Only a couple more weeks left until I have finished this journey I started 4 years ago. Back then it felt as if all signs pointed toward having me pursue a different career path.  Once I had the inkling that I wanted to pursue a different career I reached out to friends in family in…

This week I have started dynamic analysis. This consists of using Process Monitor, Process Explorer, WireShark, and INetSim. As outlined in my previous blog posts I have set up an isolated virtual environment and I have taken safety precautions before launching the malware. What is key to this analysis is setting up snapshots prior to…

While performing static analysis I learned that security vendors identified the files I am working with as Trojans.  This made me wonder what a Trojan is and how it works. In this blog post I will share the information I have found regarding this. Similar to its name a Trojan virus is software that fools…

For this Blog Post I will cover how to use Dependency Walker. Dependency Walker is a tool our group is using during Static Analysis. It helps determine if there are any dynamically linked functions for a piece of software. We want to understand what functions are being imported by the malware we analyze so we…

Last week I demonstrated how to setup a basic virtual network consisting of two windows virtual machines. For this week’s blog I will share some tips I found  to prevent malware from escaping your virtual machine and infecting your physical machine. Disclaimer: this list is not an exhaustive list of precautions to take as our…

Building a lab has been a bit more challenging than I anticipated. Before taking any safety precautions and adding malware I thought I could just create two virtual machines, put them on the same network, and get them to start talking to each other! Of course anything worth doing should be done well. I don’t…

Since my last post I found out that my capstone project will be a research project on Malware Analysis! This was my first choice for capstone project and I had been doing research on static analysis, dynamic analysis, and setting up a virtual machine on the days leading up to the news. A common resource…

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