File analysis engines for identifying security-related threats

Abstract

Techniques are described for providing a threat analysis platform capable of automating actions performed to analyze security-related threats affecting IT environments. Users or applications can submit objects (e.g., URLs, files, etc.) for analysis by the threat analysis platform. Once submitted, the threat analysis platform routes the objects to dedicated engines that can perform static and dynamic analysis processes to determine a likelihood that an object is associated with malicious activity such as phishing attacks, malware, or other types of security threats. The automated actions performed by the threat analysis platform can include, for example, navigating to submitted URLs and recording activity related to accessing the corresponding resource, analyzing files and documents by extracting text and metadata, extracting and emulating execution of embedded macro source code, performing optical character recognition (OCR) and other types of image analysis, submitting objects to third-party security services for analysis, among many other possible actions.