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

Process loading step by step

Now that we know the basic terminology, we can now dive into PE loading and process creation. We will look into it sequentially, as shown in the following steps:

  1. Starting the program: When you double-click on a program in Windows Explorer, let's say calc.exe, another process called explorer.exe (the process of Windows Explorer) calls an API called CreateProcess, which gives the operating system the request to create this process and start the execution.
  1. Creating the process data structures: Windows then creates the process data structure in the kernel (which is called EProcess) and sets a unique ID for this process (ProcessID), and sets the explorer.exe process ID as a parent PID for the newly created calc.exe process.
  2. Initialize the virtual memory: Then, Windows creates the process, virtual memory and its representation of the physical memory and saves it inside the EProcess structure, creates the PEB structure with all necessary information, and...