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

Windows internals

Before we dive into the malicious activities of rootkits, let's take a look at how the Windows OS works and how the interaction between the user mode and kernel mode is organized. This knowledge will allow us to understand the specifics of kernel-mode malware and what parts of the system it may target.

The anatomy of Windows

As we mentioned previously, the OS is divided into two parts: user mode and kernel mode. This is shown in the following diagram:

Figure 7.2 – The Windows OS design

Now, let's learn about the scope of these applications:

  • User mode: This contains all the processes running in the system (which you can see in Task Manager). These processes run under subsystems such as POSIX, the Win32 subsystem, and (more recently) the Windows Subsystem for Linux. All of these subsystems call different APIs, which are tailored for that system through specific libraries, such as kernel32.dll in the Win32 and Win64...