Leveraging API calls to understand malicious capabilities
While it is not, strictly speaking, a component of dynamic analysis, techniques identified within this chapter will make broad use of the APIs offered by Windows in order to achieve their goals.
To this end, it is important to have a basic understanding of how we may leverage Windows API calls in malicious programs to better understand what the capabilities of these programs may be, and at what point in their execution flow they may make use (malicious or otherwise) of these APIs offered by the Windows environment. Before we begin, we'll take a quick primer on x86 assembly to understand what may be occurring within these calls.
x86 assembly primer
32-bit malware still comprises the large majority of malware seen in the wild today, and for good reason. Malware operators wish to maintain the broadest compatibility possible for their payloads. 64-bit computers are able to run the x86 instruction set, but the inverse...