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

Moving from assembly to high-level programming languages

Developers mostly don’t write in assembly. Instead, they write in higher-level languages, such as C or C++, and the compiler converts this high-level code into a low-level representation in assembly language. In this section, we will look at different code blocks represented in the assembly.

Arithmetic statements

Let’s look at different C statements and how they are represented in the assembly. We will use Intel IA-32 for this example. The same concept applies to other assembly languages as well:

  • X = 50 (assuming 0x00010000 is the address of the X variable in memory):
    mov eax, 50
    mov dword ptr [00010000h], eax
  • X = Y + 50 (assuming 0x00010000 represents X and 0x00020000 represents Y):
    mov eax, dword ptr [00020000h]
    add eax, 50
    mov dword ptr [00010000h], eax
  • X = Y + (50 * 2):
    mov eax, dword ptr [00020000h]
    push eax    ; save Y for now
    mov eax, 50 ; do the multiplication first...