Practical Malware Analysis

Types of Malware

When performing malware analysis, you will find that you can often speed up your analysis by making educated guesses about what the malware is trying to do and then confirming those hypotheses. Of course, you’ll be able to make better guesses if you know the kinds of things that malware usually does. To that end, here are the categories that most malware falls into:

• Backdoor. Malicious code that installs itself onto a computer to allow the attacker access. Backdoors usually let the attacker connect to the computer with little or no authentication and execute commands on the local system.

• Botnet. Similar to a backdoor, in that it allows the attacker access to the system, but all computers infected with the same botnet receive the ...