Reddit mentions of Practical Malware Analysis: The Hands-On Guide to Dissecting Malicious Software

How has the holy trinity not been mentioned?

Incident Response & Computer Forensics, Third Edition

• This one will hit a lot of the beats you're looking for, even though it's a bit old (up to Win7) but still has the majority of things you need to get in there. Learn this book at 50% retention and you'll be better than a good majority of the IR professionals currently billing hours.
  
  Practical Malware Analysis
  
• Less focused on attack to defense relationships but lays the groundwork for a better look into what and why certain things "be how they be"
  
  Art of memory forensics
  
• Rounds it all out a bit with some fresh volatility goodness

Honestly, it's not as hard as it sounds. It's not particularly easy mind you, but with zero previous experience, I had a pretty good grasp on it in 8 weeks, which was how long my course lasted. This was the textbook I used and it does a great job of explaining it, especially if you go through each lab in order. Jumping ahead several labs per week like I had to was a challenge. There's also several videos on youtube that explain exactly what's going on in the labs, based on the solutions manual.

I often perform malware analysis on home machines, and business machines. I've inspected numerous machines where the owner thought they were secure and virus free, only to find they're infected with malware.

Some malware are blatant. Others are not so easy to spot, and are easily missed by AV's. They say most computers are part of a botnet, and I believe this to be true. Most users would never notice though.

A virus uses the same Windows API's (excluded Mac and Linux in this example) as normal non malicious software. Add a packer/obfuscation and even static malware analysis becomes difficult. Malware will never disappear unless they change the architecture of systems. But, even then, attackers would find ways around it.

How many average users know how to inspect Windows Services for malware for example? Windows Services allow an attacker to run as Local System, which is very dangerous and can be used to bypass many security restrictions on Windows machines. The average Joe simply doesn't have a clue and will happily dismiss UAC dialogs so they can install whatever it is they've downloaded.

Anyone interested in learning more about analyzing their machine for malware should check out this book: www.amazon.co.uk/Practical-Malware-Analysis-Hands--Dissecting-ebook/dp/B007ED2XDS/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1451143144&sr=8-4&keywords=malware