Reverse-Engineering Malware

Abstract

Cyberspace is quickly becoming overwhelmed with ever-evolving malware that breaches all security defenses and secretly leaks 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. The objective of this research is to present the fundamentals of malware reverse-engineering, the tools, and techniques needed to properly analyze malicious programs to determine their characteristics. Those tools and techniques will provide insights to incident response teams and digital investigation professionals. In order to stop hackers in their tracks, we need to equip cyber security professionals with the knowledge and skills necessary to detect and respond to malware attacks. Additionally, the authors discuss what ransomware is, how it infects systems, and how to prevent infection. It will also examine some different variations of ransomware, as well as explore some cases of ransomware.