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

Advanced symmetric and asymmetric encryption algorithms

Standard encryption algorithms such as symmetric DES and AES or asymmetric RSA are widely used by malware authors. However, the vast majority of samples that include these algorithms never implement these algorithms themselves or copy their code into their malware. They are generally implemented using Windows APIs.

These algorithms are mathematically more complicated than simple encryption algorithms or RC4. While you don’t necessarily need to understand their mathematical background to understand how they are implemented, it is important to know how to identify the way they can be used and how to figure out the exact algorithm involved, the encryption/decryption key(s), and the data.

Extracting information from Windows cryptography APIs

Some common APIs are used to provide access to cryptographic algorithms, including DES, AES, RSA, and even RC4 encryption. Some of these APIs are CryptAcquireContext, CryptCreateHash...