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

Identifying RC4 algorithms in a malware sample

To identify an RC4 algorithm, there are some key characteristics that can help you detect it rather than you having to spend hours trying to analyze each part of the algorithm:

  • The generation of the 256 bytes array: This part is easy to recognize, and it's quite unique for a typical RC4 algorithm like this:
Figure 27: Array generation in the RC4 algorithm
  • There's lots of swapping: If you can recognize the swapping function or code, you will find it everywhere in the RC4 algorithm. The KSA and PRGA parts of the algorithm are a good sign that it is an RC4 algorithm:
Figure 28: Swapping in the RC4 algorithm
  • The actual algorithm is XOR: At the end of a loop, you will notice that this algorithm is basically a xor algorithm. All the swapping is done on the key. The only changes that affect the data are done through xor:
Figure 29: Xor operation in the RC4 algorithm
  • Encryption and decryption similarity: You will also notice...