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 3—detecting process hollowing using the HollowFind plugin

There is a plugin called HollowFind that combines all of these commands. It finds a suspicious memory space or evidence of a hollowed out process and returns these results, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 15: The HollowFind plugin for detecting hollow process injection

This plugin can also dump the memory image into a chosen directory:

Figure 16: The HollowFind plugin for dumping the malware's PE image

So, that's it for process injection and how to analyze it dynamically using OllyDbg (or any other debugger), as well as how to detect it in a memory dump using Volatility.

In the next section, we will cover another important technique that's used by malware authors, known as API hooking. It's usually used in combination with process injection for man-in-the-middle attacks or for hiding malware presence using user-mode rootkits techniques.