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

Where to start from

Here is what you should do when analyzing a new threat:

  1. Identify the language. There are multiple ways to do this, as follows:
    • Look at the file extensions used
    • Use the file tool
    • Search for the header signature online
    • Check strings as they may give additional clues
  2. If the script requires some particular OS, make sure that you have a proper VM image set up.
  3. If the script language is compiled, search for tools such as decompilers or disassemblers to make static analysis possible.
  1. If the code is not compiled and the source code has been obtained, check for the best IDE or syntax highlighter available. Use your preferred solution that supports debugging to make dynamic analysis more convenient.
  2. Search for manuals on how to read the code—either the original or the one coming from the help files for the corresponding tools. Additionally, check whether there are some APIs available.
  3. If the code is obfuscated, try existing deobfuscators if there are any; then,...