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

Self-defense

There are multiple techniques mobile malware can incorporate in order to protect itself, including the following:

  • An inaccessible location: A previously mentioned technique where malware uses rooting exploits to become able to deploy itself into locations that are not accessible with standard user privileges. Another option is to overwrite existing system apps.
  • Detecting privilege revocation: Multiple techniques are used to scare the user when permissions are revoked in an attempt to prevent it.
  • Detecting AV solutions: In this case, malware keeps looking for files associated with known antivirus products and, once detected, may display a nag window asking for its uninstallation. Such messages are shown in a loop and prevent the victim from using the device properly until the requested action is done.
  • Emulator and sandbox detection: Here, the malware checks whether it is being executed on the emulated environment or not. There are multiple ways it can be done: by checking...