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

Understanding obfuscation and anti-disassemblers

Dissemblers are one of the most common tools that are used in reverse engineering, and so they are actively targeted by malware authors. Now, we will take a look at the different techniques that are used in malware to obfuscate its code and make it harder for reverse engineers to analyze it.

Encryption

Encryption is the most common technique as it also protects malware from static antivirus signatures. Malware can encrypt its own code and have a small piece of stub code to decrypt the malicious code before executing it. Additionally, the malware can encrypt its own data, such as strings including API names or the whole configuration block.

Dealing with encryption is not always easy. One solution is to execute the malware and dump the memory after it has been decrypted. For example, many sandboxes can now make process dumps of the monitored processes, which could help you get the malware in the decrypted form.

But for cases...