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

P-code

For p-code samples, the VB decompiler can be used to get access to its internals. The Lite version is free and provides access to the p-code disassembly, which may be enough for most cases. If the engineer doesn't have enough expertise or time to deal with the p-code syntax, then the paid full version provides a powerful decompiler that produces more readable Visual Basic source code as output:

Figure 18: The same p-code function in VB Decompiler disassembled and decompiled

Another popular option is the P32Dasm tool that allows you to obtain p-code listings in a few clicks:

Figure 19: P32Dasm in action

One of its useful features is its ability to produce MAP files that can later be loaded into OllyDbg or IDA using dedicated plugins. Its documentation also mentions the Visual Basic debugger plugin for IDA, but it doesn't seem to be available to the general public.

A hint for first time users—if necessary, put all requested .ocx files (can be downloaded separately...