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Mastering Malware Analysis

You're reading from   Mastering Malware Analysis The complete malware analyst's guide to combating malicious software, APT, cybercrime, and IoT attacks

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jun 2019
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789610789
Length 562 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Authors (2):
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Alexey Kleymenov Alexey Kleymenov
Author Profile Icon Alexey Kleymenov
Alexey Kleymenov
Amr Thabet Amr Thabet
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Amr Thabet
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Toc

Table of Contents (18) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Section 1: Fundamental Theory FREE CHAPTER
2. A Crash Course in CISC/RISC and Programming Basics 3. Section 2: Diving Deep into Windows Malware
4. Basic Static and Dynamic Analysis for x86/x64 5. Unpacking, Decryption, and Deobfuscation 6. Inspecting Process Injection and API Hooking 7. Bypassing Anti-Reverse Engineering Techniques 8. Understanding Kernel-Mode Rootkits 9. Section 3: Examining Cross-Platform Malware
10. Handling Exploits and Shellcode 11. Reversing Bytecode Languages: .NET, Java, and More 12. Scripts and Macros: Reversing, Deobfuscation, and Debugging 13. Section 4: Looking into IoT and Other Platforms
14. Dissecting Linux and IoT Malware 15. Introduction to macOS and iOS Threats 16. Analyzing Android Malware Samples 17. Other Books You May Enjoy

Code transportation

Another trick that's commonly used by malware authors is code transportation. This technique doesn't insert junk code; instead, it rearranges the code inside each subroutine with lots of unconditional jumps, including call and pop or conditional jumps that are always true.

It makes the function graph look very complicated to analyze and wastes the reverse engineer's time. An example of such code can be seen in the following screenshot:

Figure 10: Code transportation with unconditional jumps

There is a more complicated form of this where malware rearranges the code of each subroutine in the middle of the other subroutines. This form makes it harder for the disassembler to connect each subroutine as it makes it miss the ret instruction at the end of the function and then not consider it as a function.

Some other malware families don't put a ret instruction at the end of the subroutine and substitute it with pop and jmp to hide this subroutine from...

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