Announcing the FLARE Team and The FLARE On Challenge

July 7, 2014  By Mike Sikorski
 
I would like to announce the formation of the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering (FLARE) team. As part of FireEye Labs, the focus of this team is to support all of FireEye and Mandiant from a reverse engineering standpoint. Many FireEye groups have reversing engineering needs: Global Services discovers malware during incident response, Managed Defense constantly discovers threats on monitored client networks, and Products benefit from in-depth reversing to help improve detection capabilities.
 
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The Challenge
To commemorate our launch, the FLARE team is hosting a challenge for all reverse engineers and malware analysts. We invite you to compete and test your skills. The challenge runs the gamut of skills we believe are necessary to succeed on the FLARE team. We invite everyone who is interested to solve the challenge and get their just reward!
The puzzles were developed by Richard Wartell, a reverse engineer with a PhD in “IDA Pro” (actually Computer Science, but his thesis used IDA Pro) from the University of Texas at Dallas where he worked on binary rewriting techniques for the x86 instruction set. He recently presented this work at the REcon conference in Montreal. At Mandiant Richard focused on incident response, but now on the FLARE team he reverse engineers malware, teaches malware classes, and helps develop our auto-unpacking technology.
 
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