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

Debugging malicious services

While loading individual executables and DLLs for debugging is generally a pretty straightforward task, things get a little bit more complicated when we talk about debugging Windows services.

What is a service?

Services are tasks that are generally supposed to execute certain logic in the background, similar to daemons on Linux. So, it comes as no surprise that malware authors commonly use them to achieve reliable persistence.

Services are controlled by the Service Control Manager (SCM), which is implemented in %SystemRoot%\System32\services.exe. All services have the corresponding HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\<service_name> registry key. It contains multiple values that describe the service, including the following:

  • ImagePath: A file path to the corresponding executable with optional arguments.
  • Type: The REG_DWORD value specifies the type of the service. Let’s look at some examples of such supported values:
    • 0x00000001...