RVAsec 2025 Video: Christina Johns
Principal Malware Analyst – Red Canary
Title: Look Ma, No IDA! Malware Analysis Without Reverse Engineering
Do you think malware analysis is out of your reach because assembly code looks like reading the matrix? Fear not, this talk will convince you that learning assembly code is not the best place to start your malware analysis journey. For starters, the modern malware landscape is diverse and malicious code isn’t always compiled into assembly. Not every use case for malware analysis requires a deep dive and there are many great tools and services that provide information about a malware sample you can build your analysis on.
If you work as an incident responder, detection engineer, threat hunter, or intel analyst, you probably already do some malware analysis but don’t realize it. And if you don’t but would like to, this talk will discuss the tools and knowledge you should focus on first before embarking on groking the intel x86 manual.