Practical Malware Analysis Course
The Practical Malware Analysis (PMA) book is where many RPISEC members and alumn started. The book reads very well, is full of information, and the lab walkthroughs in the back are invaluable. We didn’t want to re-invent the wheel so we structured most of the class around the book. Students were expected to have read the relevant PMA book chapters before class, allowing us to spend much more class time demonstrating skills and techniques and walking through hands-on examples with the students.
Syllabus: http://security.cs.rpi.edu/courses/malware-fall2015/Syllabus.pdf
To help protect people from accidentaly running samples on an important machine, and to prevent anti-malware suites from blocking the course material, all of the samples are compressed and encrypted with a password of ‘infected’.
Course Abstract
With the increased use of the Internet and prevalence of computing systems in critical infrastructure, technology is undoubtedly a vital part of modern daily life. Unfortunately, the increasingly networked nature of the modern world has also enabled the spread of malicious software, or “malware”, ranging from annoying adware to advanced nation-state sponsored cyber-weaponry. As a result, the ability to detect, analyze, understand, control, and eradicate malware is an increasingly important issue of economic and national security.
This course will introduce students to modern malware analysis techniques through readings and hands-on interactive analysis of real-world samples. After taking this course students will be equipped with the skills to analyze advanced contemporary malware using both static and dynamic analysis.
Prerequisite Knowledge
This course carried a prereq of Computer Organization – CSCI 2500 at RPI. Computer Organization is RPI’s basic computer architecture course that teaches things like C, MIPS assembly, x86 assembly, Datapaths, CPU Pipelining, CPU Caching, Memory Mapping, etc.
Our expected demographic for Malware Analysis was students with zero reverse engineering experience. That said, to be able to take this course you will probably need at least the following skills.
- Working knowledge of C/C++
- Any assembly level experience
Lecture Breakdown
Lab Breakdown
Download
This repository contains the materials as developed and used by RPISEC to teach Malware Analysis at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Fall 2015. This was a university course developed and run soley by students, primarily using the Practical Malware Analysis book by Michael Sikorski and Andrew Honig, to teach skills in reverse engineering, malicious behaviour, malware, and anti-analysis techniques.
