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

Essentials of behavioral analysis

First of all, it is worth mentioning that some resources use the terms dynamic analysis and behavioral analysis interchangeably. Dynamic analysis is the process of executing instructions in the debugger, while behavioral analysis involves a black-box approach when malware is executed under various monitoring tools to record the changes it introduces. This approach allows researchers to get a quick insight into malware functionality. However, there are multiple limitations associated with it, as follows:

  • Malware may execute only a part of its functionality
  • Malware may behave differently if it notices it’s being analyzed

In most cases, behavioral analysis tools can easily be detected by various characteristics: file, process or directory names, registry keys and values, mutexes, window names, and so on.

Now, let’s look at the most commonly used tools, grouping them by type.

File operations

Here, the goal is to...