Apprehending malware red-handed is a very exhilarating feeling for an analyst. Debugging technology provides a wealth of information about a malware's inner construction and layout, and, most importantly, its modus operandi. You can take the metaphor of an ultra-high-speed camera used to capture a slow motion video of a moving bullet that plots its trajectory as a projectile, which hits its intended target and the effects thereof, and compare that with a debugger used to capture the execution trace of a malware instruction by instruction. Things are seldom that simply extrapolated, and hence you could also compare an analysis session as a criminal interrogation (analyst/debugger/target sample) in a Spook black-site (sandbox) where you have the liberty to extract information in any manner you want, while dealing with the myriad obfuscations, retaliations, and unwillingness of the participant.

The primary methodologies in malware analysis are static and...