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

Actual tools

Here is a list of common tools that can be used to quickly get access to the assembly code:

  • objdump (free): This is a standard tool that is also able to disassemble files using the -D/--disassemble-all argument. It supports multiple architectures; a list of them can be obtained using the -i argument. Generally, it is distributed as part of binutils and has to be compiled for the specific target in order to make the disassembler work.
  • ndisasm (free): This is another minimalistic disassembler. Its full name is the Netwide Assembler, and it supports 16-, 32-, or 64-bit code for the x86 platform only. Unlike objdump, it shouldn't be used to disassemble object files.
  • ODA (free): This is a unique Online disassembler; it provides basic disassembler functionality as well as some neat dialog windows, for example, to provide a list of functions or strings. It supports an impressive amount of architectures as we can see on the following figure:
Figure 4: List of architectures...