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

Manual unpacking techniques

Even though automated unpacking is faster and easier to use than manual unpacking, it doesn’t work with all packers, encryptors, or protectors. This is because some of them require a specific, custom way to unpack. Some of them have anti-VM techniques or anti-reverse engineering techniques, while others use unusual APIs or assembly instructions that emulators can’t detect. In this section, we will look at different techniques for unpacking malware manually.

The main difference between the previous technique and manual unpacking is when we take the memory dump and what we do with it afterward. If we just execute the original sample, dump the whole process memory, and hope that the unpacked module will be available there, we will face multiple problems:

  • It is possible that the unpacked sample will already be mapped by sections and that the import table will already have been populated, so the engineer will have to change the physical...