Book Image

Mastering Malware Analysis

By : Alexey Kleymenov, Amr Thabet
Book Image

Mastering Malware Analysis

By: Alexey Kleymenov, Amr Thabet

Overview of this book

With the ever-growing proliferation of technology, the risk of encountering malicious code or malware has also increased. Malware analysis has become one of the most trending topics in businesses in recent years due to multiple prominent ransomware attacks. Mastering Malware Analysis explains the universal patterns behind different malicious software types and how to analyze them using a variety of approaches. You will learn how to examine malware code and determine the damage it can possibly cause to your systems to ensure that it won't propagate any further. Moving forward, you will cover all aspects of malware analysis for the Windows platform in detail. Next, you will get to grips with obfuscation and anti-disassembly, anti-debugging, as well as anti-virtual machine techniques. This book will help you deal with modern cross-platform malware. Throughout the course of this book, you will explore real-world examples of static and dynamic malware analysis, unpacking and decrypting, and rootkit detection. Finally, this book will help you strengthen your defenses and prevent malware breaches for IoT devices and mobile platforms. By the end of this book, you will have learned to effectively analyze, investigate, and build innovative solutions to handle any malware incidents.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Fundamental Theory
3
Section 2: Diving Deep into Windows Malware
5
Unpacking, Decryption, and Deobfuscation
9
Section 3: Examining Cross-Platform Malware
13
Section 4: Looking into IoT and Other Platforms

Heap overflow vulnerabilities

Heap overflow vulnerabilities are exactly the same as buffer overflow vulnerabilities, except that they target variables that are allocated using malloc, HeapAlloc, or similar APIs. In this case, these variables are located in a pre-allocated space in memory that is called heap.

The heap doesn't include a return address or the address of EBP. However, all of the variables that are allocated (and the free spaces in the heap as well) are all connected via a linked list structure. After each data block, there's a pointer to where the previous item in the list and the next item are. Once the memory is freed, the free or HeapFree APIs follow these links and write the next item's address in the previous item's next entry, and the previous item's address in the next item's previous entry. The code will look something like this:

Figure 3: Sample code for the free function

By overflowing this variable, the attacker can overwrite FLink...