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

Static and dynamic linking

In this section, we will cover the code libraries that were introduced to speed up the software development process, avoid code duplication, and improve the cooperation between different teams within companies producing software.

These libraries are a known target for malware families as they can easily be injected into the memory of different applications and impersonate them to disguise their malicious activities.

First of all, let’s talk about the different ways libraries can be used.

Static linking

With the increasing number of applications on different operating systems, developers found that there was a lot of code reuse and the same logic being rewritten over and over again to support certain functionalities in their programs. Because of that, the invention of code libraries came in handy. Let’s take a look at the following diagram:

Figure 3.9 – Static linking from compilation to loading

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