The Art Of Mac Malware

A comprehensive guide to the threats facing Apple computers and the foundational knowledge needed to become a proficient Mac malware analyst. Defenders must fully understand how malicious software works if they hope to stay ahead of the increasingly sophisticated threats facing Apple products today. The Art of Mac Malware: The Guide to Analyzing Malicious Software is a comprehensive handbook to cracking open these malicious programs and seeing what’s inside. Discover the secrets of nation state backdoors, destructive ransomware, and subversive cryptocurrency miners as you uncover their infection methods, persistence strategies, and insidious capabilities. Then work with and extend foundational reverse-engineering tools to extract and decrypt embedded strings, unpack protected Mach-O malware, and even reconstruct binary code. Next, using a debugger, you’ll execute the malware, instruction by instruction, to discover exactly how it operates. In the book’s final section, you’ll put these lessons into practice by analyzing a complex Mac malware specimen on your own. You’ll learn to: Recognize common infections vectors, persistence mechanisms, and payloads leveraged by Mac malware Triage unknown samples in order to quickly classify them as benign or malicious Work with static analysis tools, including disassemblers, in order to study malicious scripts and compiled binaries Leverage dynamical analysis tools, such as monitoring tools and debuggers, to gain further insight into sophisticated threats Quickly identify and bypass anti-analysis techniques aimed at thwarting your analysis attempts A former NSA hacker and current leader in the field of macOS threat analysis, Patrick Wardle uses real-world examples pulled from his original research. The Art of Mac Malware: The Guide to Analyzing Malicious Software is the definitive resource to battling these ever more prevalent and insidious Apple-focused threats.

A comprehensive guide to the threats facing Apple computers and the foundational knowledge needed to become a proficient Mac malware analyst. Defenders must fully understand how malicious software works if they hope to stay ahead of the increasingly sophisticated threats facing Apple products today. The Art of Mac Malware: The Guide to Analyzing Malicious Software is a comprehensive handbook to cracking open these malicious programs and seeing what’s inside. Discover the secrets of nation state backdoors, destructive ransomware, and subversive cryptocurrency miners as you uncover their infection methods, persistence strategies, and insidious capabilities. Then work with and extend foundational reverse-engineering tools to extract and decrypt embedded strings, unpack protected Mach-O malware, and even reconstruct binary code. Next, using a debugger, you’ll execute the malware, instruction by instruction, to discover exactly how it operates. In the book’s final section, you’ll put these lessons into practice by analyzing a complex Mac malware specimen on your own. You’ll learn to: • Recognize common infections vectors, persistence mechanisms, and payloads leveraged by Mac malware • Triage unknown samples in order to quickly classify them as benign or malicious • Work with static analysis tools, including disassemblers, in order to study malicious scripts and compiled binaries • Leverage dynamical analysis tools, such as monitoring tools and debuggers, to gain further insight into sophisticated threats • Quickly identify and bypass anti-analysis techniques aimed at thwarting your analysis attempts A former NSA hacker and current leader in the field of macOS threat analysis, Patrick Wardle uses real-world examples pulled from his original research. The Art of Mac Malware: The Guide to Analyzing Malicious Software is the definitive resource to battling these ever more prevalent and insidious Apple-focused threats.

Memory forensics provides cutting edge technology to help investigate digital attacks Memory forensics is the art of analyzing computer memory (RAM) to solve digital crimes. As a follow-up to the best seller Malware Analyst's Cookbook, experts in the fields of malware, security, and digital forensics bring you a step-by-step guide to memory forensics—now the most sought after skill in the digital forensics and incident response fields. Beginning with introductory concepts and moving toward the advanced, The Art of Memory Forensics: Detecting Malware and Threats in Windows, Linux, and Mac Memory is based on a five day training course that the authors have presented to hundreds of students. It is the only book on the market that focuses exclusively on memory forensics and how to deploy such techniques properly. Discover memory forensics techniques: How volatile memory analysis improves digital investigations Proper investigative steps for detecting stealth malware and advanced threats How to use free, open source tools for conducting thorough memory forensics Ways to acquire memory from suspect systems in a forensically sound manner The next era of malware and security breaches are more sophisticated and targeted, and the volatile memory of a computer is often overlooked or destroyed as part of the incident response process. The Art of Memory Forensics explains the latest technological innovations in digital forensics to help bridge this gap. It covers the most popular and recently released versions of Windows, Linux, and Mac, including both the 32 and 64-bit editions.

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.

An in-depth look into Mac OS X and iOS kernels Powering Macs, iPhones, iPads and more, OS X and iOS are becoming ubiquitous. When it comes to documentation, however, much of them are shrouded in mystery. Cocoa and Carbon, the application frameworks, are neatly described, but system programmers find the rest lacking. This indispensable guide illuminates the darkest corners of those systems, starting with an architectural overview, then drilling all the way to the core. Provides you with a top down view of OS X and iOS Walks you through the phases of system startup—both Mac (EFi) and mobile (iBoot) Explains how processes, threads, virtual memory, and filesystems are maintained Covers the security architecture Reviews the internal Apis used by the system—BSD and Mach Dissects the kernel, XNU, into its sub components: Mach, the BSD Layer, and I/o kit, and explains each in detail Explains the inner workings of device drivers From architecture to implementation, this book is essential reading if you want to get serious about the internal workings of Mac OS X and iOS.

OS X Incident Response: Scripting and Analysis is written for analysts who are looking to expand their understanding of a lesser-known operating system. By mastering the forensic artifacts of OS X, analysts will set themselves apart by acquiring an up-and-coming skillset. Digital forensics is a critical art and science. While forensics is commonly thought of as a function of a legal investigation, the same tactics and techniques used for those investigations are also important in a response to an incident. Digital evidence is not only critical in the course of investigating many crimes but businesses are recognizing the importance of having skilled forensic investigators on staff in the case of policy violations. Perhaps more importantly, though, businesses are seeing enormous impact from malware outbreaks as well as data breaches. The skills of a forensic investigator are critical to determine the source of the attack as well as the impact. While there is a lot of focus on Windows because it is the predominant desktop operating system, there are currently very few resources available for forensic investigators on how to investigate attacks, gather evidence and respond to incidents involving OS X. The number of Macs on enterprise networks is rapidly increasing, especially with the growing prevalence of BYOD, including iPads and iPhones. Author Jaron Bradley covers a wide variety of topics, including both the collection and analysis of the forensic pieces found on the OS. Instead of using expensive commercial tools that clone the hard drive, you will learn how to write your own Python and bash-based response scripts. These scripts and methodologies can be used to collect and analyze volatile data immediately. For online source codes, please visit: https://github.com/jbradley89/osx_incident_response_scripting_and_analysis Focuses exclusively on OS X attacks, incident response, and forensics Provides the technical details of OS X so you can find artifacts that might be missed using automated tools Describes how to write your own Python and bash-based response scripts, which can be used to collect and analyze volatile data immediately Covers OS X incident response in complete technical detail, including file system, system startup and scheduling, password dumping, memory, volatile data, logs, browser history, and exfiltration

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.

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.