Hyper-V Virtual Machine Hardening

This article shows how a virtual machin(VM) can be modified to evade detection from malware. This process is also called VM hardening. In dynamic malware analysis, researchers use virtual machines to execute malware in a safe and isolated environment in order to monitor and investigate its behavior. This is why malware author started to use Anit-VM techniques to detect if their programs are running inside a virtual environment and subsequently evade the analysis process. In this article a virtual machine is set up and a number of open-source VM-detection tools is executed to see how the VM can be detected by malware. Afterwards countermeasures are implemented to mitigate the detection rate of the tools.