Book Image

Mastering Malware Analysis - Second Edition

By : Alexey Kleymenov, Amr Thabet
5 (2)
Book Image

Mastering Malware Analysis - Second Edition

5 (2)
By: Alexey Kleymenov, Amr Thabet

Overview of this book

New and developing technologies inevitably bring new types of malware with them, creating a huge demand for IT professionals that can keep malware at bay. With the help of this updated second edition of Mastering Malware Analysis, you’ll be able to add valuable reverse-engineering skills to your CV and learn how to protect organizations in the most efficient way. This book will familiarize you with multiple universal patterns behind different malicious software types and teach you how to analyze them using a variety of approaches. You'll learn how to examine malware code and determine the damage it can possibly cause to systems, along with ensuring that the right prevention or remediation steps are followed. As you cover all aspects of malware analysis for Windows, Linux, macOS, and mobile platforms in detail, you’ll also get to grips with obfuscation, anti-debugging, and other advanced anti-reverse-engineering techniques. The skills you acquire in this cybersecurity book will help you deal with all types of modern malware, strengthen your defenses, and prevent or promptly mitigate breaches regardless of the platforms involved. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to efficiently analyze samples, investigate suspicious activity, and build innovative solutions to handle malware incidents.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1 Fundamental Theory
4
Part 2 Diving Deep into Windows Malware
10
Part 3 Examining Cross-Platform and Bytecode-Based Malware
14
Part 4 Looking into IoT and Other Platforms

.NET explained

.NET languages (mainly C# and VB.NET) are languages that were designed by Microsoft to be cross-platform. The corresponding source code is compiled into a bytecode language, originally named Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL), which is now known as Common Intermediate Language (CIL). This language gets executed by the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which is an application virtual machine that provides memory management and exception handling.

.NET file structure

The .NET file structure is based on the PE structure that we described in Chapter 3, Basic Static and Dynamic Analysis for x86/x64. The .NET structure starts with a PE header that contains the last but one entry in the data directory pointing to .NET’s special CLR header (COR20 header).

.NET COR20 header

The COR20 header starts after 8 bytes of the .text section and contains basic information about the .NET file, as shown in the following screenshot:

Figure 9.2 –...