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Deep Inside Malicious PDF Nowadays, people share documents all the time and most of the attacks are based on client side attacks and target applications that exist in the user’s, or employee’s OS. From one single file, the attacker can compromise a large network. PDF is the most common sharing file format, due to the fact that PDFs can include active content, and are passed within the enterprise and across networks. In this article, we will analyze ways to catch malicious PDF files. When we start to check the PDF files that exist in our PC or laptop, we may use an antivirus scanner but these days it might not be good enough to detect a malicious PDF that contains a shell code because the attacker mostly encrypts its content to bypass the antivirus scanner and, many times, targets a zero day vulnerability that exists in Adobe Acrobat reader or a version that has not been updated. Figure 1 shows how PDF vulnerabilities are rising every year. Before we start to analyze malicious PDF...

Android Reverse Engineering: an Introductory Guide to Malware Analysis The Android malware has followed an exponential growth rate in recent years, in parallel with the degree of penetration of this system in different markets. Currently, over 90% of the threats to mobile devices have Android as a main target. This scenario has led to the demand for professionals with a very specific knowledge on this platform. The software reverse engineering, according to Chikofsky and Cross [1], refers to the process of analyzing a system to identify its components and their interrelationships, and create representations of the system in another form or a higher level of abstraction. Thus, the purpose of reverse engineering is not to make changes or to replicate the system under analysis, but to understand how it was built. The best way to tackle a problem of reverse engineering is to consider how we would have built the system in question. Obviously, the success of the mission depends larg...

Malware Reverse Engineering In today’s highly sophisticated world in Technology, where Information Systems form the critical back-bone of our everyday lives, we need to protect them from all sorts of attack vectors. Protecting them from all sorts of attack would require us understanding the modus operandi without which our efforts would be futile. Understanding the modi operandi of sophisticated attacks such as malware would require us dissecting malware codes into bits and pieces with processes such as Reverse Engineering. In this article, readers will be introduced to Reverse Engineering, Malware Analysis, Understanding attack vectors from reversed codes, and tools and utilities used for reverse engineering. Introduction Reverse engineering is a vital skill for security professionals. Reverse engineering malware to discovering vulnerabilities in binaries are required in order to properly secure Information Systems from today’s ever evolving threats. Reverse Engineering can ...