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

Dalvik VM (DVM)

Dalvik was an open source process virtual machine used in Android up to version 4.4 (KitKat). It got its name after the Dalvík village in Iceland. Dalvik VM implements register-based architecture, which differs from stack-based architecture VMs such as Java VMs. The difference here is that stack-based machines use instructions to load and manipulate data on the stack and generally require more instructions than register machines in order to implement the same high-level code. In contrast, analogous register machine instructions often must define the register values used (which is not the case for stack-based machines, as the order of values on the stack is always known and the operands can be addressed implicitly by the stack pointer), so they tend to be bigger.

Usually, Dalvik programs are written in the Java or Kotlin languages before being converted to Dalvik instructions. For this purpose, a tool called dx is used, which converts Java class files into the DEX...