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

Step 1 – setting the breakpoints

To apply this approach, you need to set the breakpoints on the APIs that the program will execute at some point. You can rely on the common APIs that are getting used, your behavioral analysis, or a sandbox report that will give you the APIs that were used during the execution of the sample.

Some examples of some known APIs are GetModuleFileNameA, GetCommandLine, CreateFileA, VirtualAlloc, HeapAlloc, memset, and so on.

First, you set a breakpoint on these APIs (use all of your known ones, except the ones that could be used by the unpacking stub) and execute the program until the execution breaks:

Figure 12: The return address in the stack window in OllyDbg

Now, you need to check the stack, since most of your next steps will be on the stack side. By doing this, you can start following the call stack.