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

Getting the absolute address

This is a relatively easy task. Here, the shellcode abuses the call instruction, which takes a relative address to where it should branch to and saves the absolute return address in the stack (which the shellcode can get using the pop instruction).

An example of this is as follows:

   call next_ins:
next_ins:
pop eax ; now eax has the absolute address to next_ins

After getting the absolute address, the shellcode can get the address of any data inside the shellcode, like so:

   call next_ins:
next_ins:
pop eax ;now eax has the absolute address to next_ins
add eax, data_sec – next_ins ;here, eax has the address to data section
data_sec:
db ‘Hello, World',0

Another common way to get the absolute address is by using the FPU instruction fstenv. This instruction saves some parameters related to the FPU for debugging purposes, including the absolute address of the last executed FPU instruction. This instruction could be used like...