CS6038 Syllabus

This is a rough syllabus for the course. Topics may change week to week as I develop the curriculum further and in response to student feedback.

• Week 01 - Jan 15: Introduction to Malware Analysis CS6038
• Week 02 - Jan 22: Introduction to Malware Labs & Sandboxing: HW1(Assigned)
• Week 03 - Jan 29: Static Analysis & x86|x86_64 Assembly Intro
• Week 04 - Feb 05: Dynamic & Hybrid Analysis: HW2(Assigned)
• Week 05 - Feb 12: Document Analysis: HW3(Assigned)
• Week 06 - Feb 19: Windows Artifact Analysis
• Week 07 - Feb 26: Network Analysis: HW4(Assigned)
• Week 08 - Mar 05: Utilizing Static Analysis with Yara, etc.
• Week 09 - Mar 12: Reporting and Client Communications
• Week 10 - Mar 19: Spring break - NO CLASS
• Week 11 - Mar 26: Reverse Engineering (RE): HW5(Assigned)
• Week 12 - Apr 02: Run-Time Debugging Analysis, System Tracing, Inspection: HW6(Assigned)
• Week 13 - Apr 09: Debugging Analysis of Running Code
• Week 14 - Apr 16: Final exam (Class will still be held to answer questions)
• Week 15 - Apr 23: Final exam (Class will still be held to answer questions)
• Week 16 - Apr 30: Finals Week - Final Project Due Sunday before Finals week. Good Luck

Grading

The course consists of mostly hands-on work analysing artifacts. Therefore, the entire class will consist of projects (6), a final project that will be made available toward the last week of class, and some “participation” scores which may consist of unannounced class-time quizzes, mini-assignments, or forum discussions. The final project will be a malware lab assignment that will attempt to comprehensively test your abilities on the topics covered during the entire semester.

The contribution of each of these to your score will be as follows:

• 70%: The six (6) project assignments (you will get 2 weeks for each, though they might overlap)
• 20%: Final project/lab
• 10%: Participation