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

Technique 7 – call stack backtracing

The call stack is a relatively hard topic to understand, but it is very useful for speeding up your malware analysis process. It's also useful in the unpacking process.

Take a look at the following code and imagine what the stack will look like:

func 01:
1: push ebp
2: mov esp, ebp ;now ebp = esp
...
3: call func 02
...
func 02:
4: push ebp ;which was the previous esp before the call
5: mov ebp, esp ;now ebp = new esp
...
5: call func 03
...
func 03:
6: push ebp ;which is equal to previous esp
7: mov ebp, esp ; ebp = another new esp
...

You will notice that, just after the return address from call func03 in the stack, the address of the previous esp is stored. The previous esp value is stored in the stack. This stored esp value points to the top of the stack, just after instruction 5. On top of the stack from this previous esp value, the first esp value is stored (this is because of instruction 4...