Why Reverse Engineers Must Read Assembly
- Malware ships as compiled binaries. There is no source code.
- The only ground truth is what the CPU actually executes: machine code.
- Disassemblers (Ghidra, IDA) turn bytes back into assembly you can read.
- Decompilers help, but they guess. Assembly does not lie.
- Packers, obfuscation, and anti-analysis tricks live at the asm level.
Key Takeaway
If you can read x86-64 assembly, you can understand any Windows or Linux malware sample, regardless of the language it was written in.