Practical Malware Analysis

Malware analysis is big business, and attacks can cost a company dearly. When malware breaches your defenses, you need to act quickly to cure current infections and prevent future ones from occurring. For those who want to stay ahead of the latest malware, Practical Malware Analysis will teach you the tools and techniques used by professional analysts. With this book as your guide, you'll be able to safely analyze, debug, and disassemble any malicious software that comes your way. You'll learn how to: –Set up a safe virtual environment to analyze malware –Quickly extract network signatures and host-based indicators –Use key analysis tools like IDA Pro, OllyDbg, and WinDbg –Overcome malware tricks like obfuscation, anti-disassembly, anti-debugging, and anti-virtual machine techniques –Use your newfound knowledge of Windows internals for malware analysis –Develop a methodology for unpacking malware and get practical experience with five of the most popular packers –Analyze special cases of malware with shellcode, C++, and 64-bit code Hands-on labs throughout the book challenge you to practice and synthesize your skills as you dissect real malware samples, and pages of detailed dissections offer an over-the-shoulder look at how the pros do it. You'll learn how to crack open malware to see how it really works, determine what damage it has done, thoroughly clean your network, and ensure that the malware never comes back. Malware analysis is a cat-and-mouse game with rules that are constantly changing, so make sure you have the fundamentals. Whether you're tasked with securing one network or a thousand networks, or you're making a living as a malware analyst, you'll find what you need to succeed in Practical Malware Analysis.

Malware analysis is big business, and attacks can cost a company dearly. When malware breaches your defenses, you need to act quickly to cure current infections and prevent future ones from occurring. For those who want to stay ahead of the latest malware, Practical Malware Analysis will teach you the tools and techniques used by professional analysts. With this book as your guide, you'll be able to safely analyze, debug, and disassemble any malicious software that comes your way. You'll learn how to: –Set up a safe virtual environment to analyze malware –Quickly extract network signatures and host-based indicators –Use key analysis tools like IDA Pro, OllyDbg, and WinDbg –Overcome malware tricks like obfuscation, anti-disassembly, anti-debugging, and anti-virtual machine techniques –Use your newfound knowledge of Windows internals for malware analysis –Develop a methodology for unpacking malware and get practical experience with five of the most popular packers –Analyze special cases of malware with shellcode, C++, and 64-bit code Hands-on labs throughout the book challenge you to practice and synthesize your skills as you dissect real malware samples, and pages of detailed dissections offer an over-the-shoulder look at how the pros do it. You'll learn how to crack open malware to see how it really works, determine what damage it has done, thoroughly clean your network, and ensure that the malware never comes back. Malware analysis is a cat-and-mouse game with rules that are constantly changing, so make sure you have the fundamentals. Whether you're tasked with securing one network or a thousand networks, or you're making a living as a malware analyst, you'll find what you need to succeed in Practical Malware Analysis.

Understand malware analysis and its practical implementation Key Features Explore the key concepts of malware analysis and memory forensics using real-world examples Learn the art of detecting, analyzing, and investigating malware threats Understand adversary tactics and techniques Book Description Malware analysis and memory forensics are powerful analysis and investigation techniques used in reverse engineering, digital forensics, and incident response. With adversaries becoming sophisticated and carrying out advanced malware attacks on critical infrastructures, data centers, and private and public organizations, detecting, responding to, and investigating such intrusions is critical to information security professionals. Malware analysis and memory forensics have become must-have skills to fight advanced malware, targeted attacks, and security breaches. This book teaches you the concepts, techniques, and tools to understand the behavior and characteristics of malware through malware analysis. It also teaches you techniques to investigate and hunt malware using memory forensics. This book introduces you to the basics of malware analysis, and then gradually progresses into the more advanced concepts of code analysis and memory forensics. It uses real-world malware samples, infected memory images, and visual diagrams to help you gain a better understanding of the subject and to equip you with the skills required to analyze, investigate, and respond to malware-related incidents. What you will learn Create a safe and isolated lab environment for malware analysis Extract the metadata associated with malware Determine malware's interaction with the system Perform code analysis using IDA Pro and x64dbg Reverse-engineer various malware functionalities Reverse engineer and decode common encoding/encryption algorithms Reverse-engineer malware code injection and hooking techniques Investigate and hunt malware using memory forensics Who this book is for This book is for incident responders, cyber-security investigators, system administrators, malware analyst, forensic practitioners, student, or curious security professionals interested in learning malware analysis and memory forensics. Knowledge of programming languages such as C and Python is helpful but is not mandatory. If you have written few lines of code and have a basic understanding of programming concepts, you’ll be able to get most out of this book.

A computer forensics "how-to" for fighting malicious code andanalyzing incidents With our ever-increasing reliance on computers comes anever-growing risk of malware. Security professionals will findplenty of solutions in this book to the problems posed by viruses,Trojan horses, worms, spyware, rootkits, adware, and other invasivesoftware. Written by well-known malware experts, this guide revealssolutions to numerous problems and includes a DVD of customprograms and tools that illustrate the concepts, enhancing yourskills. Security professionals face a constant battle against malicioussoftware; this practical manual will improve your analyticalcapabilities and provide dozens of valuable and innovativesolutions Covers classifying malware, packing and unpacking, dynamicmalware analysis, decoding and decrypting, rootkit detection,memory forensics, open source malware research, and much more Includes generous amounts of source code in C, Python, and Perlto extend your favorite tools or build new ones, and customprograms on the DVD to demonstrate the solutions Malware Analyst's Cookbook is indispensible to ITsecurity administrators, incident responders, forensic analysts,and malware researchers.

