Book Image

Mastering Malware Analysis

By : Alexey Kleymenov, Amr Thabet
Book Image

Mastering Malware Analysis

By: Alexey Kleymenov, Amr Thabet

Overview of this book

With the ever-growing proliferation of technology, the risk of encountering malicious code or malware has also increased. Malware analysis has become one of the most trending topics in businesses in recent years due to multiple prominent ransomware attacks. Mastering Malware Analysis explains the universal patterns behind different malicious software types and how to analyze them using a variety of approaches. You will learn how to examine malware code and determine the damage it can possibly cause to your systems to ensure that it won't propagate any further. Moving forward, you will cover all aspects of malware analysis for the Windows platform in detail. Next, you will get to grips with obfuscation and anti-disassembly, anti-debugging, as well as anti-virtual machine techniques. This book will help you deal with modern cross-platform malware. Throughout the course of this book, you will explore real-world examples of static and dynamic malware analysis, unpacking and decrypting, and rootkit detection. Finally, this book will help you strengthen your defenses and prevent malware breaches for IoT devices and mobile platforms. By the end of this book, you will have learned to effectively analyze, investigate, and build innovative solutions to handle any malware incidents.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Fundamental Theory
3
Section 2: Diving Deep into Windows Malware
5
Unpacking, Decryption, and Deobfuscation
9
Section 3: Examining Cross-Platform Malware
13
Section 4: Looking into IoT and Other Platforms

Basics of MIPS

Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages (MIPS) was developed by MIPS technologies (formerly MIPS computer systems). Similar to ARM, at first, it was a 32-bit architecture with 64-bit functionality added later. Taking advantage of the RISC ISA, MIPS processors are characterized by low power and heat consumption. They can often be found in multiple embedded systems such as routers and gateways, and several video game consoles such as Sony PlayStation also incorporated them. Unfortunately, due to the popularity of this architecture, the systems implementing it became a target of multiple IoT malware families. An example can be seen in the following screenshot:

Figure 6: IoT malware targeting MIPS-based systems

As the architecture evolved, there were several versions of it, starting from MIPS I and going up to V, and then several releases of the more recent MIPS32/MIPS64. MIPS64 remains backward-compatible with MIPS32. These base architectures can be further supplemented...