You may have recently had a malware outbreak in your network, or a single instance of malware discovered on a host. The containment and remediation of this malware is a trivial matter for experienced Incident Response teams, but fully understanding the capabilities of the malware and the potential threat it posed is often overlooked.
Maldocs are used to infect systems with malware. They generally contain either malicious code or act as a staging tool to download the malicious payload.
Understanding the capabilities of the malware is crucial in understanding the level of threat posed by it and how to fully remediate the threat. Malware that has been removed from a system may have already run and could have added a persistence mechanism or additional payloads. Removing the initial instance of malware does not necessarily mean that all traces of the threat have been removed. This is where malware / maldoc analysis comes into its own. It helps to fully understand the capabilities of the malware and the overall threat, giving you the tools you need to ensure that it is fully remediated and mitigated.