Book Image

Learning Malware Analysis

By : Monnappa K A
5 (1)
Book Image

Learning Malware Analysis

5 (1)
By: Monnappa K A

Overview of this book

Malware analysis and memory forensics are powerful analysis and investigation techniques used in reverse engineering, digital forensics, and incident response. With adversaries becoming sophisticated and carrying out advanced malware attacks on critical infrastructures, data centers, and private and public organizations, detecting, responding to, and investigating such intrusions is critical to information security professionals. Malware analysis and memory forensics have become must-have skills to fight advanced malware, targeted attacks, and security breaches. This book teaches you the concepts, techniques, and tools to understand the behavior and characteristics of malware through malware analysis. It also teaches you techniques to investigate and hunt malware using memory forensics. This book introduces you to the basics of malware analysis, and then gradually progresses into the more advanced concepts of code analysis and memory forensics. It uses real-world malware samples, infected memory images, and visual diagrams to help you gain a better understanding of the subject and to equip you with the skills required to analyze, investigate, and respond to malware-related incidents.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

11. x64 Architecture


Once you understand the concepts of x86 architecture, it's much easier to understand x64 architecture. The x64 architecture was designed as an extension to x86 and has a strong resemblance with x86 instruction sets, but there are a few differences that you need to be aware of from a code analysis perspective. This section covers some of the differences in the x64 architecture:

  • The first difference is that the 32-bit (4 bytes) general purpose registers eaxebxecxedxesiediebp, and esp are extended to 64 bits (8 bytes); these registers are named raxrbxrcxrdxrsirdirbp, and rsp. The eight new registers are named r8, r9, r10, r11, r12, r13, r14, and r15. As you might expect, a program can access the register as 64-bit (RAXRBX, and so on), 32-bit (eax, ebx, etc), 16-bit (axbx, and so on), or 8-bit (albl, and so on). For example, you can access the lower half of the RAX register as EAX and the lowest word as AX. You can access the registers r8-r15...