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

Static and dynamic analysis

With web development on the rise, there are plenty of tools that exist for analyzing and debugging JS code—from basic text editors with syntax highlight to quite sophisticated packages. However, the developer's use cases are quite different from the reverse engineer's, which eventually affects a set of programs used by them.

First of all, in order to speed up the analysis, it makes sense to reformat the existing JS code so that it is easier to follow the logic. There are multiple tools that serve this purpose, which also contain basic unpacking and deobfuscation logic, such as jsbeautifier.

In terms of generic dynamic analysis, embedded browser toolsets such as Chrome Developer tools or Firefox Developer tools are extremely handy. In order to use them, the small HTML block needs to be written in order to load the JS file of interest.

Here, the JS code is embedded into the page itself:

Figure 14: An example of the embedded JS code in Chrome...