> My experience w/ learning reverse engineering!

(11/19/2025), 2 minute read ⏰

This isn't going to be a super detailed review of reverse engineering, rather it's more about my feelings with it.

I've been trying to get into reverse engineering for a while. I'd load up Binja like an absolute chad and witness my confidence come crashing down once I see anything that isn't baby difficulty or basically source code. Simply put, I was a mega noob no more than a few months ago, not that I changed that much in that time from then til now.

What has changed is the group I've surrounded myself with. I joined the Invoke RE Discord server a while back and got chatting with some people. I came across OALabs and discovered the absolute masterclass content they had that was available for free and I was HOOKED. Now, this has all transpired in just the past few weeks, but I know that I've made a ton of progress with these steps, past reversing some shrimple C programs, and learning a bit more about calling conventions, System V ABI, etc. It's all nerd-speak really.

Now, to end off this really short blog post, I'll go over my toolkit of reversing real quick.............

It's IDA Free, and that's it. Yep. I legit haven't done much else past static analysis thus far and don't think I'll go a whole lot of dynamic analysis anytime soon. Sure, I'll probably try simple VM detonation services like any.run, tria.ge, etc. soon too. IDA is good and does what I want it to do. I've got all my notes in markdown for samples I review and my obsidian notes contain IDA shortcuts and a bunch of RE topics like safe malware handling, calling convention notes, VM setup, online docs, etc.

I also added a reverse engineering section to my notes page containing some cool docs and references that I consult on occasion. The majority of my knowledge comes from people I chat with on Discord, especially with reversing Linux binaries, which I've started doing a bit!

That's all I've got to share for now. If you do want to find me anywhere, check out the HTB/Invoke RE/OALabs discord and you'll find me there!