February 2012
Intermediate to advanced
800 pages
23h 55m
English
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Reverse-Engineering
When malware is stored on a disk, it is typically in binary form at the machine code level. As discussed, machine code is the form of code that the computer can run quickly and efficiently. When we disassemble malware (as shown in Figure 4-1), we take the malware binary as input and generate assembly language code as output, usually with a disassembler. (Chapter 5 discusses the most popular disassembler, IDA Pro.)
Assembly language is actually a class of languages. Each assembly dialect is typically used to program a single family of microprocessors, such as x86, x64, SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, and ARM. x86 is by far the most popular architecture for PCs.
Most 32-bit personal computers are x86, also known as Intel IA-32, and all modern ...