Mastering Reverse Engineering

Binary analysis tools

Binary analysis tools are used to parse binary files and extract information about the file. An analyst would be able to identify which applications are able to read or execute the binary. File types are generally identified from their magic header bytes. These Magic Header bytes are usually located at the beginning of a file. For example, a Microsoft executable file, an EXE file, begin with the MZ header (MZ is believed to be the initials of Mark Zbikowski, a developer from Microsoft during the DOS days). Microsoft Office Word documents, on the other hand, have these first four bytes as their Magic Header: 

The hexadecimal bytes ...