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

Handling JavaScript

JavaScript is a web language that powers billions of pages on the internet, so it is no surprise that it is commonly used to create exploits that target web users. However, on Windows, it is also possible to execute JScript (a very similar dialect of ECMAScript) files through Windows Script Host, which also makes it a good candidate for malicious attachments and post-compromised scripting. For example, a fileless threat called Poweliks uses JScript code stored in the registry to achieve system persistence without leaving separate files on a disk.

Since there are minor differences between JavaScript and JScript, here, we will cover syntax that is common to both of them. Additionally, starting from this moment, we will use the JavaScript notation.

The universal file extension for JavaScript files is .js; encoded JScript files have the .jse extension. Additionally, they can be embedded into .wsf and .hta files in the same way as VBScript. In terms of similarity...