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Practical Malware Analysis
book

Practical Malware Analysis

by Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig
February 2012
Intermediate to advanced
800 pages
23h 55m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from Practical Malware Analysis

Hashing: A Fingerprint for Malware

Hashing is a common method used to uniquely identify malware. The malicious software is run through a hashing program that produces a unique hash that identifies that malware (a sort of fingerprint). The Message-Digest Algorithm 5 (MD5) hash function is the one most commonly used for malware analysis, though the Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) is also popular.

For example, using the freely available md5deep program to calculate the hash of the Solitaire program that comes with Windows would generate the following output:

C:\>md5deep c:\WINDOWS\system32\sol.exe
373e7a863a1a345c60edb9e20ec32311  c:\WINDOWS\system32\sol.exe

The hash is 373e7a863a1a345c60edb9e20ec32311.

The GUI-based WinMD5 calculator, shown in Figure 1-1 ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781593272906Errata Page