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

Process injection in kernel mode

Process injection in kernel mode is a popular technique used by multiple malware families, including Stuxnet (with its MRxCls rootkit), to create another way of maintaining persistence and for disguising malware activities under a legitimate process name. For a device driver to be able to read and write memory inside a process, it needs to attach itself to this process's memory space.

Once the driver is attached to this process's memory space, it can see this process's virtual memory, and it becomes possible to read and write directly to it. For example, if the process executable's ImageBase is 0x00400000, then the driver can access it normally, as follows:

CMP WORD PTR [00400000h], 'ZM'
JNZ <not_mz>

For a driver to be able to attach to the process memory, it needs to get its EPROCESS using the PsLookupProcessByProcessId API and then use the KeStackAttachProcess API to attach to this process's memory space. In disassembly...