Many incident response situations and computer forensics investigations cannot be completed accurately or thoroughly without understanding the runtime nature of a binary. Hackers increasingly use customized trojans that are not detected by antivirus which can only be analyzed and traced back to the original attacker via reverse engineering. Additionally, many binary programs contain vulnerabilities, such as buffer overflows and the use of very weak cryptographic algorithms. The only way to discover these critical vulnerabilities for closed-source programs is to reverse engineer them. Reverse engineering is also required in order to understand complex binary obfuscation schemes used by copy protection vendors, as well as obfuscation put in place by commercial software vendors. Understanding hashing functions Working with encrypted binaries Reversing UPX and other compression types Discovering stack overflows Discovering heap overflows Creating a sandbox to isolate malware Unpacking malware Monitoring registry changes Identifying malware communication channels Understanding Digital Rights Management (DRM) implementations
