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 Kernel-Mode Rootkits

In this chapter, we are going to dig deeper into the Windows kernel and its internal structures and mechanisms. We will cover different techniques used by malware authors to hide the presence of their malware from users and antivirus products.

We will look at different advanced kernel-mode hooking techniques, process injection in kernel mode, and how to perform static and dynamic analysis there.

Before we get into rootkits and learn how they are implemented, we need to understand how the operating system (OS) works and how rootkits can target different parts of the OS and use it to their advantage.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Kernel mode versus user mode
  • Windows internals
  • Rootkits and device drivers
  • Hooking mechanisms
  • DKOM
  • Process injection in kernel mode
  • KPP in x64 systems (PatchGuard)
  • Static and dynamic analysis in kernel mode