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

Data transfer instructions

There's a mov instruction, which copies a value from src to dest. This instruction has multiple forms, as we can see in this table:

Instruction

Structure

Description

mov

mov dest, src

dest = src

movsx/movzx

movsx/movzx dest , src

src is smaller than dest (src is 16-bits and dest is 32-bits)
movzx: Sets the remaining bits in dest to zero
movsx: Preserves the sign of the src value

Other instructions related to stack are like this:

Instruction

Structure

Description

push/pop

push/pop dest

Pushes the value to the top of the stack (esp = esp - 4)/ pulls the value out of the stack (esp = esp + 4)

pushad/popad

pushad/popad

Saves all registers to the stack/pulls out all registers from the stack (in x86 only)

For string manipulation, they are like this:

Instruction Structure Description
lodsb/lodsw/lodsd/lodsq lodsb/lodsw/lodsd/lodsq Loads a byte, 2 bytes, 4 bytes, or 8 bytes from the address rsi/esi...