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 the debugger

Now, we can run the debugger and check that everything works as expected. If local debugging is being used, it can be done by executing WinDbg as an administrator using the following command line:

windbg.exe -kl

For debugging over a serial port, it is possible to specify the port and the baud rate using the _NT_DEBUG_PORT and _NT_DEBUG_BAUD_RATE environment variables. The corresponding command line with a pipe should look as follows:

windbg.exe -k com:pipe,port=\\.\pipe\<pipe_name>,baud=115200,resets=0,reconnect

It is also possible to do this from the GUI using File | Kernel Debug...:

Figure 21: Kernel-mode debugging with VirtualBox and WinDbg over COM port

Another option here is to use a separate VirtualKD project, which is aimed at improving kernel debugging performance if VMWare or VirtualBox VMs are used. Follow the official installation documentation to make sure it is working as expected.

If IDA with WinDbg is being used, then it can be set up in the...