Static and dynamic analysis

The once-supported Microsoft Script Debugger was replaced by the Microsoft Script Editor and was distributed as part of the MS Office up to the 2007 edition; it was later discontinued:

Figure 4: The interface of the Microsoft script editor

For basic static analysis, a generic text editor supporting syntax highlighting might be good enough. For dynamic analysis, it is highly recommended to use Visual Studio 2017. Even the free community edition provides all the necessary functionality to do this in a very efficient way. Instructions on how to set it up can be found in the following screenshot.

In addition to this, there are multiple third-party IDEs and debuggers available on the market.

Figure 5: Debugging the VBScript file in Visual Studio

While it is relatively straightforward to encode the .vbs file into .vbe using the EncodeScriptFile method provided by the Scripting.Encoder object, there is obviously no native tool to decode the .vbe scripts back to...