Crafting malware with modern metals. [Research Saturday]

CyberWire Daily

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4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

This week, we are joined by Nick Cerne, Security Consultant from Bishop Fox, to discuss "Rust for Malware Development." In pursuit of simulating real adversarial tactics, this blog explores the use of Rust for malware development, contrasting it with C in terms of binary complexity, detection evasion, and reverse engineering challenges. The author demonstrates how Rust's inherent anti-analysis traits and memory safety features can create more evasive malware tooling, including a simple dropper that injects shellcode using lesser-known Windows APIs. Through hands-on comparisons and decompiled output analysis, the post highlights Rust’s growing appeal in offensive security while noting key OPSEC considerations and tooling limitations. The research can be found here: Rust for Malware Development Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Cyberwire Network, powered by N2K.
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0:41.8	Explore open cybersecurity and technology roles today CyberWires Research Saturday.
1:03.0	I'm Dave Bittner, and this is our weekly conversation with researchers and analysts
1:07.5	tracking down the threats and vulnerabilities, solving some of the hard problems and protecting ourselves in a rapidly evolving cyberspace.
1:16.1	Thanks for joining us.
1:22.5	A lot of modern malware, or just malware in general,
1:26.5	was traditionally written in the C languages.
1:32.0	Yeah.
1:32.6	However, recently, there's been an emerging trend where threat actors have been using other
1:39.5	languages like D, NIM, Gol-Lang, and Rust.
1:45.2	That's Nick Cerney, security consultant at Bishop Fox.
1:49.1	The research we're discussing today is titled Rust for Malware Development.
2:00.2	And so Rust kind of appealed to me because it was a low-level language like C, but it also had some kind of cool features like memory safety guarantees and other nuances that I found interesting.
2:14.7	So that's kind of why I picked Rust over, you know,
2:19.2	like a traditional language like C or other programming languages.
2:23.9	I see.
2:24.7	Well, in your research, you recreated several common malware techniques using Rust.
	...

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