Last updated: April 29, 2026
When an alert fires and the SOC ends up holding a suspicious binary — extracted from a phishing attachment, pulled off an infected endpoint, or flagged by EDR — somebody has to decide quickly: is this actually malicious, what does it do, and how bad is the exposure? That is malware triage. Not full reverse engineering (that takes days per sample) but a fast, structured assessment that answers the operational questions in under 30 minutes. This module walks through static triage, behavioural triage in a sandbox, the tools that matter, and the decision points that mark when to escalate to a dedicated reverse engineer.
Triage vs reverse engineering
Reverse engineering is a deep discipline: disassembly, control-flow graphs, identifying crypto constants, recovering C2 protocol. It is expensive and slow. Triage is the fast first-pass that determines whether reverse engineering is worth doing, and extracts actionable indicators (IPs, domains, hashes, filenames, registry keys) so the SOC can hunt for other affected hosts while the RE work proceeds.
Triage answers: “Is it malicious? What family? What does it do at a high level? What indicators do we hunt on right now?”
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