Advanced Or Not? A Comparative Study Of The Use Of Anti-Debugging And Anti-Vm Techniques In Generic And Targeted Malware

Malware is becoming more and more advanced. As part of the sophistication, malware typically deploys various anti-debugging and anti-VM techniques to prevent detection. While defenders use debuggers and virtualized environment to analyze malware, malware authors developed anti-debugging and anti-VM techniques to evade this defense approach. In this paper, we investigate the use of anti-debugging and anti-VM techniques in modern malware, and compare their presence in 16,246 generic and 1,037 targeted malware samples (APTs). As part of this study we found several counter-intuitive trends. In particular, our study concludes that targeted malware does not use more anti-debugging and anti-VM techniques than generic malware, although targeted malware tend to have a lower antivirus detection rate. Moreover, this paper even identifies a decrease over time of the number of anti-VM techniques used in APTs and the Winwebsec malware family.