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

Obfuscated names for classes, methods, and others

One of the most common obfuscation techniques is basically to obfuscate the names of the classes, methods, variables, fields, and so on—basically everything that has a name. Obfuscation can get even harder if you obfuscate the names into other alphabets or other symbols (since the names are in Unicode), such as Chinese or Japanese.

You can easily deobfuscate such samples by running the de4dot deobfuscator from the command line, like so:

de4dot.exe <sample>

This will rename all the obfuscated names, as you can see in the following screenshot (the HammerDuke sample is shown here):

Figure 9: Hammerduke sample before and after running de4dot to deobfuscate the names

You can also rename the methods manually to add more meaningful names by right-clicking on the method and then selecting Edit Method or clicking Alt + Enter and changing the name of the method. After that, you need to save the module and reload it for the changes...