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

Modifying SSDT in an x86 environment

In 32-bit systems, the SSDT address is exported by ntoskrnl.exe under the name of KeServiceDescriptorTable. There are slots for four different SSDT entries, but Windows has used only two of them so far: KeServiceDescriptorTable and KeServiceDescriptorTableShadow.

When a user-mode application uses sysenter, as you saw in Figure 3, the application provides the function number or ID in the eax register. This value in eax is divided in the following way:

Figure 7: The sysenter eax argument value

These values are as follows:

  • bits 0-11: This is the System Service Number (SSN), which is the index of this function in the SSDT
  • bits 12-13: This is the Service Descriptor Table (SDT), which represents the SSDT number (here, KeServiceDescriptorTable is 0x00, and KeServiceDescriptorTableShadow is 0x01)
  • bits 14-31: This value is not used and is filled with zeros

As there are only two tables, the value of SDT is always either 00 or 01. The KeServiceDescriptorTable...