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

KPP in x64 systems (PatchGuard)

In x64 systems, Microsoft has introduced new protection against kernel-mode hooking and patching called KPP, or PatchGuard. This protection disables any patching of the SSDT and the core kernel code. It doesn't allow the usage of kernel stacks beyond what was allocated by the kernel itself.

Additionally, Microsoft allows only signed drivers to be loaded in the x64 systems, except for situations when the system is running in test mode or driver signature enforcement is disabled.

KPP received lots of criticism from antivirus and firewall vendors when it was first introduced because SSDT hooking and other hooking types were heavily used in multiple security products. Microsoft has created a new API to help antivirus products replace their hooking methods.

Although several ways of bypassing PatchGuard have been documented, for the last several years, Microsoft has released only a few major updates to deal with these techniques. In addition...