Summary

In this chapter, we've discussed several fairly complex ideas revolving around the dynamic and hybrid analysis of malware, ranging from understanding API calls that malware may utilize to further its ends, avoid analysis, and generally wreak havoc within our environment, to how malware may utilize commercial and custom packers to attempt to obfuscate their true nature or make analysis more difficult.

We've also discovered how we may leverage this knowledge and defeat these mechanisms with tools such as x32 and x64dbg, as well as plugins such as Scylla, and tools such as the NSA's Ghidra. While these are complex topics, they become far easier the more they are practiced – the more time you spend in Ghidra or a debugger, the more comfortable the tools become, regardless of the relative complexity of the ideas surrounding them.

In the next chapters, we'll take a few steps back from the technical complexity and focus on easier-to-understand and...