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

1. Virtual Memory


When you double-click a program containing a sequence of instructions, a process is created. The Windows operating system provides each new process created with its own private memory address space (called the process memory). The process memory is a part of virtual memory; virtual memory is not real memory, but an illusion created by the operating system's memory manager. It is because of this illusion that each process thinks that it has its own private memory space. During runtime, the Windows memory manager, with the help of hardware, translates the virtual address into the physical address (in RAM) where the actual data resides; to manage the memory, it pages some of the memory to the disk. When the process's thread accesses the virtual address that is paged to the disk, the memory manager loads it from the disk back to the memory. The following diagram illustrates two processes, A and B, whose process memories are mapped to the physical memory while some parts are...