Book Image

Mastering Reverse Engineering

By : Reginald Wong
Book Image

Mastering Reverse Engineering

By: Reginald Wong

Overview of this book

If you want to analyze software in order to exploit its weaknesses and strengthen its defenses, then you should explore reverse engineering. Reverse Engineering is a hackerfriendly tool used to expose security flaws and questionable privacy practices.In this book, you will learn how to analyse software even without having access to its source code or design documents. You will start off by learning the low-level language used to communicate with the computer and then move on to covering reverse engineering techniques. Next, you will explore analysis techniques using real-world tools such as IDA Pro and x86dbg. As you progress through the chapters, you will walk through use cases encountered in reverse engineering, such as encryption and compression, used to obfuscate code, and how to to identify and overcome anti-debugging and anti-analysis tricks. Lastly, you will learn how to analyse other types of files that contain code. By the end of this book, you will have the confidence to perform reverse engineering.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

MS Office macro analysis


Microsoft Office has a way for automating simple tasks such as creating formatted tables or inserting letterheads. This is called an MS office macro. MS Office macro makes use of the Visual Basic for Application language, which uses the same language as Visual Basic scripts. However, these can be abused to do more like download a file, create files, make registry entries, and even delete files. 

First off, we need static tools to read information and extract the macro source from a given Office file. To open MS Office documents, we need to have Microsoft Office installed. The other tool that we could use would be OLE tools, which can be downloaded from http://www.decalage.info/en/python/oletools. These set of tools are Python scripts, and will require Python 2.7 to be installed on your system. The Python installer can be downloaded from https://www.python.org/.

The file we are going to analyze first is https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Reverse-Engineering...