# Malware Bible is a free cybersecurity course library organised like a scripture, and it is deliberately light on tooling documentation > Perkins-Fund/Malware-Bible is a nonprofit collection of free courses in malware analysis, reverse engineering, digital forensics, incident response, secure coding and programming, published by the Perkins Cybersecurity Educational Fund. The curriculum sits in four themed directories with a SUMMARY.md table of contents and a site directory, and the README is a funding and sponsorship page rather than a technical guide. **Perkins-Fund/Malware-Bible** — Free educational courses in cybersecurity, reverse engineering, malware analysis, and programming designed to expand access, build practical skills, and support the next generation of cyber defenders. - Repository: https://github.com/Perkins-Fund/Malware-Bible - Website: https://bible.perkinsfund.org - Stars: 622 · Forks: 92 - Language: Unknown - License: NOASSERTION - Published: 2026-10-22 · Updated: 2026-10-22 · Language: en - Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/perkins-fund-malware-bible ## A course library funded by donations, not a product The Malware Bible is a set of free educational courses in cybersecurity, reverse engineering, malware analysis and programming, published by the Perkins Cybersecurity Educational Fund. The project description states the goal plainly: to expand access, build practical skills, and support the next generation of cyber defenders. What the repository is not is as important as what it is. There is no application, no library and no command line tool. There is no install step, no dependency manifest and no container image in the top level entries. The root holds the course material, a summary file, governance documents and a site directory. The funding model is stated on the front page. The courses are provided for free by the fund, and readers are invited to donate to the Malware Bible Fund or buy the maintainers a coffee. Sponsorship is offered in the same block, with the argument that the courses reach thousands of cybersecurity professionals, researchers, students and teachers worldwide who engage with the material. That framing explains a lot about the repository, including things that might otherwise look like omissions. A volunteer funded, donation supported course library has different priorities from a product: breadth of teaching material, accessibility, and not locking content behind a paywall. It also explains the absence of versioned releases, of a changelog and of a support commitment. The site is at bible.perkinsfund.org, and the top level directory named the-malware-bible/ appears to be where the published site lives. ## Four themed course directories and a SUMMARY.md that acts as the table of contents The curriculum is organised into four directories whose names are drawn from a religious and occult vocabulary: The Beginning, The Journey, The Rituals and The Scriptures. The naming is a deliberate editorial choice, and the README leans into it. The opening line calls the project The Indoctrination, describes the material as a sacred text created to guide you on your journey into cybersecurity, and frames the courses as sacred texts forged to bestow forbidden knowledge. There is a quoted line about conquering an enemy by walking in the shadow of their thoughts. For a reader, the practical question is whether the metaphor helps or hurts. A thematic naming scheme can make a large body of material easier to navigate by giving each stage a place in a narrative, and it is memorable. It is also the kind of framing that some learners find theatrical, and it makes the repository harder to search for a specific topic, because a directory called The Rituals tells you nothing about which skills it covers. SUMMARY.md is the file that solves that problem, and it is the one entry in the root that a newcomer should open first. It is a table of contents for the whole library, so it is where you find out which course lives in which themed directory. The remaining root entries are the standard governance set for an open project: CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md, CONTRIBUTING.md and a LICENSE file. The topics listed for the repository give a better sense of the actual curriculum than the directory names do, covering cybersecurity education, digital forensics, incident response, malware analysis basics, malware detection, malware research, programming fundamentals, reverse engineering, secure coding practices, threat intelligence and digital public good style community topics. ## What the documentation does not tell you The honest limitation of this repository is that the README is a landing page. It describes the mission, the funding and the sponsorship options, and it says nothing about the content itself. What it does not do is worth listing precisely, because each omission is something a prospective user will look for. It does not list the individual courses. There is no course catalogue in the visible documentation, no prerequisites, no duration, no difficulty levels and no statement of which tools each course assumes. The SUMMARY.md file is the place where that information would live, and the README does not summarise it. It does not describe an environment. There is no lab setup, no virtual machine image, no malware sample handling guidance, and no indication of whether the exercises expect you to supply your own samples. For a subject where the practical exercises usually involve running or reversing real samples, that is a significant omission, and the sort of question that belongs in a course introduction rather than a funding page. It does not discuss safety. Static analysis practice generally involves samples that defenders are supposed to treat as dangerous, and a course library that does not say anything about handling them, isolating them, or the legal status of working with them, leaves a gap that a careful reader has to fill from elsewhere. It also does not state a support model, a release cadence or a maintenance commitment. The repository has no GitHub releases, and the last push was on 2026-08-22, so the material is being worked on, but the documentation makes no promise about how often. None of this means the material is bad. It means the front page is a donation appeal with a curriculum attached, and anyone evaluating it for adoption has to go and open SUMMARY.md and a course directory to do the actual evaluation. ## Learning from samples directly, versus a structured curriculum It is worth setting this project against the other ways people learn this material, because the trade is not really about content quality. The first alternative is self teaching from samples and blog posts. It is free, immediately available, and it teaches you the actual shape of the field, because a real sample in a disassembler tells you things no course author can. What it does not give you is