Master malware analysis to protect your systems from getting infected Key FeaturesSet up and model solutions, investigate malware, and prevent it from occurring in futureLearn core concepts of dynamic malware analysis, memory forensics, decryption, and much moreA practical guide to developing innovative solutions to numerous malware incidentsBook 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 learnExplore widely used assembly languages to strengthen your reverse-engineering skillsMaster different executable file formats, programming languages, and relevant APIs used by attackersPerform static and dynamic analysis for multiple platforms and file typesGet to grips with handling sophisticated malware casesUnderstand real advanced attacks, covering all stages from infiltration to hacking the systemLearn to bypass anti-reverse engineering techniquesWho 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.

Stop manually analyzing binary! Practical Binary Analysis is the first book of its kind to present advanced binary analysis topics, such as binary instrumentation, dynamic taint analysis, and symbolic execution, in an accessible way. As malware increasingly obfuscates itself and applies anti-analysis techniques to thwart our analysis, we need more sophisticated methods that allow us to raise that dark curtain designed to keep us out--binary analysis can help. The goal of all binary analysis is to determine (and possibly modify) the true properties of binary programs to understand what they really do, rather than what we think they should do. While reverse engineering and disassembly are critical first steps in many forms of binary analysis, there is much more to be learned. This hands-on guide teaches you how to tackle the fascinating but challenging topics of binary analysis and instrumentation and helps you become proficient in an area typically only mastered by a small group of expert hackers. It will take you from basic concepts to state-of-the-art methods as you dig into topics like code injection, disassembly, dynamic taint analysis, and binary instrumentation. Written for security engineers, hackers, and those with a basic working knowledge of C/C++ and x86-64, Practical Binary Analysis will teach you in-depth how binary programs work and help you acquire the tools and techniques needed to gain more control and insight into binary programs. Once you've completed an introduction to basic binary formats, you'll learn how to analyze binaries using techniques like the GNU/Linux binary analysis toolchain, disassembly, and code injection. You'll then go on to implement profiling tools with Pin and learn how to build your own dynamic taint analysis tools with libdft and symbolic execution tools using Triton. You'll learn how to: - Parse ELF and PE binaries and build a binary loader with libbfd - Use data-flow analysis techniques like program tracing, slicing, and reaching definitions analysis to reason about runtime flow of your programs - Modify ELF binaries with techniques like parasitic code injection and hex editing - Build custom disassembly tools with Capstone - Use binary instrumentation to circumvent anti-analysis tricks commonly used by malware - Apply taint analysis to detect control hijacking and data leak attacks - Use symbolic execution to build automatic exploitation tools With exercises at the end of each chapter to help solidify your skills, you'll go from understanding basic assembly to performing some of the most sophisticated binary analysis and instrumentation. Practical Binary Analysis gives you what you need to work effectively with binary programs and transform your knowledge from basic understanding to expert-level proficiency.

Malware Data Science explains how to identify, analyze, and classify large-scale malware using machine learning and data visualization. Security has become a "big data" problem. The growth rate of malware has accelerated to tens of millions of new files per year while our networks generate an ever-larger flood of security-relevant data each day. In order to defend against these advanced attacks, you'll need to know how to think like a data scientist. In Malware Data Science, security data scientist Joshua Saxe introduces machine learning, statistics, social network analysis, and data visualization, and shows you how to apply these methods to malware detection and analysis. You'll learn how to: - Analyze malware using static analysis - Observe malware behavior using dynamic analysis - Identify adversary groups through shared code analysis - Catch 0-day vulnerabilities by building your own machine learning detector - Measure malware detector accuracy - Identify malware campaigns, trends, and relationships through data visualization Whether you're a malware analyst looking to add skills to your existing arsenal, or a data scientist interested in attack detection and threat intelligence, Malware Data Science will help you stay ahead of the curve.

Discover how the internals of malware work and how you can analyze and detect it. You will learn not only how to analyze and reverse malware, but also how to classify and categorize it, giving you insight into the intent of the malware. Malware Analysis and Detection Engineering is a one-stop guide to malware analysis that simplifies the topic by teaching you undocumented tricks used by analysts in the industry. You will be able to extend your expertise to analyze and reverse the challenges that malicious software throws at you. The book starts with an introduction to malware analysis and reverse engineering to provide insight on the different types of malware and also the terminology used in the anti-malware industry. You will know how to set up an isolated lab environment to safely execute and analyze malware. You will learn about malware packing, code injection, and process hollowing plus how to analyze, reverse, classify, and categorize malware using static and dynamic tools. You will be able to automate your malware analysis process by exploring detection tools to modify and trace malware programs, including sandboxes, IDS/IPS, anti-virus, and Windows binary instrumentation. The book provides comprehensive content in combination with hands-on exercises to help you dig into the details of malware dissection, giving you the confidence to tackle malware that enters your environment. What You Will Learn Analyze, dissect, reverse engineer, and classify malware Effectively handle malware with custom packers and compilers Unpack complex malware to locate vital malware components and decipher their intent Use various static and dynamic malware analysis tools Leverage the internals of various detection engineering tools to improve your workflow Write Snort rules and learn to use them with Suricata IDS Who This Book Is For Security professionals, malware analysts, SOC analysts, incident responders, detection engineers, reverse engineers, and network security engineers "This book is a beast! If you're looking to master the ever-widening field of malware analysis, look no further. This is the definitive guide for you." Pedram Amini, CTO Inquest; Founder OpenRCE.org and ZeroDayInitiative