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

Special registers

There are two special registers in Intel assembly and they are as follows:

  • rip/eip: This is an instruction pointer that points to the next instruction to be executed. It cannot be accessed directly but there are special instructions to access it.
  • rflags/eflags/flags: This register contains the current state of the processor. Its flags are affected by the arithmetic and logical instructions including comparison instructions such as cmp and test, and it's used with conditional jumps and other instructions as well. Here are the most common flags:
    • Carry flag (CF): This is when an arithmetic operation goes out of bounds; look at the following operation:
mov al, FFh ;al = 0xFF & CF = 0
add al, 1 ;al = 0 & CF = 1
    • Zero flag (ZF): This flag is set when the arithmetic or a logical operation's result is zero. This could also be set with compare instructions.
    • Sign flag (SF): This flag indicates that the result of the operation is negative.
    • Overflow flag...