Malware Analysis - What is it?

Hi All,

First of all I thank you for visiting my blog and a warm welcome to you guys.

From the day I  have told my friends, cousins, relatives that I am a Virus Research Analyst, there are couple of  things that come to them spontaneously:
1. Woww!! the title really looks cool and
2. "So what do you do - write viruses?"

People generally not working in the AV(anti-virus) industry do not know much about this field. Many of my friends/cousins are working in the IT industry. Even they ask me that I belong to which category (read: development or testing/QA) and my answer is "NO - I don't belong to either of these".

This is one of the main reasons behind this blog - let you know what exactly do we mean by Virus Research or in more common known as Malware Research or Malware Analysis.

The main question - What is malware?
Answer is : Malware means Malicious Software - it could be a software/program which sneaks in onto your computer and does the damage without your knowledge.
 
We all would have come across a certain situation where in you would see the same files being copied in different locations on your system or it becomes too slow or a pop-up coming up every 10 minutes asking you to click on some link etc. These are all nothing but different types of malware which come in varied forms and sizes.

So what is Virus Analysis(Malware Analysis)?

 Virus Research or Virus Analysis is an art or the science of analyzing malicious programs(code) so as to provide appropriate prevention as there are lot of computer viruses in the wild.
Virus Research is also about knowing about vulnerabilities and the malicious code that exploits it.

This is such an exciting  and vast field that the virus researchers and the virus writers are always engaged in some sort of battle to prove that they are the best and you need to constantly keep updating as new classes/variants of viruses keep appearing, the existing viruses too are modified into different forms.

As a start up, I have provided a very basic information as to what virus analysis is all about(for those of you who didn't know)
Will try to write something more technical in my next blog.

Your comments are always appreciated for me to improve.

Regards,
Anand