Defining a lead
The antivirus research lead is a file that we know the purpose of in the overall operation of the antivirus software and that we have found suitable to add to our research. Lead files are the most relevant files in antivirus research.
We can compare lead gathering to the first stage of a penetration test, known as reconnaissance. When we are performing reconnaissance on a target, that information is a type of lead, and we can use it to advance toward accomplishing our goal.
To gather leads, we must discover how the antivirus software works on the operating system and what its flow is.
As we wrote earlier, the work environment we used to conduct these examples of lead gathering is Windows 10 with AVG 2020 installed. In order to gather leads, we used a range of dynamic malware analysis tools in this chapter, such as the Sysinternals suite (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysinternals-suite) and Regshot (https://sourceforge.net/projects...