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 power of PowerShell

PowerShell represents an ongoing evolution of Windows shell and scripting languages. Its powerful functionality, access to .NET methods, and deep integration with recent versions of Windows have facilitated the increase of its popularity drastically among common users and malicious actors. From the point of view of the attacker, it has many other advantages, especially in terms of obfuscation, which we are going to cover in great detail. Additionally, because the whole script can be encoded and executed as a single command, it requires no script files to hit the hard disk and leaves minimal traces for forensic experts.

Let’s start with the peculiarities of its syntax.

Basic syntax

PowerShell command-line arguments provide unique opportunities for the attackers because of certain characteristics of their implementation. For example, PowerShell understands even truncated arguments and the associated parameters, so long as they are not ambiguous...