Malware Analyst's Cookbook and DVD: Tools and Techniques for Fighting Malicious Code

Introduction

Malware Analyst's Cookbook is a collection of solutions and tutorials designed to enhance the skill set and analytical capabilities of anyone who works with, or against, malware. Whether you're performing a forensic investigation, responding to an incident, or reverse-engineering malware for fun or as a profession, this book teaches you creative ways to accomplish your goals. The material for this book was designed with several objectives in mind. The first is that we wanted to convey our many years of experience in dealing with malicious code in a manner friendly enough for non-technical readers to understand, but complex enough so that technical readers won't fall asleep. That being said, malware analysis requires a well-balanced combination of many different skills. We expect that our readers have at least a general familiarity with the following topics:

• Networking and TCP/IP

• Operating system internals (Windows and Unix)

• Computer security

• Forensics and incident response

• Programming (C, C++, Python, and Perl)

• Reverse-engineering

• Vulnerability research

• Malware basics

Our second objective is to teach you how various tools work, rather than just how to use the tools. If you understand what goes on when you click a button (or type a command) as opposed to just knowing which button to click, you'll be better equipped to perform an analysis on the tool's output instead of just collecting the output. We realize that not everyone can or wants to program, so we've included over 50 ...