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You're reading from  Mastering Malware Analysis - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inSep 2022
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781803240244
Edition2nd Edition
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Authors (2):
Alexey Kleymenov
Alexey Kleymenov
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Alexey Kleymenov

Alexey Kleymenov started working in the information security industry in his second year at university and now has more than 14 years of practical experience at several international cybersecurity companies. He is a malware analyst and software developer who is passionate about reverse engineering, automation, and research. Alexey has taken part in numerous investigations analyzing all types of malicious samples, has developed various systems to perform threat intelligence activities in the IT, OT, and IoT sectors, and has authored several patents. Alexey is a member of the (ISC)² organization and holds the CISSP certification. Finally, he is a founder of the RE and More project, teaching people all over the world how to perform malware analysis in the most efficient way.
Read more about Alexey Kleymenov

Amr Thabet
Amr Thabet
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Amr Thabet

Amr Thabet is a malware researcher and an incident handler with over 10 years of experience. He has worked in several Fortune 500 companies, including Symantec and Tenable. Currently, he is the founder of MalTrak, providing real-world in-depth training in malware analysis, incident response, threat hunting, and red teaming to help the next generation of cybersecurity enthusiasts to build their careers in cybersecurity. Amr is also a speaker and trainer at some of the top security conferences all around the world, including Blackhat, DEFCON, Hack In Paris, and VB Conference. He was also featured in Christian Science Monitor for his work on Stuxnet.
Read more about Amr Thabet

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Analyzing Microsoft Office exploits

While Microsoft Office is mainly associated with Windows by many people, it has also supported the macOS operating system for several decades. In addition, the file formats used by it are also understood by various other suites, such as Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. In this section, we will look at vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malformed documents to perform malicious actions and learn how to analyze them.

File structures

The first thing that should be clear when analyzing any exploit is how the files associated with them are structured. Let’s take a look at the most common file formats associated with Microsoft Office that are used by attackers to store and execute malicious code.

Compound file binary format

This is probably the most well-known file format that can be found in documents associated with various older and newer Microsoft Office products, such as .doc (Microsoft Word), .xls (Microsoft Excel), .ppt...

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Mastering Malware Analysis - Second Edition
Published in: Sep 2022Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781803240244

Authors (2)

author image
Alexey Kleymenov

Alexey Kleymenov started working in the information security industry in his second year at university and now has more than 14 years of practical experience at several international cybersecurity companies. He is a malware analyst and software developer who is passionate about reverse engineering, automation, and research. Alexey has taken part in numerous investigations analyzing all types of malicious samples, has developed various systems to perform threat intelligence activities in the IT, OT, and IoT sectors, and has authored several patents. Alexey is a member of the (ISC)² organization and holds the CISSP certification. Finally, he is a founder of the RE and More project, teaching people all over the world how to perform malware analysis in the most efficient way.
Read more about Alexey Kleymenov

author image
Amr Thabet

Amr Thabet is a malware researcher and an incident handler with over 10 years of experience. He has worked in several Fortune 500 companies, including Symantec and Tenable. Currently, he is the founder of MalTrak, providing real-world in-depth training in malware analysis, incident response, threat hunting, and red teaming to help the next generation of cybersecurity enthusiasts to build their careers in cybersecurity. Amr is also a speaker and trainer at some of the top security conferences all around the world, including Blackhat, DEFCON, Hack In Paris, and VB Conference. He was also featured in Christian Science Monitor for his work on Stuxnet.
Read more about Amr Thabet