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

The essentials of Visual Basic

Visual Basic is a high-level programming language developed by Microsoft and based on the BASIC family of languages. Initially, its main feature was its ability to quickly create graphical interfaces and good integration with the COM model, which fostered easy access to ActiveX Data Objects (ADOs).

The last version of it was released in 1998 and the extended support for it ended in 2008. However, all modern Windows operating systems keep supporting it and, while it is rarely used by APT actors, many mass malware families are still written on it. In addition, many malicious packers use this programming language, often detected as Vbcrypt/VBKrypt or something similar. Finally, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is still widely used in Microsoft Office applications and was even upgraded to version 7 in 2010, is largely the same language as VB6 and uses the same runtime library.

In this section, we will dive into two different compilation modes...