Malware Analysis

Every SOC analyst, incident responder, and threat intelligence professional eventually faces the same question: what does this sample actually do? Malware Analysis: From Sample to Signature is a practical, hands on guide that takes you from a suspicious file to a defensible detection, without assuming you've ever opened a debugger or read a line of assembly.

The book starts with the fundamentals: how to categorize malware, how to think in terms of the four tiers of analysis, and how to build a real analysis lab with REMnux and FLARE VM. From there it moves from the outside of a binary in, covering static triage, controlled detonation and behavioral analysis, Windows specific attacker techniques, malicious documents and scripts, network traffic and C2 analysis, code analysis with disassemblers, unpacking and anti analysis evasion, and memory forensics with Volatility 3.

The final chapters turn your findings into operational value: writing production quality YARA rules, mapping behavior to MITRE ATT&CK, building Sigma, KQL, and Snort detections, and producing reports your whole team can act on. A full worked example, tracing a phishing attachment all the way to a shipped YARA rule, ties every technique in the book together into a single repeatable workflow.

Written for SOC analysts, incident responders, threat intel analysts, and aspiring reverse engineers, this book asks only that you're comfortable on a command line and willing to read code carefully. By the end, you'll have built a lab, detonated and unpacked a real sample, written working detection content, and produced an analyst grade report from scratch.