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

Setting up a testing environment

There are several options available for performing kernel-mode debugging:

  • The debugger client is running on the target machine: An example of such a setup is WinDbg or the KD debugger, utilizing local kernel debugging or working together with the LiveKd tool. This approach doesn't require an engineer to set up a remote connection, but if something goes wrong and the system crashes, it may take some time to restore tools to their previous state.
  • The debugger client is running on the host machine: Here, the virtual or another physical machine is used to execute a sample, and all debugging tools with the result knowledge base are stored outside of it. This approach may take slightly more time to set up, but it is generally recommended as it will save lots of time and effort later.
  • The debugger client is running on the remote machine: This setup is not commonly used; the idea here is that the host machine is running a debugging server that can interact...