Chapter 21. 64-Bit Malware

Almost all current malware is 32-bit, but some is written for the 64-bit architecture in order to interact with 64-bit OSs. As 64-bit OSs become more popular, so will 64-bit malware.

Several 64-bit architectures have been introduced. The first to be supported by Windows, Itanium, was designed for performance computing and was not compatible with x86. AMD later introduced a 64-bit architecture called AMD64, which was compatible with x86 code. Intel adopted AMD64 and called its implementation EM64T. This architecture is now known as x64, or x86-64, and it is the most popular implementation of 64-bit code on Windows. All current Windows versions are available in 64-bit versions, which support both 64-bit and 32-bit applications. ...

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