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

5. Listing Process Handles


During your investigation, once you pin down a malicious process, you may want to know which objects (such as processes, files, registry keys, and so on) the process is accessing. This will give you an idea of the components associated with the malware and an insight into their operation, for example, a keylogger may be accessing a log file to log captured keystrokes, or malware might have an open handle to the configuration file.

To access an object, a process needs to first open a handle to that object by calling an API such as CreateFile or CreateMutex. Once it opens a handle to an object, it uses that handle to perform subsequent operations such as writing to a file or reading from a file. A handle is an indirect reference to an object; think of a handle as something that represents an object (the handle is not the object itself). The objects reside in the kernel memory, whereas the process runs in the user space, because of which a process cannot access the...