Paper: Custom packer defeats multiple automation systems

Combination of anti-automation, anti-VM and anti-reverse engineering to make researchers' lives harder.

Ever since the number of new malware samples became so large we could no longer list them in Virus Bulletin magazine, security researchers have been looking at ways to automate analysis. And ever since then, malware authors have been trying to find ways to make malware analysis in general, and automated analysis in particular, a lot harder.

Often, those techniques don't appear in the malware itself but in packers, which are often specifically designed to hide the malware's activities.

Today, we publish an article by Symantec researcher Ke Zhang in which he looks at three anti-analysis tricks applied by one such packer. In particular, the packer applies anti-automation to ensure it only runs when it is running on a real machine used by a human user, anti-VM which prevents it from running on a virtual machine, and anti-reverse engineering techniques to frustrate the lives of those analysing the packer.

Read more (2 paragraphs)