GREM Passed....93%, details inside

Hi all,

I recently took the GREM exam and wanted to share back a few details as earlier posts were helpful in my studying.

Before I took the course in April, I went through the Practical Malware Analysis book in December and made it through 70% of it. (If you are able to do the all the labs without any assistance, you can definitely pass the exam as its harder than the GREM course)

I took the course this past April live and the instructor, Anuj Soni, was great and it was helpful hearing him apply real world context to the material and the additional hands on with labs and tools was very useful, not just for the exam but for taking the skillset back into the job and actually looking at malware. After the course, I spent the next 3 weeks reviewing all the material and creating my index, it came in at just over 60 pages, broken down by each book, important tools and important API calls.

I took the practice tests and came in at 86% for both but with the real exam, I used more of my time to look questions up I wasnt 100% sure on and came in at 93%. For a while my score check said 97% and I was stoked but unfortunately a few tougher questions took it down a little.

My background prior to the exam is as a threat analyst where I had looked at malware but only behaviorally (running it and recording the actions and pulling out key indicators) with very little experience with code level and assembly analysis. I did pick up Python this past year and although it doesnt interact with memory or registers, understanding key programming structures made it easier to read assembly.

I'm so happy I can stop studying now and am looking forward to doing more static analysis at work and continue to grow this skillset. As a caveat, having the cert definitely doesnt make you a malware analysis wizard but it gives a very strong foundation in many different aspects of malware analysis that you can build upon as well as immediately use.

Cheers!