
Explore the five-step cyber kill chain in malware analysis and reverse engineering, from weaponization and delivery to exploitation, persistence, and exfiltration, aligning with attacker mindset and defense strategies.
Identify hardware and software needs for course, including 2–3 GHz CPUs, 8–16 GB RAM, 100 GB storage, Windows guest OS, VMware or VirtualBox, and tools like IDA Pro and Wireshark.
Set up a separate virtual environment to isolate malware analysis, centralize tools and samples, and prevent host antivirus interference, using Windows 7 or 10 with VMware or VirtualBox.
Set up your malware testing lab by installing flare vm from github using powershell on Windows, and assemble pdf, office tools, hex editors, disassemblers, and debuggers.
Discover Remnux, a linux toolkit for reverse engineering and analyzing malware, packaged as a ready-to-run distro with Docker containers and a handy cheat-sheet.
Examine the reconnaissance and weaponization phases of the cyber kill chain, comparing passive OSINT gathering with active port scanning and fingerprinting, and show how attackers craft weaponized delivery via email.
Explore spearphishing emails as a targeted delivery mechanism in the delivery and exploitation phase, contrasting with generic phishing and highlighting detection via sender details, headers, links, and attachments.
Explore Microsoft Office file formats, from OLE compound files to Open XML, and learn how macros and VBA reside in streams and storage, inspecting docx and xlsx as zip archives.
Analyze malicious document files with oledump and oletools to reveal embedded macros or scripts in doc, ppt, and xls. View hex representations and prepare a cross-platform malware analysis environment.
Analyze malicious office documents with oledump to reveal macro scripts, decode vba, and identify delivery and exploitation phases and the malware payload.
Analyze malicious ole files with oletools, using oleid to detect format and macros, and olemeta, oledir, and olemap to extract meta data and map internal structure.
Learn to analyze malicious ole files with olevba from the oletools suite, extract vba macros, and use mraptor to heuristically assess suspicion and identify indicators of compromise.
Understand the complete pdf file structure, from header and objects to the cross-reference table, trailer, and end of file. Verify parsing with a hex editor to map object locations.
Learn to analyze malicious pdf files using pdfid for static metadata and pdf-parser for dynamic parsing, identifying javascript, open action, xfa, uri, and embedded files.
Explore how exploit kits deliver malware through compromised sites and ads via redirects, enumerate browser plugins, and identify related traffic in pcaps with http filter tips.
Inspect a suspicious pcap with exploit kit traffic in wireshark, applying filters to trace landing pages, iframe injections, and flash exploits, and examine post requests to the command-and-control server.
Portable executable files are the executable files for the windows operating system. This file format is the most critical portion of malware analysis as it is the actual executable code which is responsible for performing the infection behaviours and perform command and control operation. In this section, we are going to cover in detail about how we can analyze this file format and reverse engineer it using static and dynamic techniques.
This lecture talks about advance details about the structure of PE files and how to parse it using common security tools like CFF explorer and 010 editor.
This lecture tries to answer a simple question > What happens when a file is executed? What operations are performed by the operating system to launch the operation? This lecture tries to briefly answer this question. This is an important concept to understand as it lays the foundational work of understanding the behaviours of malware execution onto the windows operating system.
Understand the compilation process from preprocessing to linking, turning high-level code into an executable by expanding macros, generating assembly, producing machine code, and linking the final exe.
Explore how source code compiles to object files and executables via compiler and linker, then how decompilers reverse this process to analyze malware from exe to assembly.
This lecture covers some of the useful tools for quick static analysis of PE files
Learn to use PPEE and PE Studio to inspect ransomware binaries, determine packed status, extract strings and ransom notes, and assess threats with Virus Total and MITRE techniques.
Malware analysis is a critical skill in the information security community. This course is logically designed to help you leap through the complicated steps of static and dynamic malware analysis in an easy and proactive way. After this course, you will be able to understand the core skills required in malware incident response investigations and analysis of Advance persistent threats. The course will guide you trough the basic requirements and necessary skillsets required in order to take your knowledge to the next level.
Some of the key take a-ways from this course are:
You can post your queries and doubts in the course and I will be more than happy to help you in your learning curve.