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. Malware Unpacking


Attackers go to great lengths to protect their binary from anti-virus detection and to make it difficult for a malware analyst to perform static analysis and reverse engineering. Malware authors often use packers and cryptors (seeChapter 2, Static Analysis, for a basic introduction to packers and how to detect them) to obfuscate the executable content. A packer is a program that takes a normal executable, compresses its contents, and generates a new obfuscated executable. A cryptor is like a packer instead of compressing the binary; it encrypts it. In other words, a packer or cryptor transforms an executable into a form that is difficult to analyze. When a binary is packed, it reveals very less information; you will not find strings revealing any valuable information, the number of imported functions will be lower, and the program instructions will be obscured. To make sense of a packed binary, you need to remove the obfuscation layer (unpack) applied to the program...