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. Debugging a .NET Application


When performing malware analysis, you will have to deal with analyzing a wide variety of code. You are likely to encounter malware created using Microsoft Visual C/C++, Delphi, and the .NET framework. In this section, we will take a brief look at a tool called dnSpy (https://github.com/0xd4d/dnSpy), which makes analyzing .NET binaries much easier. It is quite effective when it comes to decompiling and debugging a .NET application. To load a .NET application, you can drag and drop the application into dnSpy, or launch dnSpy and select File | Open, giving it the path to the binary. Once the .NET application has loaded, dnSpy decompiles the application, and you can access the program's methods and classes in the left-hand window, named Assembly explorer. The following screenshot shows the main function of the decompiled .NET malicious binary (named SQLite.exe):

Once the binary has decompiled, you can either read the code (static code analysis) to determine the...