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

Malware behavior patterns

Generally speaking, even though malware for mobile devices has its own nuances caused by the different environment and use cases of the targeted systems, many motivation patterns behind attacks stays the same as for PC platforms. In this section, we are going to dive deeper into various examples of mobile malware functionality and learn what methods it uses in order to achieve malevolent goals.

Now that we know how things are supposed to work, let’s take a look at how malware authors leverage them. Here, we will go through various attack stages common for the vast majority of malware, which will enable us to see these patterns in the analyzed samples and understand their purpose.

Initial access

The most common ways malware gets access to devices are the following:

  • Google Play
  • Third-party markets and sideloading
  • Malicious ads and exploits

In the first two cases, malware authors generally rely on social engineering, tricking...