Attacks and malware
What is Obfuscation?
Deliberately making code, commands or data hard to read or recognise, for example with encoding or junk code, to slow analysis and avoid detection.
Obfuscation is making code, scripts, commands or data deliberately hard to read without changing what they do. Common methods include Base64 or XOR encoding, string splitting, junk code, renamed variables and packing executables.
It slows down analysts and defeats simple signatures. Defenders respond by decoding samples, by detecting the obfuscation itself and by watching what the code does when it runs rather than what it looks like.