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

Inline API hooking with a length disassembler

As we have seen in the previous techniques, API hooking is quite simple when you use the mov edi, edi instruction at the beginning of each API, which makes the first five bytes predictable for API hooking functionality. Unfortunately, this can't always be the case with all Windows APIs, so sometimes malware families have to disassemble the first few instructions to avoid breaking the API.

Some malware families such as Vawtrak use a length disassembler to replace a few instructions (with a size equal or greater than five bytes) with the jmp instruction to the hooking function, as shown in the following screenshot. Then, they copy these instructions to the trampoline and add a jmp instruction to the API:

Figure 18. The Vawtrak API hooking with a disassembler

The main goal of this is to ensure that the trampoline doesn't jmp back to the API in the middle of the instruction and to make the API hooking work seamlessly without any unpredictable...