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

.NET static analysis

There are multiple tools that can help you disassemble and decompile a sample, and even convert it completely into C# or VB.NET source code. You can use Dnspy to decompile a sample by just dragging and dropping it into the application interface. This is what this application looks like:

Figure 7: Static analysis with Dnspy

You can click on File | Export To Project to export the decompiled source code into a Visual Studio project. Now, you can read the source code, modify it, write comments on it, or modify the names of the functions for better analysis. Dnspy has the ability to show the actual IL language of the sample by right-clicking and choosing Edit IL Language from the menu.

To go to the main function, you can right-click on the program (from the sidebar) and choose Go To Entry Point. However, it is possible that the main functionality will be located in other functions, such as OnRun, OnStartup, or OnCreateMainForm, or in forms. When analyzing code associated...