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

Static and dynamic analysis in kernel mode

Once we know how rootkits work, it becomes possible to analyze them. The first thing worth mentioning is that not all kernel-mode malware families just hide the presence of actual payloads – some of them can perform malicious actions on their own as well. In this section, we will familiarize ourselves with tools that can facilitate rootkit analysis to understand malware functionalities and learn some particular usage-related nuances.

Static analysis

It always makes sense to start from static analysis, especially if the debugging setup is not available straight away. In some cases, it is possible to perform both static and dynamic analysis using the same tools.

Rootkit file structure

Rootkit samples are usually drivers that implement the traditional MZ-PE structure with the IMAGE_SUBSYSTEM_NATIVE value specified in the subsystem field of the IMAGE_OPTIONAL_HEADER32 structure. They use the usual x86 or x64 instructions that...