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

Gatekeeper

One of the first technologies worth mentioning is called Gatekeeper. It gives users direct control over what apps are allowed to be installed. Thus, it is possible to enforce the policy by allowing only apps from the App Store to be used. All apps aiming to appear on the App Store should be signed with a certificate issued by Apple and reviewed by its engineers to ensure they are generally free of bugs, up to date, secure, and don't compromise user experience in any way.

Default Gatekeeper settings also allow applications from outside the App Store that still have a valid developer ID signature, which means the app is signed using a certificate issued by Apple. In addition, it is possible to submit an app to Apple for notarizing. In this case, the files are checked by automatic malware scanning and signature checking; as a result, the ticket is issued to be distributed with the app and is available online. So, when the user executes such an app, they get a notification...