Lenny Zeltser develops teams, products, and programs that use information security to achieve business results. He is presently the CISO at Axonius and an author and instructor at SANS Institute. Over the past two decades, Lenny has been leading efforts to establish resilient security practices and solve hard security problems. As a respected author and speaker, he has been advancing cybersecurity tradecraft and contributing to the community. His insights build upon 20 years of real-world experiences, a Computer Science degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA degree from MIT Sloan.

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This cheat sheet outlines tips and tools for analyzing malicious documents, such as Microsoft Office, RTF and Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files. To print it, use the one-page PDF version; you can also edit the Word version to customize it for you own needs.

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The SANS malware analysis course I’ve co-authored explains the techniques summarized in this cheat sheet and covers many other reverse-engineering topics.

If you like this reference, take a look at my other IT and security cheat sheets.