Even for a larger incident response team handling all of the repetitive tasks related to malware infections is a tedious task. Our malware analysts have spent a lot of time chasing digital forensics from potentially infected Mac OS X systems, leveraging open source tools, like OSXCollector. Early on, we have automated some part of the analysis process, augmenting the initial set of digital forensics collected from the machines with the information gathered from the threat intelligence APIs. They helped us with additional information on potentially suspicious domains, URLs and file hashes. But our approach to the analysis still required a certain degree of configuration and manual maintenance that was consuming lots of attention from malware responders.
Enter automation: turning all of your repetitive tasks in a scripted way that will help you deal faster with the incident discovery, forensic collection and analysis, with fewer possibilities to make a mistake. We went ahead and turned OSXCollector toolkit into AMIRA: Automated Malware Incident Response and Analysis service. AMIRA turns the forensic information gathered by OSXCollector into actionable response plan, suggesting the infection source as well as suspicious files and domains requiring a closer look. Furthermore, we integrated AMIRA with our incident response platform, making sure that as little interaction as necessary is required from the analyst to follow the investigation.
Thanks to that, the incident response team members can focus on what they excel at: finding unusual patterns and the novel ways that malware was trying to sneak into the corporate infrastructure.