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

If conditions

Basic If statements may look like this:

  • If (X == 50) (assuming 0x0001000 represents the X variable):
mov eax, 50
cmp dword ptr [00010000h],eax
  • If (X | 00001000b) (| represents the OR logical gate):
mov eax, 000001000b
test dword ptr [00010000h],eax

In order to understand the branching and flow redirection, let's take a look at the following diagram to see how it's manifested in pseudocode:

Figure 7: Conditional flow redirection

To apply this branching sequence in assembly, the compiler uses a mix of conditional and unconditional jumps, as follows:

  • IF.. THEN.. ENDIF:
cmp dword ptr [00010000h],50
jnz 3rd_Block ; if not true

Some Code

3rd_Block:
Some code
  • IF.. THEN.. ELSE.. ENDIF:
cmp dword ptr [00010000h],50
jnz Else_Block ; if not true
...
Some code
...
jmp 4th_Block ;Jump after Else
Else_Block:
...
Some code
...
4th_Block:
...
Some code