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

Finding the tool process

One of the simplest and most common ways how malware can deal with malware-analysis tools (and antivirus tools as well) is to loop through all the running processes and detect any unwanted entries. Then, it is possible to either terminate or stop them to avoid further analysis.

In Chapter 4, Inspecting Process Injection and API Hooking, we covered how malware can loop through all running processes using the CreateToolhelp32Snapshot, Process32First, and Process32Next APIs. In this anti-reverse engineering trick, the malware uses these APIs in exactly the same way to check the process name against a list of unwanted processes names or their hashes. If there's a match, the malware terminates itself or uses some approach such as calling the TerminateProcess API to kill that process. The following screenshot shows an example of this trick being implemented in Gozi malware:

Figure 15: Gozi malware looping through all running processes

The following screenshot...