From Registry With Love: Malware Registry Abuses
The Windows Registry is one of the most powerful Windows operating system features that can tweak or manipulate Windows policies and low-level configuration settings. Because of this capability, most malware or adversaries abuse this hierarchical database to perform malicious tasks on a victim host or environment. Over the last 2 years, the Splunk Threat Research Team has analyzed and reverse engineered some of the most prevalent and successful malware families.