Malware Analysis Sandbox Testing Methodology

Abstract

Manual processing of malware samples became impossible years ago. Sandboxes are used to automate the analysis of malware samples to gather information about the dynamic behaviour of the malware, both at AV companies and at enterprises. Some malware samples use known techniques to detect when it runs in a sandbox, but most of these sandbox detection techniques can be easily detected and thus flagged as malicious. I invented new approaches to detect these sandboxes. I developed a tool, which can collect a lot of interesting information from these sandboxes to create statistics how the current technologies work. After analysing these results I will demonstrate tricks to detect sandboxes. These tricks can’t be easily flagged as malicious. Some sandboxes don’t not interact with the Internet in order to block data extraction, but with some DNS-fu the information can be extracted from these appliances as well.