Malware analysis encompasses a broad range of activities, including examining the malware's network traffic. To be effective at it, it's crucial to understand the common challenges and how to overcome them. Here are three prevalent issues you may encounter and the tools you'll need to address them. Decrypting HTTPS traffic Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), the protocol for secure online communication, has become a tool for malware to conceal their malicious activities. By cloaking data exchange between infected devices and command-and-control (C&C) servers, malware can operate undetected, exfiltrating sensitive data, installing additional payloads, and receiving instructions from the operators. Yet, with the right tool, decrypting HTTPS traffic is an easy task. For this purpose, we can use a man-in-the-middle (MITM) proxy. The MITM proxy works as an intermediary between the client and the server, intercepting their communication. The MITM proxy aids analysts in real-time monitoring of the malware's network traffic, providing them with a clear view of its activities. Among other things, analysts can access content of request and response packets, IPs, and URLs to view the details of the malware's communication and identify stolen data. The tool is particularly useful for extracting SSL keys used by the malware. Use case Information about AxileStealer provided by the ANY.RUN sandbox In this example, the initial file, 237.06 KB in size, drops AxilStealer's…Read More