 Welcome to my analysis for headshots! I decided to do another FAQ video but this time it's just me and also I got two questions by now which means we have a lot of time to discuss them. The first one is how did you get into malware analysis? I'm not so sure if whether I answered that already in one of the previous videos but I get this question a lot so here's my answer. It started with me reading the book The Art of Computer Virus Research and Defense by Peter Zaw and as one of my colleagues told me this is the Bible for malware analysis. So it's a very good book. It's old but it's still valid up to this day and it is specialized on one malware type on viruses which were by then back then when the book was written the most prevalent malware type. That's not the case anymore but you can use the basic concepts that are covered there even today. So if you haven't read it I think you should try it. It's pretty good. Now this book got me hooked. I was already in a stage where I had my bachelor's degree in computer science. I was still not sure what to do after I finished with the master's degree so but it got me very very interested in that topic and so I decided to make this topic part of my master's thesis and while I was writing and working on my thesis I realized this is really really fun. I want to do that even after I'm done with studying. I want to work in that area and basically being paid for doing something that that's fun that's fascinating and that was the right decision. I had no clue how to use a debugger when I applied for a job. I knew I mean my master's thesis was about the Potoback executable format and how it's being used by malware and how it can how anomalies in the format can be used by malware and how you can use them to detect malware. So it's just static analysis that I did and it's very specific to this file format. So I was very specialized and I had no clue in most of the other areas that are in regards to malware analysis. Yeah and I applied and they believed me that I'm so interested that I will learn this very fast and that's what I did. Like after two to three weeks I was already able to produce signatures for the antivirus product and that was much faster than they expected me to be able to do that. So it was right decision. But you also have to keep in mind that I had this you shouldn't expect the same from you if you don't have the same foundations as I did. I was already able to read assembly. I was able to you know I had a good programming background at least more than other computer science students in my class and so with those foundations it's quite easy to get into this topic. Yeah the second question what was that? What does the assembly do you recommend for newbie? So if you are a newbie I will assume that you don't have much money to pay for a commercial disassembly like either. I recommend that you go with a disassembly that also provides 64-bit support because 64 bit malware is just it's getting more and more so you kind of need that and in my opinion or that's at least the one I know is x64dbd it's modeled after Oli debugger and Oli doesn't support 64-bit so go with x64dbd. If you find you will find a lot of tutorials on Oli it has a huge community and that's the cool thing is that if you learn by those tutorials you can also use x64dbd because it's just basically you use it the same way. But don't spend too much time on deciding what tool to use. Also the same goes for if you're trying to decide what programming language you should learn first. That's the same thing you shouldn't procrastinate by investing all your time into this decision because that's not helpful. You just go for one language you just go for one tool and learning how to use the tool that's not the most work and that's not the most complicated stuff. The thing you have to learn is how to use the information that the tool gives you and in case of a disassembly it's a disassembled code so how do you read that code and how can you step through and find the parts of the code that you're looking for and that's the same with every disassembly out there so don't procrastinate with putting work into deciding just go for something flip a coin or just use what I said I don't know but keep in mind I don't know every disassembly that's out there so it's just what I know yeah I hope this helps you that's it already have fun analyzing that way and thanks for watching see you next time