Are there any “start here” guides for beginning reversing? Like a break it down Barney style? I’ve done some self study and shadowing teams at work but I need to fill in the gaps. Thanks!
Go to The Netherlands, go to Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Follow a course called "Binary and Malware Analysis" (if it's still called that). It's from the VUSec group. Follow: Hardware Security, Systems Security and Kernel Programming while you're at it ;-)
These were the hardest courses of my life.
That's all I know, I wish I had an easier answer. I happen to have lived there at the time. I was lucky in that regard for accidentally finding that course.
I can share what worked for me, although I am by no means a pro
I found the book "Reverse Engineering for beginners" quite useful. Its a bit tedious but if your serious about it and go through it a bit it'll give you some solid practice.
Also, write, compile, and reverse own snippets of your code to get more intuition about how things work.
Finally work on a actual target, not something crazy like Photoshop or Word but at least something real to get the practical experience. It might be a bit of a grind but when you do manage to crack/hack whatever it is your trying on, its an euphoric feeling
I learned by jumping head first into a program that used blowfish encryption to calculate a license and etc. the company was gone so this was the only option.
There is definitely a “clicks” moment. It took me three weeks from zero to key generator. Absolutely time worth spending.
As you can see in the other replies, there are many paths that lead to reverse engineering, but I feel like the best way to make the concepts stick is to have "reverse engineer X" be a problem standing in your way (where X is a piece of software, a protocol, etc.)
When you have that problem and you need to solve it, you have a target to throw all the "darts" those tutorials give you, and this will probably be more effective than just reading the material and hoping you'll use some of it in the future.
In my experience, you can learn reversing in an empirical fashion. Download Ghidra or IDA pro, and get cracking. Google every question you may have as you place breakpoints and modify control flow.
Or atleast that's how I got started as a midschooler with infinite time. Also try playing around with Cheat Engine. Don't let it's name fool you, it's a very advanced debugger that's capable to do way more than make you a bullet sponge :)
