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

Dynamic API calling with checksum

Dynamic API calling is a famous anti-disassembling trick used by many malware families. The main reason behind using it is that this way, they hide API names from static analysis tools and make it harder to understand what each function inside the malware does.

For a malware author to implement this trick, they need to pre-calculate a checksum for this API name and push this value as an argument to a function that scans export tables of different libraries and searching for an API by this checksum. An example of this is shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 11: Library and API names' checksums (hash)

The code for resolving the function actually goes through the PE header of the library, loops through the import table, and calculates the checksum of each API to compare it with the given checksum (or hash) that's provided as an argument.

The solution to this approach could require scripting to loop through all known API names and calculate...