Featured resource
pluralsight tech forecast
2025 Tech Forecast

Which technologies will dominate in 2025? And what skills do you need to keep up?

Check it out
Hamburger Icon
  • Course
    • Libraries: If you want this course, consider one of these libraries.
    • Security

Malware Analysis: Identifying and Defeating Code Obfuscation

Malware authors routinely utilize obfuscation techniques to complicate the analysis of their code. This course will teach you techniques for identifying and defeating code obfuscation so that key characteristics and behaviors can be identified.

Josh Stroschein - Pluralsight course - Malware Analysis: Identifying and Defeating Code Obfuscation
by Josh Stroschein

What you'll learn

Malware authors will routinely utilize obfuscation techniques to complicate the analysis of their code. These techniques can prevent the discovery of important indicators of compromise and limit the ability to determine malware functionality. In this course, Malware Analysis: Identifying and Defeating Code Obfuscation, you will gain the skills necessary to not only identify prevalent obfuscation techniques, but also how to effectively defeat them. First, you will see how obfuscation will affect your analysis and effective strategies for defeating a variety of obfuscation methods. Next, you will explore how to identify and detect obfuscation techniques in interpreted code. This includes software routinely abused by malware authors such as Powershell and Visual Basic for Applications. You will next be able to expand your skills by learning about code obfuscation in native code. Finally, you will discover how malware authors use cryptography for obfuscation and ways to detect it. Each module of this course will include detailed demonstrations and hands-on labs that will allow you to analyze real-world malware. You will be going deep into malware obfuscation techniques with such tools as IDA Pro and WinDbg. By the end of this course, you will have the knowledge and skills to effectively tackle obfuscation!

Table of contents

About the author

Josh Stroschein - Pluralsight course - Malware Analysis: Identifying and Defeating Code Obfuscation
Josh Stroschein

Dr. Josh Stroschein is an Assistant Professor at Dakota State University where he teaches malware analysis, software exploitation, reverse engineering, and penetration testing. Josh also works as a malware analyst for Bromium, an end-point security company and is the Director of Training for the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF).

More Courses by Josh