Reverse engineering malware has been an integral part of the world of security. At best it has been employed for signature logging malware until now. Since the evolution of new age technologies, this is now being researched as a robust methodology which can lead to more reactive and proactive solutions to the modern security threats that are growing stronger and more sophisticated. This research in its entirety has been an attempt to understand the in and outs of reverse engineering pertaining to malware analysis, with an eye to the future trends in security.
Reverse engineering of malware was done with Nugache P2P malware as the target showing that signature based malware identification is ineffective. Developing a proactive approach to quickly identifying malware was the objective that guided this research work. Innovative malware analysis techniques with data mining and rough sets methodologies have been employed in this research work in the quest of a proactive and feasible security solution.