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

Behind C&C – even malware has its own backend

Many malware families use some sort of C&C server to receive updates or custom commands from the malicious actor or to exfiltrate stolen data. Getting access to these backend files can give researchers and law enforcement agencies a lot of information about how malware works and who the victims are. Sometimes, it can even lead to the actual people behind the attack! Therefore, properly and promptly analyzing the code obtained from the C&C is an important task that researchers have to face from time to time, so it’s better to be ready!

Things to focus on

So long as the analyst has access to the code, it makes sense to prepare and prioritize a list of questions to answer. Generally, the following knowledge can be obtained from the backend:

  • Is it an actual backend code or a proxy redirecting messages to another location? What URI or port does the malware utilize?
  • What is the format of the accepted...