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Practical Malware Analysis
book

Practical Malware Analysis

by Michael Sikorski, Andrew Honig
February 2012
Intermediate to advanced
800 pages
23h 55m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from Practical Malware Analysis

Why 64-Bit Malware?

Knowing that 32-bit malware can target both 32-bit and 64-bit machines, why would anyone bother to write 64-bit malware?

While you can run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications on the same system, you cannot run 32-bit code within 64-bit applications. When a processor is running 32-bit code, it is running in 32-bit mode, and you cannot run 64-bit code. Therefore, anytime malware needs to run inside the process space of a 64-bit process, it must be 64-bit.

Here are a few examples of why malware might need to be compiled for the x64 architecture:

Kernel code

  • All kernel code for an OS is within a single memory space, and all kernel code running in a 64-bit OS must be 64-bit. Because rootkits often run within the kernel, rootkits that ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781593272906Errata Page