a sequence, and the sequence is the point. Most people who try this learn one area deeply, usually the one they already knew something about, and never find out which adjacent skills they are missing. The second alternative is a paid professional course. That buys you a curriculum, but you pay for it, and the material is tied to one provider's view of the field and their refresh cycle. The Malware Bible sits between the two. It is a structured sequence of free material funded by donations and sponsorship, which means the cost constraint is real: whoever writes the courses is doing it because they support the mission, and a sponsor's logo buys reach rather than a seat in the curriculum. For a learner, that is an attractive combination. For a team, it means the material has no vendor behind it, so nobody is contractually obliged to keep it current. The comparison that matters for an organisation is therefore about who carries the maintenance risk. If you teach from this material, you are the one who has to notice when a technique has aged and update it yourself, or supplement it with something you buy. ## The licence is the one thing to read before you copy anything The licence field on the repository is left unclassified, which is what GitHub reports for a licence it cannot categorise, and the repository carries a LICENSE file at the root. For an educational resource this matters less than it would for a library, but it still matters, because the usual uses of a course library are exactly the uses that involve redistribution or embedding. A team that wants to put a chapter into an internal onboarding programme, a nonprofit that wants to translate a course, or a training provider who wants to reuse the exercises are all doing things that a permissive licence permits and a restrictive one does not. The project is a nonprofit, and nonprofit educational material often comes with terms that are friendlier to the mission than to commercial reuse. The right move is to read the LICENSE file and, if the terms are ambiguous for your use, ask the maintainers. The fund publishes contact details on its site for exactly that kind of question, and the sponsorship and contact links in the README are the route to it. Nothing in the visible documentation states a licence by name, and this review cannot tell you what it permits. The Copyright file at the root and the LICENSE file are the two places to look. ## How to actually work through it Since there is no installation to describe, the useful first use is a reading order rather than a command, and the repository layout makes that order fairly obvious. Start with SUMMARY.md. It is the index of the whole library, and it is the fastest way to answer the two questions the README does not: which courses exist, and how they are ordered. From there, pick one course and read it end to end before starting another, because the directory structure implies a progression through the four stages. The Beginning is where a new reader starts, The Journey is the body of the material, The Rituals and The Scriptures are the later stages, and the exact allocation of topics across them is what SUMMARY.md is for. The course names in the path listing show that the curriculum is broken into individual, numbered documents rather than a handful of long files, which is the format you want if you are going to study a topic in one sitting or assign one chapter to a team member. Two supporting files matter for anyone contributing rather than only reading. CONTRIBUTING.md covers the mechanics of adding a course or fixing an error, and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md sets the expectations for the community. The .github/ directory holds the workflow configuration and the project image that appears in the README. The documentation also points to a general entry point for the organisation at perkinsfund.org, and the Gitpod badge in the README indicates that the repository can be opened in a browser based development environment, which is convenient for a course reader who wants to try code samples without setting up a local toolchain. ## Conclusion Use Malware-Bible if you want free, self paced material on malware analysis, reverse engineering and secure coding and you are comfortable working through a curriculum on your own. Do not expect a tool, a lab environment or a supported training programme, because this repository is a course library and its documentation does not describe an installable environment. Before you commit a team to it, read SUMMARY.md and one full course directory to judge the depth and currency of the material, check the licence file yourself because the licence is not one GitHub can classify, and confirm that the last push on 2026-08-22 is recent enough for the topics you intend to teach. ## FAQ ### What is the Malware Bible? It is a free collection of educational courses in cybersecurity, reverse engineering, malware analysis, digital forensics, incident response, secure coding and programming, published by the Perkins Cybersecurity Educational Fund. It is a course library rather than a tool, with no installable component. ### How is the Malware Bible curriculum organised? The courses sit in four themed directories, The Beginning, The Journey, The Rituals and The Scriptures, with SUMMARY.md acting as the table of contents for the whole library and individual courses broken into numbered documents. ### How is the Malware Bible funded? The courses are free, and the fund asks for donations through a donation page or a coffee, and offers sponsorship to organisations that want their brand featured in future courses. The stated reach is thousands of cybersecurity professionals, researchers, students and teachers. ### What licence does the Malware Bible use? The licence field is left unclassified, which is the marker GitHub uses for a licence it cannot categorise, and the repository carries a LICENSE file and a COPYRIGHT file at the root. Read those before copying or redistributing any course material. ### Does the Malware Bible document a lab environment or malware samples? The visible documentation does not. The README is a funding and sponsorship page and says nothing about lab setup, virtual machines, sample handling or the tools the exercises expect, so the practical instructions have to be found inside the individual course directories. ### Is the Malware Bible still being worked on? The repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-08-22, with no GitHub releases and no maintenance commitment stated in the documentation. ## Sources - [Issues](https://github.com/Perkins-Fund/Malware-Bible/issues) - [Perkins-Fund/Malware-Bible on GitHub](https://github.com/Perkins-Fund/Malware-Bible) - [Project website](https://bible.perkinsfund.org) - [README](https://github.com/Perkins-Fund/Malware-Bible/blob/main/README.md) --- Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/perkins-fund-malware-bible