Reader small image

You're reading from  Windows APT Warfare

Product typeBook
Published inMar 2023
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781804618110
Edition1st Edition
Languages
Tools
Right arrow
Author (1)
Sheng-Hao Ma
Sheng-Hao Ma
author image
Sheng-Hao Ma

Sheng-Hao Ma is currently working as a threat researcher at TXOne Networks, specializing in Windows reverse engineering analysis for over 10 years. In addition, he is currently a member of CHROOT, an information security community in Taiwan. He has served as a speaker and instructor for various international conferences and organizations such as Black Hat USA, DEFCON, CODE BLUE, HITB, VXCON, HITCON, ROOTCON, Ministry of National Defense, and Ministry of Education.
Read more about Sheng-Hao Ma

Right arrow

What is a software packer?

You can imagine a program packed by a software packer will be protected or compressed and wrapped in a shell so that its internal contents are not directly visible to analysts. As usual, we’ll use a memory distribution figure to give you a quick overview of how packing technology has been implemented. Figure 8.1 shows the distribution of msgbox.exe in the dynamic phase before (left side) and after (right side) the software was packed:

Figure 8.1 – Difference in memory before and after packing

Figure 8.1 – Difference in memory before and after packing

The left-hand side of the figure shows the memory distribution of the msgbox.exe executable after file mapping, which we mentioned in Chapter 7. We can see that the current image base of the executable is mounted at 0x400000, and the entire PE module is allocated a total of 0x307A bytes in memory. The .text section, which holds the code, is currently placed at 0x401000 to 0x401FFF; the .data section, which holds the data, is...

lock icon
The rest of the page is locked
Previous PageNext Page
You have been reading a chapter from
Windows APT Warfare
Published in: Mar 2023Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781804618110

Author (1)

author image
Sheng-Hao Ma

Sheng-Hao Ma is currently working as a threat researcher at TXOne Networks, specializing in Windows reverse engineering analysis for over 10 years. In addition, he is currently a member of CHROOT, an information security community in Taiwan. He has served as a speaker and instructor for various international conferences and organizations such as Black Hat USA, DEFCON, CODE BLUE, HITB, VXCON, HITCON, ROOTCON, Ministry of National Defense, and Ministry of Education.
Read more about Sheng-Hao Ma