Thursday, August 20, 2009

Introduction to Malware Dissection

This October 29-30th the annual Ohio Information Security Summit will be held. I highly recommend attending it if you can. The conference features two days of great talks, keynotes, labs and networking. It has been going on for a few years now and never fails to disappoint anyone who attends, especially for the price ($275 until Oct 1, $350 after). In addition to the normal talks, the summit is offering a number of pre-conference training courses.

I will be teaching a 2 day introduction to malware analysis class as one of the pre-conference training courses. The course is geared to those who want to learn malware analysis or are just starting out. We'll cover all of the basics for malware analysis including setting up your analysis lab, static analysis and dynamic analysis. In the end, you'll walk out of the class with the knowledge of how to take a malware sample and determine what it does, who it contacts and what risk it poses.

In the courses I have taken, I've found that I learn alot more by actually doing things rather than watching a powerpoint presentation for 8 hours. Because of this, the class will be structured around a number of labs which have you do the analysis using various tools on actual malware. I've collected a number of cool malware samples which will be analyzed in the course in various ways and I'm really excited about it. At the end of the class they'll also be an analysis contest where prizes will be given out.

Since we will be handling live malware there are some laptop requirements listed in the course description.

If anyone has any questions on the course or the laptop requirements, please contact me. I look forward to seeing you there!

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