Expand your capacity to fight malicious code by learning how to analyze bots, worms, and trojans. This popular four-day course discusses practical approaches to examining Windows malware using a variety of monitoring utilities, a disassembler, a debugger, and other tools useful for reverse-engineering malicious software. You don't have to be a full-time malware searcher to benefit from this course-as organizations increasingly rely on their staff to act as first responders during a security incident, malware analysis skills become increasingly important.

By covering both behavioral and code analysis approaches, this unique course provides a rounded approach to reverse-engineering. As a result, the course makes malware analysis accessible even to individuals with a limited exposure to programming concepts. The materials do not assume that the students are familiar with reverse-engineering; however, the difficulty level of concepts and techniques increases quickly as the course progresses.

In the first half of the course, you will learn how to set up an inexpensive and flexible laboratory for understanding inner-workings of malware, and demonstrate the process by exploring capabilities of real-world specimens. You will learn to examine the program's behavioral patterns and assembly code, and study techniques for bypassing common code obfuscation mechanisms. The course also explores how to analyze browser-based malware.

In the second half of the course, you will review key assembly language concepts. You will learn to examine malicious code to understand its flow by identifying key logic structures, looking at examples of bots, rootkits, key loggers, and so on. You will understand how to work with PE headers and handle DLL interactions. You will also develop skills for analyzing self-defending malware through advanced unpacking techniques and bypassing code-protection mechanisms. Finally, you will discover how to bypass obfuscation techniques employed by browser-based malicious scripts.

Hands-on workshop exercises are an essential aspect of this course, and allow you to apply reverse-engineering techniques by examining malicious code in a carefully-controlled environment. When performing the analysis, you will study the supplied specimen's behavioral patterns, and examine key portions of its assembly code.