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Hi, this is the first (or zeroth) article wrote by me. Here I’d like to share some thinkings about me and my career.
My name is Mateus Gualberto, a Computer Science student who seeks a cybersecurity career focused in Malware Analysis.
I love programming, specially in C/C++, and that’s probably the origin of my passion in binary/malware analysis. When my middle school professor showed a “Portugol” program running, using variables and doing some math with them, my mind blowed up. In that moment I knew my future study field, and it was computing.
Jumping to college’s time at Universidade Federal do Ceará, my knowledge about computing, programming and math changed a lot. Abstract thinking is something powerful to mathematics and computing and I found it useful to many things in my life. What does it mean? It means that I can solve problems translating them to some general structures, like a graph or a data structure, and use some applyable theorems or operations to those structures, simplifying the thinking logic of the solving.
Another really good thing of the college was the possibility to join a cybersecurity focused study group. Its name is Residência em Segurança da Informação (RSI), or in English: “Security Information Residence”. Joining this group has given me knowledge abouth technical things and security information market, besides some good friends for life.
I started studying reverse engineering and OS-related things in January/2019. My wish has been to get more knowledge about how a computer really works in real world. I know what a variable is, but how does the computer really store it in memory? How does the compilers translate an algorithm written in a high-level programming language to machine code? How does the computer really execute this code? What is the purpose of an operating system and how does it affect the execution flow? These are some questions which gave me curiosity about OS-related things.
Before I started reversing binaries, I needed to study computer architecture and operating systems. Registers, memory addresses, machine code, Assembly, and much more became my (almost) daily life. After that, I went deep into the reversing techniques and procedures, learning those from Papo Binário youtube channel, whose reverse engineering course brought me a lot of knowledge.
Nowadays, I work as a Malware Analyst at a brazillian company. Working with malware brings another level of knowledge in “Binary Arts”, because it is not just reverse the code and check for some strings or structs, it takes the reverse engineering to a greater scope, analysing Network-related things, intrinsec OS APIs and behavior, etc. I would like to better my analysis and so that’s one of the reasons that I created this Medium. I’d like to share thoughts about cybersecurity, reversing, malware analysis, drivers, OS and maybe some Math (discrete maths, of course :) ). Maybe someday I will edit this for appending more thoughts and information.
Welcome to my study field!
