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

INT3 breakpoint

This is the most common breakpoint and you can easily set this breakpoint by double-clicking on the hex representation of an assembly line in the CPU window in OllyDbg. After this, you can see a red highlight over the address of this instruction, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 23: Disassembly in OllyDbg

Well, this is what you see through the debugger's UI, but what you don't see is that the first byte of this instruction (0xB8 in this case) has been modified to 0xCC (INT3 instruction), which stops the execution once the processor reaches it and returns back to the debugger.

Once the debugger returns back on this INT3 breakpoint, it replaces the 0xCC back to 0xB8 and executes this instruction normally.

The problem of this breakpoint is that, if malware tries to read or modify the bytes of this instruction, it will read the first byte as 0xCC instead of 0xB8, which can break some code or detect the presence of the debugger (which we will cover in...