I haven't had a chance to write a full review (although I intend to) on the Infosec Reverse Engineering course.  When I do, I'll be sure to post a link here.

I had a chance to take an on-site offering of the course two weeks ago.  I am well versed in assembly and (linux) programming and really needed the course to polish my skills in reverse engineering malware.

The lab manual was so bad that the site rep who contracted the training called Infosec and told them they had to fix it by the second on site offering of the course or we were canceling.  He made sure they agreed that those of us in the first offering would get a copy of the updated manual.

I'd say use them at your own risk.  I don't think this is typical of Infosec.  The POC who brought them in is a CEPT, VERY knowledgeable and had nothing but good things to say about Infosec prior to this course.  Honestly, the self study work I did with the tools in the "Malware Forensics" book did me more good than this class.

For those considering an onsite course offering, get something in writing about the quality of the hardware they are bringing.  They brought laptops with a whopping 1G of ram.  subtract from that video memory and you'll see where this is going.  Because you doing malware, everything has to run in a VM.  You can imaging the speed of IDA (relative memory hog) trying to run on < 1G for host and guest OS.  The exercise where you work with an IRC bot is horrible since now you have to run an IRC server on your host to see the full functionality of the malware.

If you find something good for not a lot of $$, please post it here.  I'm still looking.  If I'd paid my own money for this, I'd be livid.  Not to take anything away from the instructor (who was a contractor for Infosec and REALLY knew his stuff), but the course material was full of errors and worse, omissions.  I can't imaging you'd get anything different from them in an online offering.

The course content is also largely a blow by blow of the "Reversing" book (some examples are verbatim).  Thanks to Infosec, I now own two copies of this book (which isn't bad, but isn't great).  If you don't own one, PM me I'll sell you a copy, cheap.

Why not try the ondemand or selfstudy versions of:


SANS SEC610     Reverse-Engineering Malware: Malware Analysis Tools and Techniques

SANS SEC709     Developing Exploits for Penetration Testers and Security Researchers

Or this years BlacKhat on-site training: Exploit and Metasploit Module Development

and for kicks check out NY Poly’s ISIS Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Analysis course material (videos included) by Dan Guido:

http://cryptocity.net/pentest
http://cryptocity.net/archive/source09/

If some of the reversing and exploit dev stuff is down just email him he's a nice guy =)

I've done the infosec reverse engineering course.  I did the online version and paid my own money for it.

If you see it as an entry level course, then I think it is fine, although the lab manual does leave a little bit to be desired.

I've spoken with the institute and they assure me they're revamping the course significantly as well as improving the exam to include a practical component, bringing it in-line with their other exams (such as the cept)

as it stands though, I'd have to second that buying the Reversing book is a far more economical method of learning reversing.  

I have noticed on their site that there is an advanced reversing course available, specifically looking at malware.  I don't know how that one fares compared to the current one.

edit:  I got the course for half-price as an introductory offer last year, and although it certainly isn't polished, they have been very receptive to feedback I've given. 

Thank you very much Jhaddix for the links from Dan Guido, much appreciated. Only have watched through them shortly but they look like an excellent free resource.