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

Registers

Here is a table showing the relationship between registers in IA-32 and x64 architectures:

Figure 3: Registers used in the x86 architecture

r8 to r15 are available only in x64 and not in IA-32, and spl, bpl, sil, and dil can be accessed only in x64.

The first four registers (rax, rbx, rcx, and rdx) are General-Purpose Registers (GPRs), but some of them have the following special use cases for certain instructions:

  • rax/eax: This is used to store information and it's a special register for some calculations
  • rcx/ecx: This is used as a counter register in loop instructions
  • rdx/edx: This is used in division to return the modulus

In x64, the registers from r8 to r15 are also GPRs that were added to the available GPRs.

The rsp/esp register is used as a stack pointer that points to the top of the stack. Its value decreases when there's a value getting pushed to the stack, and increases, when there's a value getting pulled out from the stack. The rbp/ebp register is...