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

Common anti-reverse engineering tricks

Generic anti-reverse engineering tricks such as detecting breakpoints using checksums or exact match, stripping symbol information, incorporating data encryption, or using custom exception/signal handlers (setting them using the signal syscall we discussed previously) will work perfectly for ELF files pretty much the same way as for PE.

There are multiple ways the malware can take advantage of the ELF structure in order to complicate the analysis. The two most popular ways are as follows:

  • Make the sample unusual, but still follow the ELF specification: In this case, malware complies with the documentation, but there are no compilers that would generate such code. An example of such a technique could be a wrong target OS specified in the header (we know that it can actually be 0, which means this value is largely ignored by programs). Another example is a stripped section table, which is, as we saw earlier, actually optional for executable files...