Practical Malware Analysis

Introduction

The phone rings, and the networking guys tell you that you’ve been hacked and that your customers’ sensitive information is being stolen from your network. You begin your investigation by checking your logs to identify the hosts involved. You scan the hosts with antivirus software to find the malicious program, and catch a lucky break when it detects a trojan horse named TROJ.snapAK. You delete the file in an attempt to clean things up, and you use network capture to create an intrusion detection system (IDS) signature to make sure no other machines are infected. Then you patch the hole that you think the attackers used to break in to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

Then, several days later, the networking guys are back, telling ...