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

4. Enumerating Processes


When you are investigating a memory image, you will mainly focus on identifying any suspicious process running on the system. There are various plugins in Volatility that allow you to enumerate processes. Volatility's pslist plugin lists the processes from the memory image, similar to how task manager lists the process on a live system. In the following output, running the pslist plugin against a memory image infected with a malware sample (Perseus) shows two suspicious processes: svchost..exe(pid 3832) and suchost..exepid 3924). The reason why these two processes are suspicious is that the names of these processes have an additional dot character before the .exe extension (which is abnormal). On a clean system, you will find multiple instances of svchost.exe processes running. By creating a process such as svchost..exe and suchost..exe, the attacker is trying to blend in by making these processes look similar to the legitimate  svchost.exe process:

$ python vol...