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

Detecting a trap flag using the SS register

In the x86 architecture, there are multiple registers that are not widely used nowadays. These registers were used in DOS operating systems before virtual memory in the way we know it was introduced, particularly the segment registers. Apart from the FS register (which you already know about), there are other segment registers, such as CS, which was used to point to the code section, DS, which was used to point to the data section, and SS, which was used to point to the stack.

The pop SS instruction is quite special. This instruction is used to get a value from the stack and change the stack segment (or address) according to this value. So if there's any exception happening while executing this instruction, it could lead to confusion (which stack would be used to store the exception information?). Therefore, no exceptions or interrupts are allowed while executing this instruction, including any breakpoints or trap flags.

If you are tracing...