Book Image

Learning Malware Analysis

By : Monnappa K A
5 (1)
Book Image

Learning Malware Analysis

5 (1)
By: Monnappa K A

Overview of this book

Malware analysis and memory forensics are powerful analysis and investigation techniques used in reverse engineering, digital forensics, and incident response. With adversaries becoming sophisticated and carrying out advanced malware attacks on critical infrastructures, data centers, and private and public organizations, detecting, responding to, and investigating such intrusions is critical to information security professionals. Malware analysis and memory forensics have become must-have skills to fight advanced malware, targeted attacks, and security breaches. This book teaches you the concepts, techniques, and tools to understand the behavior and characteristics of malware through malware analysis. It also teaches you techniques to investigate and hunt malware using memory forensics. This book introduces you to the basics of malware analysis, and then gradually progresses into the more advanced concepts of code analysis and memory forensics. It uses real-world malware samples, infected memory images, and visual diagrams to help you gain a better understanding of the subject and to equip you with the skills required to analyze, investigate, and respond to malware-related incidents.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 4. Assembly Language and Disassembly Primer

Static analysis and dynamic analysis are great techniques to understand the basic functionality of malware, but these techniques do not provide all the required information regarding the malware's functionality. Malware authors write their malicious code in a high-level language, such as C or C++, which is compiled to an executable using a compiler. During your investigation, you will only have the malicious executable, without its source code. To gain a deeper understanding of a malware's inner workings and to understand the critical aspects of a malicious binary, code analysis needs to be performed.

This chapter will cover the concepts and skills required to perform code analysis. For a better understanding of the subject, this chapter will make use of relevant concepts from both C programming and assembly language programming. To understand the concepts covered in this chapter, you are expected to have a basic programming knowledge (preferably...