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 9. Malware Obfuscation Techniques

The term obfuscation refers to a process of obscuring meaningful information. Malware authors often use various obfuscation techniques to hide the information and to modify the malicious content to make detection and analysis difficult for a security analyst. Adversaries typically use encoding/encryption techniques to conceal the information from the security products. In addition to using encoding/encryption, an attacker uses a program such as packers to obfuscate the malicious binary content, which makes analysis and reverse engineering much more difficult. In this chapter, we will look at identifying these obfuscation techniques and how to decode/decrypt and unpack the malicious binaries. We will begin by looking at the encoding/encryption techniques, and later we will look at the unpacking techniques.

Adversaries typically use encoding and encryption for the following reasons:

  • To conceal command and control communication
  • To hide from a signature...