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

Analysis workflow

Here is an example of the workflow, describing how the Android sample analysis can be performed:

  1. Sample acquisition: Quite often, the sample is already provided by the customer or is easily downloadable from a third-party website. However, sometimes it is required to obtain samples from Google Play. There are multiple ways this can be done: by using dedicated tools such as APK Downloader or by installing an app on the emulator and then getting its APK file from the disk. If optimized ART files are provided (particularly OAT), make sure you have all the system files required to extract the DEX bytecode, for example, the boot.oat file.
  2. Decompilation/disassembling: For apps, it always makes sense to try to get the decompiled source code, as, usually, it is much easier to read it and perform dynamic analysis, including alteration if necessary. If decompilation doesn't work and some anti-reverse engineering technique is expected, then the code can be disassembled so...