Mastering Malware Analysis: The complete malware analyst’s guide to combating malicious software, APT, cybercrime, and IoT attacks

Book Description

With the ever-growing proliferation of technology, the risk of encountering malicious code or malware has also increased. Malware analysis has become one of the most trending topics in businesses in recent years due to multiple prominent ransomware attacks. Mastering Malware Analysis explains the universal patterns behind different malicious software types and how to analyze them using a variety of approaches. You will learn how to examine malware code and determine the damage it can possibly cause to your systems to ensure that it won’t propagate any further. Moving forward, you will cover all aspects of malware analysis for the Windows platform in detail. Next, you will get to grips with obfuscation and anti-disassembly, anti-debugging, as well as anti-virtual machine techniques. This book will help you deal with modern cross-platform malware. Throughout the course of this book, you will explore real-world examples of static and dynamic malware analysis, unpacking and decrypting, and rootkit detection. Finally, this book will help you strengthen your defenses and prevent malware breaches for IoT devices and mobile platforms. By the end of this book, you will have learned to effectively analyze, investigate, and build innovative solutions to handle any malware incidents.

What you will learn

• Explore widely used assembly languages to strengthen your reverse-engineering skills
• Master different executable file formats, programming languages, and relevant APIs used by attackers
• Perform static and dynamic analysis for multiple platforms and file types
• Get to grips with handling sophisticated malware cases
• Understand real advanced attacks, covering all stages from infiltration to hacking the system
• Learn to bypass anti-reverse engineering techniques

Who this book is for

If you are an IT security administrator, forensic analyst, or malware researcher looking to secure against malicious software or investigate malicious code, this book is for you. Prior programming experience and a fair understanding of malware attacks and investigation is expected.

Table of Contents

1. A Crash Course in CISC & RISC Assembly and Basics of Computer Programming
2. Basic Static and Dynamic Analysis for x86/x64
3. Unpacking, Decryption and Deobfuscation
4. Inspecting Process Injection & API Hooking
5. Bypassing Anti-Reverse Engineering Techniques
6. Understanding Kernel-Mode & Rootkits
7. Handling Exploits & Shellcode
8. Reversing Bytecode Languages: DotNet, Java and More
9. Scripts & Macros: Reversing, Deobfuscation and Debugging
10. Dissecting Linux and IoT Malware
11. Intro to MacOS and iOS Threats
12. Analyzing Android Malware Samples