Dynamic Analysis

Overview

Dynamic analysis executes a malware sample in a controlled environment and observes its behavior — filesystem changes, registry modifications, network communications, process creation, and API calls. Dynamic analysis reveals runtime behavior that static analysis cannot, especially for packed, encrypted, or obfuscated samples.

Topics in This Section

• Sandbox Setup — building isolated analysis environments with VMs, snapshots, and network simulation
• Behavioral Analysis — monitoring filesystem, registry, process, and system-level changes during execution
• Network Traffic Analysis — capturing and analyzing malware C2 communications, DNS queries, and data exfiltration
• API Call Monitoring — tracing system calls and API usage with strace, ltrace, and Frida

General Approach

1. Prepare — set up an isolated VM with snapshots, configure network monitoring
2. Execute — run the sample while monitoring tools capture activity
3. Observe — watch for filesystem, registry, network, and process changes
4. Capture — save network traffic, API traces, and behavioral logs
5. Analyze — correlate observations to understand malware capabilities
6. Restore — revert the VM to a clean snapshot after analysis