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

What is structured exception handling?

For any program to handle exceptions, Windows provides a mechanism called SEH. It's based on setting a callback function to handle the exception and then resume execution. If this callback failed to handle the exception, it can pass this exception to the previous callback that was set. If the last callback was unable to handle the exception, the operating system terminates the process and informs the user about the unhandled exception, and often suggests him or her to send it to the developer company.

A pointer to the first callback to be called is stored in the thread information block (TIB) and can be accessed via FS:[0x00]. The structure is a linked list, which means that each item in this list contains the address of the callback function and follows the address of the previous item in the list (the previous callback). The linked list looks like this in the stack:

Figure 6: SEH linked list in the stack

The setup of the SEH callback generally...