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 these articles cited was the 2012 book Practical Malware Analysis by M. Sidorski. I obtained this book from my local library and was pleasantly surprised when I found out we would use this for our project.
My team feels like we will have a strong product at the end of this course. My two team mates have taken either Introduction to Security or Defense Against the Dark Arts. I had not taken either so I needed to compensate with research prior to the project. In our first meeting one of my teammates answered a question from my research regarding the virtual machine software we would use! From reading this article, https://zeltser.com/vmware-malware-analysis/, I found out that there are different editions of VMWare. There are free editions such as VMWare Player or VMWare Server and editions for purchase such as VMWare Workstation. The tradeoff for each version is the amount of snapshots you can take of your virtual machine. It is very valuable to take multiple snapshots to see how the system changes due to malware. Thanks to my teammate’s I found out that we can obtain a license through our OSU account. With this question answered I was able to begin working on creating a virtual machine. In return I shared the notes I have taken regarding creating a virtual machine and malware analysis.
At the moment we are working on creating our project plan and I am looking into creating an isolated virtual network. We plan on meeting tomorrow to continue discussion.
