this is my first post on here so please excuse me if I have made any mistakes.
So, I was browsing around on the Metasploit page, and I found these strange types of codes. I tried searching it on google and on here, but couldn't find any other questions and answers like I had. I also noticed that Elliot used the method in "Mr. Robot" while programming in Python. I can see that the code is usually used in viruses, but I need to know why. This is the code that I found using this method:
buf += "\x5b\x4d\x6f\x76\x69\x65\x50\x6c\x61\x79\x5d\x0d\x0a\x46\x69\x6c\x65\x4e\x61\x6d\x65\x30\x3d\x43\x3a\x5c"
It's a string, just as any other string like "Hello World!". However, it's written in a different way. In computers, each character corresponds to a number, called a code-point, according to an encoding. One such encoding that you might have heard of is ASCII, another is UTF-8. To give an example, in both encodings, the letter H corresponds to the number 72. In Python, one usually specifies a string using the matching letters, like "Hello World!". However, it is also possible to use the code-points. In python, this can be denoted with \xab, where ab is replaced with the hexadecimal form of the code-point. So H would become '\x48', because 48 is the hexadecimal notation for 72, the code-point for the letter H. In this notation, "Hello World!" becomes "\x48\x65\x6c\x6c\x6f\x20\x57\x6f\x72\x6c\x64\x21".
The string you specify consists of the hexadecimal code-point 5b (decimal 91, the code-point for the character [), followed by the code-point 4d (M), etc., leading to the full string [MoviePlay]\r\nFileName0=C:\\. Here \r and \n are special characters together representing a line-break, so one could also read it as:
[MoviePlay]
FileName0=C:\\
In principle this notation is not necessarily found in viruses, but that kind of programming often requires very specific manipulation of numbers in memory without a lot of regard for the actual characters represented by those numbers, so that could explain why you'd see it arise there.