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

Loading the driver

You aren't allowed to load unsigned drivers on modern 64-bit Windows systems, or 32-bit systems with Secure Boot turned on. If the sample driver is not signed, it generally makes sense to figure out the way it is being executed in the wild (for example, by abusing other legitimate drivers) and reproduce it. In this way, we can guarantee that malware will behave exactly as expected.

Alternatively, it is possible to disable system security mechanisms. The most reliable way to temporarily disable it is by going to the advanced options for the booting process and selecting the Disable driver signature enforcement option. Additionally, make sure that Secure Boot is disabled in the firmware settings if present. Another approach that involves using the bcdedit.exe /set testsigning on command is not recommended for analysis as it still requires the driver to be correctly signed by some certificate.

Now, it is time to load the analyzed driver. This can also be done straight...