Practical Malware Analysis

What Is Malware Analysis?

Malicious software, or malware, plays a part in most computer intrusion and security incidents. Any software that does something that causes harm to a user, computer, or network can be considered malware, including viruses, trojan horses, worms, rootkits, scareware, and spyware. While the various malware incarnations do all sorts of different things (as you’ll see throughout this book), as malware analysts, we have a core set of tools and techniques at our disposal for analyzing malware.

Malware analysis is the art of dissecting malware to understand how it works, how to identify it, and how to defeat or eliminate it. And you don’t need to be an uber-hacker to perform malware analysis.

With millions of malicious programs ...