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

Rootkits and device drivers

Now that you understand Windows internals and how user mode and kernel mode interactions work, let's dig into rootkits. In this section, we will understand what rootkits are and how they are designed. After we grasp the basic concepts of rootkits, we will discuss device drivers.

What is a rootkit?

Rootkits are essentially low-level tools that provide stealth capabilities to malicious modules. This way, their main purpose is generally to complicate the malware detection and remediation procedures on the target machine by hiding the presence of related artifacts. There are multiple ways this can be done, so let's discuss them in detail.

Types of rootkits

There are various types of rootkits in user mode, kernel mode, and even boot mode:

  • User-mode or application rootkits: We covered user-mode rootkits in Chapter 5, Inspecting Process Injection and API Hooking; they inject malicious code into other processes and hook their APIs to...