Catch Me If You Can!—Detecting Sandbox Evasion Techniques

Just like great escape artists captivate an innocent audience with perfectly measured and planned escapes, these extraordinary illusionists of the cyber world also aim for the same goal. Using meticulous, innovative maneuvers and their specially crafted malware pieces, they are able to analyze their surroundings to detect and evade sandbox environments. At this point, they can choose to conceal their real behavior to carry out their grand finale without being detected. But, how can we see beyond the surface? How can we harden our sandbox systems in order to prevent such evasion techniques?

In this talk, we are going to reveal the techniques used by these attackers to evade sandboxes and avoid being analyzed. We will walk you through the different approaches malware takes in order to achieve this and remain undetected. Additionally, we will show you unique malware samples to examine how they implement these techniques. Finally, we will demonstrate how, thanks to the use of MITRE ATT&CK Framework, we are able to document these techniques and improve our detection and analysis systems.