Python and Malware: Developing Stealth and Evasive Malware without Obfuscation

Vasilios Koutsokostas, Constantinos Patsakis, Constantinos Patsakis

2021

Abstract

With the continuous rise of malicious campaigns and the exploitation of new attack vectors, it is necessary to assess the efficacy of the defensive mechanisms used to detect them. To this end, the contribution of our work is twofold. First, it introduces a new method for obfuscating malicious code to bypass all static checks of multi-engine scanners, such as VirusTotal. Interestingly, our approach to generating the malicious executables is not based on introducing a new packer but on the augmentation of the capabilities of an existing and widely used tool for packaging Python, PyInstaller but can be used for all similar packaging tools. As we prove, the problem is deeper and inherent in almost all antivirus engines and not PyInstaller specific. Second, our work exposes significant issues of well-known sandboxes that allow malware to evade their checks. As a result, we show that stealth and evasive malware can be efficiently developed, bypassing with ease state of the art malware detection tools without raising any alert.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Koutsokostas V. and Patsakis C. (2021). Python and Malware: Developing Stealth and Evasive Malware without Obfuscation. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, ISBN 978-989-758-524-1, pages 125-136. DOI: 10.5220/0010541501250136

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt21,
author={Vasilios Koutsokostas and Constantinos Patsakis},
title={Python and Malware: Developing Stealth and Evasive Malware without Obfuscation},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT,},
year={2021},
pages={125-136},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010541501250136},
isbn={978-989-758-524-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT,
TI - Python and Malware: Developing Stealth and Evasive Malware without Obfuscation
SN - 978-989-758-524-1
AU - Koutsokostas V.
AU - Patsakis C.
PY - 2021
SP - 125
EP - 136
DO - 10.5220/0010541501250136