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

Executing the inject code using APC queuing

Asynchronous Procedure Call (APC) is a function that gets executed asynchronously in the context of another thread. When a thread enters an alertable state (that is, when it executes the SleepEx, SignalObjectAndWait, MsgWaitForMultipleObjectsEx, WaitForMultipleObjectsEx, or WaitForSingleObjectEx APIs) and before it gets resumed, all the queued user-mode APC functions and kernel-mode APC functions are executed in the context of that thread, allowing the malware to execute user-mode code inside that process before returning control back to it.

For a malware sample to queue an APC function, it needs to perform the following steps:

  1. Get the ETHREAD object of the thread it wants to queue an APC function by providing its Thread ID (TID). This can be done by using the PsLookupThreadByThreadId API.
  2. Attach the user-mode function to this thread using the KeInitializeApc API.
  1. Add this function to the queue of the APC functions to be executed in this...