malware reversing

Let’s talk about malware reversing the process highly necessary today. The reason for it is clear, the number of viruses and computer intrusions is growing day after day and what is the most dangerous is their quality is improving as well. At the present days malicious software developers make up new ways to penetrate a computer or a network and get all necessary information. That is why, the forces of all users and programmers all over the world have been united.

Malicious software is considered to be the most dangerous threat to network, computer and even Internet security. Talking about the nature of malware it is worth mentioning that this term stands for malicious software developed for intruding and damaging personal data. The variety of malicious programs is impressive, here you can find multiples versions and types of computer viruses, adware, Trojans, rootkits, spyware and so on and so forth.

The number of malicious programs created lately is shocking. According to F-Secure data, in 2007 the number of these programs was equal to their number during the previous 20 years. Two main pathways used by malware developers are the Worls Wide Web and e-mails.

In the Internet most of users are not protected from malware penetrating in their computers, so it looks like a chain of computer contaminations that is impossible to stop. A limited number of programmers that are to detect malicious software can not cope with an increasing stream of contaminations.

It wonders that the first malware was written as an experiment and annoying stuff rather than doing any harm. Later on, programmers decided to find out what could result from those experiments and kept on creating worms and viruses. And finally their curiosity, I would say, led to developing programs that could do harm and delete personal data in a computer. It was then that the joke turned into a “malicious” business. Nowadays, every malicious program is designed to make any profit for their developers and do harm to users. Almost all the worms designed after the year of 2003 have been created to take control over a user’s computer and utilize it with black market aims. Among such aims there is distribution of e-mail spam, advertisements, contraband data and so on and so forth.

That is the reason why malware reversing is highly necessary. It is malicious software reverse engineering that could decrease the threat to your computer or a network. Just keep in mind that malware is vulnerable. And the unique way to detect these vulnerabilities is to reverse engineer the malware.

Malware reversing includes static and dynamic analyses which help to understand the nature of a malware. Static analyzing is aimed at exploring the software without executing it. Here the work of decompilers, strings, disassemblers and code analyzers is involved. As a rule this part of analysis can provide us only with an approximate image of the program describing its behavior in uncommon conditions. Then we resort to the help of dynamic analysis, which describes a program when it executes. Here the work of debuggers, network sniffers, call tracers, file system monitors and registry monitors is involved.

Talking about stages of malware reversing, the first step will be virus scanning, a part of static analysis. The stage is held for detecting if the worm is identified. The second step is strings research for contiguous sets of ASCII displaying. Then dynamic analysis begins, and its first stage is checking of file integrity with the aim to check the state of the system before malware execution. The second step is file monitoring for verifying what processes are functioning, I mean read and write files. Then process monitoring goes. This indicates what resources are utilized by running programs. The next stage is network monitoring for identifying the ports that are listening on the system. Actually network monitoring includes several steps to be made. After that we go to registry monitoring. This is a process for verifying all real time system activities. And, finally, code analyzing that is necessary for flow controlling. The last stage includes the work of reverse compiling tools, debugging and disassembly tools.

These stages describe the malicious software reverse engineering only in a few words, the rest of the information can be obtained in the result of hard and scrupulous work. As a rule it is used for business purposes because a lot of anti-virus and software companies, some agencies and military organizations are faced to a serious threat from the side of malicious software developers.