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

PE loading and process creation

Everything that we have covered so far was related to the PE file present on the hard disk. What we haven’t covered yet is how this PE file changes in memory when it’s loaded, as well as the whole execution process of these files. In this section, we will talk about how Windows loads a PE file, executes it, and turns it into a live program.

Basic terminology

To understand PE loading and process creation, we must cover some basic terminology, such as process, thread, Thread Environment Block (TEB), Process Environment Block (PEB), and others before we dive into the flow of loading and executing an executable PE file.

What’s a process?

A process is not just a representation of a running program in memory – it is also a container for all the information about the running application. This container stores information about the virtual memory associated with that process, all the loaded DLLs, opened files and sockets...