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Malicious software, a threat users face on a daily basis, have evolved from simple bankers based on social engineering to advanced persistent threats. Recent research and discoveries reveal that malware developers have been using a wide range of anti-analysis and evasion techniques, in-memory attacks, and system subversion, including BIOS and hypervisors. In addition, code-reuse attacks like Returned Oriented Programming emerge as highly potential remote code execution threats. To counteract the broadness of malicious codes, distinct techniques and tools have been proposed, such as transparent malware tracers, system-wide debuggers, live forensics tools, and isolated execution rings. In this work, we present a survey on state-of-the-art techniques that detect, mitigate, and analyze the aforementioned attacks. We show approaches based on Hardware Virtual Machines introspection, System Management Mode instrumentation, Hardware Performance Counters, isolated rings (e.g., Software Guard eXtensions), as well as others based on external hardware. We also discuss upcoming threats based on the very same technologies used for defense. Our main goal is to provide the reader with a broader, more comprehensive understanding of recently surfaced tools and techniques aiming at binary analysis for modern platforms.

Malware analysis is an essential task to understand infection campaigns, the behavior of malicious codes, and possible ways to mitigate threats. Malware analysis also allows better assessment of attackers’ capabilities, techniques, and processes. Although a substantial amount of previous work provided a comprehensive analysis of the international malware ecosystem, research on regionalized, country-, and population-specific malware campaigns have been scarce. Moving towards addressing this gap, we conducted a longitudinal (2012-2020) and comprehensive (encompassing an entire population of online banking users) study of MS Windows desktop malware that actually infected Brazilian banks’ users. We found that the Brazilian financial desktop malware has been evolving quickly: it started to make use of a variety of file formats instead of typical PE binaries, relied on native system resources, and abused obfuscation techniques to bypass detection mechanisms. Our study on the threats targeting a significant population on the ecosystem of the largest and most populous country in Latin America can provide invaluable insights that may be applied to other countries’ user populations, especially those in the developing world that might face cultural peculiarities similar to Brazil’s. With this evaluation, we expect to motivate the security community/industry to seriously consider a deeper level of customization during the development of next-generation anti-malware solutions, as well as to raise awareness towards regionalized and targeted Internet threats.

Malicious programs are persistent threats to computer systems, and their damages extend from financial losses to critical infrastructure attacks. Malware analysis aims to provide useful information to be used for forensic procedures and countermeasures development. To thwart that, attackers make use of anti-analysis techniques that prevent or difficult their malware from being analyzed. These techniques rely on instruction side-effects and that system's structure checks are inspection-aware. Thus, detecting evasion attempts is an important step of any successful investigative procedure. In this paper, we present a broad overview of what anti-analysis techniques are being used in malware and how they work, as well as their detection counterparts, i.e., the anti-anti-analysis techniques that may be used by forensic investigators to defeat evasive malware. We also evaluated over one hundred thousand samples in the search of the presence of anti-analysis technique and summarized the obtained information to present an evasion-aware malware threat scenario.