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

How to choose

The tool should always be chosen according to the task and prior knowledge. If the purpose is to analyze a small shellcode, then standard tools such as objdump may be good enough. Otherwise, it generally makes sense to master more powerful all-in-one solutions that support either multiple architectures or the main architecture of interest. While the learning curve in this case will be much steeper, this knowledge can later be re-applied to handle new tasks and eventually can save an impressive amount of time. The ability to do both static and dynamic analysis in one place would definitely be an advantage as well.

Open source solutions nowadays provide a pretty decent alternative to the commercial ones, so eventually, the decision should be done by the engineer. If money doesn't matter, then it makes sense to try several of them; check which one has the better interface, documentation, and community; and eventually stick to the most comfortable solution.

Finally, if...