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

Monitoring and dynamic instrumentation

Commonly referred to as behavioral analysis, running malware in a real or simulated environment with various monitors to track system changes can give a quick and valuable insight into malware functionality. In addition, it may be useful to change the behavior of the executed sample on the fly. Here are some of the most popular tools that make it possible on macOS:

  • DTrace toolkit: A collection of tools that aim to monitor various system events. Here are some of the most popular ones:
    • opensnoop: Allows us to monitor filesystem operations. An alternative to monitoring disk I/O events is iosnoop.
    • execsnoop: Can be used to record process activity, for example, executed commands. Particularly useful for monitoring short-living processes.
    • dtruss: Allows us to monitor syscall details as an alternative to strace on Linux.
    • tcpsnoop: Can be used to map network traffic to particular processes and monitor accessed hosts and ports used.
  • ProcInfo: This library...