The Antivirus Hacker's Handbook

Introduction

Welcome to The Antivirus Hacker's Handbook. With this book, you can increase your knowledge about antivirus products and reverse-engineering in general; while the reverse-engineering techniques and tools discussed in this book are applied to antivirus software, they can also be used with any other software products. Security researchers, penetration testers, and other information security professionals can benefit from this book. Antivirus developers will benefit as well because they will learn more about how antivirus products are analyzed, how they can be broken into parts, and how to prevent it from being broken or make it harder to break.

I want to stress that although this book is, naturally, focused on antivirus products, it also contains practical examples that show how to apply reverse-engineering, vulnerability discovery, and exploitation techniques to real-world applications.

Overview of the Book and Technology

This book is designed for individuals who need to better understand the functionality of antivirus products, regardless of which side of the fence they are on: offensive or defensive. Its objective is to help you learn when and how specific techniques and tools should be used and what specific parts of antivirus products you should focus on, based on the specific tasks you want to accomplish. This book is for you if any of the following statements are true:

• You want to learn more about the security of antivirus products.
• You want to learn more about ...