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

Exploring packers

A packer is a tool that packs together the executable file’s code, data, and sometimes resources, and contains code for unpacking the program on the fly and executing it. Here are some processes we are going to tackle:

  • Advanced symmetric and asymmetric encryption algorithms
  • Applications of encryption in modern malware – Vawtrak banking Trojan
  • Using IDA for decryption and unpacking

Here is a high-level diagram of this process:

Figure 4.1 – The process of unpacking a sample

Packers help malware authors hide their malicious code behind these compression and/or encryption layers. This code only gets unpacked and executed once the malware is executed (in runtime mode), which helps malware authors bypass static signature-based detections when they are applied against packed samples.

Exploring packing and encrypting tools

Multiple tools can pack/encrypt executable files, but each has a different purpose...