Malicious software (i.e., malware) has become a severe threat to interconnected computer systems for decades and has caused billions of dollars damages each year. A large volume of new malware samples are discovered daily. Even worse, malware is rapidly evolving becoming more sophisticated and evasive to strike against current malware analysis and defense systems. Automatic Malware Analysis presents a virtualized malware analysis framework that addresses common challenges in malware analysis. In regards to this new analysis framework, a series of analysis techniques for automatic malware analysis is developed. These techniques capture intrinsic characteristics of malware, and are well suited for dealing with new malware samples and attack mechanisms.

This book is a step-by-step, practical tutorial for analyzing and detecting malware and performing digital investigations. This book features clear and concise guidance in an easily accessible format.Cuckoo Malware Analysis is great for anyone who wants to analyze malware through programming, networking, disassembling, forensics, and virtualization. Whether you are new to malware analysis or have some experience, this book will help you get started with Cuckoo Sandbox so you can start analysing malware effectively and efficiently.

Botnets have become the platform of choice for launching attacks and committing fraud on the Internet. A better understanding of Botnets will help to coordinate and develop new technologies to counter this serious security threat. Botnet Detection: Countering the Largest Security Threat consists of chapters contributed by world-class leaders in this field, from the June 2006 ARO workshop on Botnets. This edited volume represents the state-of-the-art in research on Botnets.

This book captures the state of the art research in the area of malicious code detection, prevention and mitigation. It contains cutting-edge behavior-based techniques to analyze and detect obfuscated malware. The book analyzes current trends in malware activity online, including botnets and malicious code for profit, and it proposes effective models for detection and prevention of attacks using. Furthermore, the book introduces novel techniques for creating services that protect their own integrity and safety, plus the data they manage.

Since 2014 there have been over 120 million new malicious programs registered every year. Due to the amount of new malware appearing every year, analysts have automated large sections of the malware reverse engineering process. Many automated analysis systems are created by re-implementing analysis techniques rather than automating existing tools that utilize the same techniques. New implementations take longer to create and do not have the same proven quality as a tool that evolved alongside malware for many years. The goal of this study is to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of using existing tools for the application of automated malware analysis. This study focuses on the problem of discovering how malware persists on an infected system. Six tools are chosen based on their usefulness in manual analysis for revealing different persistence techniques employed by malware. The functions of these tools are automated in a fashion that emulates how they can be manually utilized, resulting in information about a tested sample. These six tools are tested against a collection of actual malware samples, pulled from malware families that are known for employing various persistence techniques. The findings are then scanned for indicators of persistence. The results of these tests are used to determine the smallest tool subset that discovers the largest range of persistence mechanisms. For each tool, implementation difficulty is compared to the number of indicators discovered to reveal the effectiveness of similar tools for future analysis applications. The conclusion is that while the tools covered a wide range of persistence mechanisms, the standalone tools that were designed with scripting in mind were more effective than those with multiple system requirements or those with only a graphical interface. It was also discovered that the automation process limits functionality of some tools, as they are designed for analyst interaction. Regaining the tools' functionality lost from automation to use them for other reverse engineering applications could be cumbersome and could require necessary implementation overhauls. Finally, the more successful tools were able to detect a broader range of techniques, while some less successful tools could only detect a portion of the same techniques. This study concludes that while an analysis system can be created by automating existing tools, the characteristics of the tools chosen impact the workload required to automate them. A well-documented tool that is controllable through a command line interface that offers many configuration options will require less work for an analyst to automate than a tool with little documentation that can only be controlled through a graphical interface.

This volume of Advances in Intelligent and Soft Computing contains accepted papers presented at CISIS 2012 and ICEUTE 2012, both conferences held in the beautiful and historic city of Ostrava (Czech Republic), in September 2012. CISIS aims to offer a meeting opportunity for academic and industry-related researchers belonging to the various, vast communities of Computational Intelligence, Information Security, and Data Mining. The need for intelligent, flexible behaviour by large, complex systems, especially in mission-critical domains, is intended to be the catalyst and the aggregation stimulus for the overall event. After a through peer-review process, the CISIS 2012 International Program Committee selected 30 papers which are published in these conference proceedings achieving an acceptance rate of 40%. In the case of ICEUTE 2012, the International Program Committee selected 4 papers which are published in these conference proceedings. The selection of papers was extremely rigorous in order to maintain the high quality of the conference and we would like to thank the members of the Program Committees for their hard work in the reviewing process. This is a crucial process to the creation of a high standard conference and the CISIS and ICEUTE conferences would not exist without their help.