Malware Challenge

I saw this site a couple of days ago and thought it might be of interest - http://www.malwarechallenge.info

The site is going to release a piece of malware on 1st Oct with a set of questions for you to answer as you analyse the malware, with prizes for the best answers.

Copied from the site: "The 2008 malware challenge will consist of one malware sample which has been taken from the wild. While some slight modifications have been performed on the sample, these modifications do not affect malware execution.

Participants in the malware challenge will download the malware, analyze it and answer questions based on their findings. The answers to these questions will be evaluated by the judges in order to determine who the winners are."

I've never done anything like this before and am not expecting to win any prizes but I'm gonna give the challenge a go. If anyone else fancies trying it please let me know, I could use all the help I can get! I'm gonna use this thread to document my progress and may even write an article/tutorial depending on how much I learn and how far I get with it.

Wait until you get a good amount of info to post rather than every single new development. This definitely sounds like an interesting "challenge" and I will probably check it out too.

challenge??? :) i'm in ;)

There are always going to be challenges like this going on, so I wouldn't take this specific one seriously if you actually want to learn about the topic.

key words: battle program, battle programming, reverse engineer

And you may want to brush up on your crypto as well as any other fun techniques you come across while reading about battle programs. Hopefully this will give you some experience before you enter the challenge.