new today. In almost every place like corporate, education, offices and even public places, have also found the Internet to facilitate the flow of information.In the daily life of the Internet network becomes one of the important needs. With the Internet network, it will be easier for us in terms of sharing of data and information. Computer network security system has become a major part of an important and need to be considered in an agency, as reported in some media either inside or outside the country, there has been a phenomenon WannaCry malware attacks in several countries, including Indonesia. This WannaCry malware attacks spread and massive character and attacking computer connected to the internet, to provide protection or protection on an Internet network to avoid the various external threats in order to avoid WannaCry malware attacks by using application Spreading Malware Detection and Prevention Based WannaCry Short Message Service. From the test results have shown that the system is capable of detecting interference or intrusion into the network connected to the network and the Internet through a router to the rejection of the action and then send alerts in the form of a short message via Short Message Service to the network administrator phone

A cyber-kill-chain based taxonomy of crypto-ransomware features

In spite of being just a few years old, ransomware is quickly becoming a serious threat to our digital infrastructures, data and services. Majority of ransomware families are requesting for a ransom payment to restore a custodian access or decrypt data which were encrypted by the ransomware earlier. Although the ransomware attack strategy seems to be simple, security specialists ranked ransomware as a sophisticated attack vector with many variations and families. Wide range of features which are available in different families and versions of ransomware further complicates their detection and analysis. Though the existing body of research provides significant discussions about ransomware details and capabilities, the all research body is fragmented. Therefore, a ransomware feature taxonomy would advance cyber defenders’ understanding of associated risks of ransomware. In this paper we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first scientific taxonomy of ransomware features, aligned with Lockheed Martin Cyber Kill Chain (CKC) model. CKC is a well-established model in industry that describes stages of cyber intrusion attempts. To ease the challenge of applying our taxonomy in real world, we also provide the corresponding ransomware defence taxonomy aligned with Courses of Action matrix (an intelligence-driven defence model). We believe that this research study is of high value for the cyber security research community, as it provides the researchers with a means of assessing the vulnerabilities and attack vectors towards the intended victims

Embedded YARA rules:strengthening YARA rules utilising fuzzy hashing and fuzzy rules for malware analysis

The YARA rules technique is used in cybersecurity to scan for malware, often in its default form, where rules are created either manually or automatically. Creating YARA rules that enable analysts to label files as suspected malware is a highly technical skill, requiring expertise in cybersecurity. Therefore, in cases where rules are either created manually or automatically, it is desirable to improve both the performance and detection outcomes of the process. In this paper, two methods are proposed utilising the techniques of fuzzy hashing and fuzzy rules, to increase the effectiveness of YARA rules without escalating the complexity and overheads associated with YARA rules. The first proposed method utilises fuzzy hashing referred to as enhanced YARA rules in this paper, where if existing YARA rules fails to detect the inspected file as malware, then it is subjected to fuzzy hashing to assess whether this technique would identify it as malware. The second proposed technique called embedded YARA rules utilises fuzzy hashing and fuzzy rules to improve the outcomes further. Fuzzy rules countenance circumstances where data are imprecise or uncertain, generating a probabilistic outcome indicating the likelihood of whether a file is malware or not. The paper discusses the success of the proposed enhanced YARA rules and embedded YARA rules through several experiments on the collected malware and goodware corpus and their comparative evaluation against YARA rules

GUIDE FOR THE COLLECTION OF INSTRUSION DATA FOR MALWARE ANALYSIS AND DETECTION IN THE BUILD AND DEPLOYMENT PHASE

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when most businesses were not equipped for remote work and cloud computing, we saw a significant surge in ransomware attacks. This study aims to utilize machine learning and artificial intelligence to prevent known and unknown malware threats from being exploited by threat actors when developers build and deploy applications to the cloud. This study demonstrated an experimental quantitative research design using Aqua. The experiment\u27s sample is a Docker image. Aqua checked the Docker image for malware, sensitive data, Critical/High vulnerabilities, misconfiguration, and OSS license. The data collection approach is experimental. Our analysis of the experiment demonstrated how unapproved images were prevented from running anywhere in our environment based on known vulnerabilities, embedded secrets, OSS licensing, dynamic threat analysis, and secure image configuration. In addition to the experiment, the forensic data collected in the build and deployment phase are exploitable vulnerability, Critical/High Vulnerability Score, Misconfiguration, Sensitive Data, and Root User (Super User). Since Aqua generates a detailed audit record for every event during risk assessment and runtime, we viewed two events on the Audit page for our experiment. One of the events caused an alert due to two failed controls (Vulnerability Score, Super User), and the other was a successful event meaning that the image is secure to deploy in the production environment. The primary finding for our study is the forensic data associated with the two events on the Audit page in Aqua. In addition, Aqua validated our security controls and runtime policies based on the forensic data with both events on the Audit page. Finally, the study’s conclusions will mitigate the likelihood that organizations will fall victim to ransomware by mitigating and preventing the total damage caused by a malware attack