Gray Hat Hacking, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

Why Reverse Engineering?

With all of the other techniques covered in this book, why would you ever want to resort to something as tedious as reverse engineering? You should be interested in reverse engineering if you want to extend your vulnerability assessment skills beyond the use of the pen tester’s standard bag of tricks. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to run Nessus and report its output. Unfortunately, such tools can only report on what they know. They can’t report on undiscovered vulnerabilities and that is where your skills as a reverse engineer come into play. If you want to move beyond the standard features of Canvas or Metasploit and learn how to extend them effectively, you will probably want to develop at least some rudimentary ...