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

Action phase

As long as the malware completed its installation, it can switch to the main purpose it was created for. The exact implementation will vary drastically depending on that. Here are some of the most common behaviors found in mass malware:

  • Premium SMS senders: Probably the easiest way to make money straight away in mobile malware in certain countries is to send paid SMS messages to premium numbers (including the ones related to in-app purchases) or subscribing to paid services. Each of them will cost a certain amount of money, or an automatic subscription payment will be taken regularly, which eventually leads to draining the victim's balance. In order to bypass CAPTCHA protection, existing anti-CAPTCHA services may be used.
  • Clickers: A more generic group of threats that uses mobile devices to make money in multiple different ways:
    • Ad clickers: Simulate clicks on advertising websites without the user's interaction, eventually draining money from advertising companies...