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

Memory breakpoints

The last type of breakpoint to talk about is memory breakpoints. It's not common to see an anti memory breakpoints trick, but they can be easily detected by using the ReadProcessMemory API with the malware's ImageBase as an argument and the SizeOfImage as the size. ReadProcessMemory will return False if any page inside the malware is guarded (PAGE_GUARD) or set to no-access protection (PAGE_NOACCESS).

For a malware sample to detect a memory breakpoint on write or execute, it can query any memory page protection using the VirtualQuery API. Alternatively, it can evade them by using VirtualProtect with PAGE_EXECUTE_READWRITE argument.

The best way to deal with these anti-debugging tricks is to set breakpoints on all of these APIs and force them to return the desired result to the malware in order to resume normal execution.