Latasha Friend
Latasha Friend is a cybersecurity consultant at Integrity 360, where she serves as technical lead of the incident response team. Having begun her career in penetration testing, she transitioned into incident response driven by a passion for digital forensics and active threat management.
Malware analysis quickly stood out as a fascinating and essential piece of the incident response puzzle. Since then, she has been building her knowledge in this space, driven by a genuine curiosity about how malware works and a desire to turn that understanding into faster, sharper triage decisions. As a certified incident responder working directly in client environments, Latasha sees firsthand how critical it is to quickly make sense of a threat before it does real damage.
The excitement of untangling complex problems is what drew her to this topic and what this talk is built around.
Session
Malware analysis can often feel out of reach for newer analysts, particularly when discussions move into reverse engineering and assembly. In practice, however, the earliest stages of analysis frequently provide enough information to form an initial understanding of a sample.
This talk introduces a structured “first 10 minutes” malware triage workflow, covering hashes, reputation analysis, strings extraction, and sandbox detonation. The focus is on efficiently identifying behavioural indicators and building a coherent analytical narrative from early observations, rather than immediately relying on deep reverse engineering.
Attendees will leave with a repeatable and practical approach to early-stage malware analysis that supports incident response workflows, strengthens analytical confidence, and improves the ability to quickly translate unknown samples into meaningful, actionable insight.