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

Propagation

The bot scans IP addresses, which are selected pseudo-randomly with certain ranges excluded, asynchronously using TCP SYN packets in order to find target candidates with open default Telnet ports first:

Figure 8: Mirai malware excluding several IP ranges from scanning

Then, malware brute forces access to the found candidate machines using pairs of hardcoded credentials. The successful results are passed to the server to balance the load, and all data is stored in a database. The server then activates a loader module that verifies the system and delivers the bot payload using either the wget or tftp tool, if available; otherwise, it uses a tiny embedded downloader. Malware has several pre-compiled binary payloads for several different architectures (ARM, MIPS, SPARC, SuperH, PowerPC, and m68k). After this, the cycle repeats and the just-deployed bots continue searching for new victims.