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

2. CPU Registers


As mentioned previously, the CPU contains special storage called registers. The CPU can access data in registers much faster than data in memory, because of which the values fetched from the memory are temporarily stored in these registers to perform operations.

2.1 General-Purpose Registers

The x86 CPU has eight general purpose registers: eaxebxecxedxespebpesi, and edi. These registers are 32 bits (4 bytes) in size. A program can access registers as 32-bit (4 bytes), 16-bit (2 bytes), or 8-bit (1 byte) values. The lower 16 bits (2 bytes) of each of these registers can be accessed as axbxcxdxspbpsi, and di. The lower 8 bits (1 byte) of eaxebxecx, and edx can be referenced as alblcl, and dl. The higher set of 8 bits can be accessed as ahbhch, and dh. In the following diagram, the eax register contains the 4-byte value 0xC6A93174. A program can access the lower 2 bytes (0x3174) by accessing the ax register, and it can access the lower byte...