Posts Tagged sysinternal

Malicious software pieces like viruses, worms and bots are currently one of the largest threats to the security of the Internet. Antivirus Labs have invested great Money for analyzing and reversing viruses, but for our case we can perform the analysis using some useful tools on our PC.

Let’s start with www.virustotal.com , if I feel that I have a suspicious file. First what I will do is to upload it to VirusTotal. VirusTotal gives the user the ability to analyze any file with more than 40 Antivirus products. With the latest signature definition, this brings a clear idea not only if your file is safe but also to know which AV is effective. The file can be uploaded directly from the site using SSL or sent over the email. You can also download the uploader to your PC and install it which enables you to directly send files from your system using the context menu.

Today it is very important for reversing malware to know virus behavior. User should run the program and detect the changes in the system but this can harm the main system. for this we need Sandboxie. Sandboxie runs your programs in an isolated space which prevents them from making permanent changes to other programs and data in your computer. After installing Sandboxie you will have a big choice of tools for detecting and monitoring the changes on the system. you can use Process Monitor from sysinternal, API Monitor or free analyzing tools from iDEFENSE LABS.

CWSandbox is another very nice tool for performing malware analysis that fulfills the three design criteria of automation, effectiveness and correctness for the Win32 family of operating systems. CWSandbox allows tracing and monitoring all relevant system calls and generating an automated report that describes:

• which files the malware sample has created or modified,
• which changes the malware sample performed on the Windows registry,
• which dynamic link libraries (DLLs) were loaded before executing,
• which virtual memory areas were accessed,
• which processes were created, or which network connections were opened and what information was sent over such connections.

Malware can be so hard to remove, and sometimes the best approach to clean an infected machine is by restoring a clean copy of the operating system. Here we arrived to the end of this new series of Building your own malware Lab.

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