Beginner’s guide to malware analysis and reverse engineering

This blog post presents a practical, context-driven guide to malware analysis and reverse engineering, demonstrating initial triage steps—identifying file format and architecture, detecting packing and unpacking (UPX example), extracting strings and IOCs, and analyzing the PE import table—using a 64-bit DLL sample (mal_mal). The example highlights potential malicious behaviors (registry persistence, process/thread manipulation, file I/O, and WinHTTP-based network activity) and emphasizes decision-making to determine whether deeper static or dynamic analysis is required.