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

Optional header

Following the File header, the Optional header comes with way more information, as shown here:

Figure 3: Optional header explained

The most important values from this header are as follows:

  • Magic: This identifies the platform this PE file supports (whether it's x86 or x64).
  • AddressOfEntryPoint: This is a very important field for our analysis and it points to the starting point of program execution (to the first assembly instruction to be executed in the program).
  • ImageBase: This is the address where the program was designed to be loaded in the virtual memory. If the program has a relocation section, it can be moved somewhere else if it overlaps with another executable loaded at the same address.
  • SectionAlignment: The size of each section and all headers' size should be aligned to this value while loaded in the memory (generally, this value is 0x1000).
  • FileAlignment: The size of each section in the PE file (and as well the size of all headers) has to be aligned...