Static analysis and dynamic analysis are great techniques to understand the basic functionality of malware, but these techniques do not provide all the required information regarding the malware's functionality. Malware authors write their malicious code in a high-level language, such as C or C++, which is compiled to an executable using a compiler. During your investigation, you will only have the malicious executable, without its source code. To gain a deeper understanding of a malware's inner workings and to understand the critical aspects of a malicious binary, code analysis needs to be performed.
This chapter will cover the concepts and skills required to perform code analysis. For a better understanding of the subject, this chapter will make use of relevant concepts from both C programming and assembly language programming...
