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

Summary


In the first chapter, we learned about reverse engineering and its importance when analyzing malware. To begin with our reverse engineering adventures, we have to learn the system we are analyzing. We discussed the three main areas in the Windows operating system environment: memory, disk, and the registry.  In this chapter, we aimed to find malware from a compromised Windows system by extracting suspected files. To do that, we listed common startup areas in the system that we can search into. These areas include the registry, task schedules, and startup folder.  

We learned that typical malware behaves by installing itself and runnng code that harms the system. Malware installs itself basically for persistence which results in the malware file triggering most of the time the system is online. We then listed a few behaviors as to why malware was called malicious. This malicious code consisted of anything to do with crime entailing monetary or political gain, such as ransom and backdoor...