BlackBerry releases free reverse engineering tool to fight cyber attacks
By PLANT STAFF
Industry Electronics Blackberry cyber security malware PE Tree Reverse engineering TechPE Tree reduces the time and effort required to reverse engineer malware
WATERLOO, Ont. — BlackBerry Ltd. has announced it is making available a free open-source tool for cybersecurity professionals, called PE Tree, that it says significantly reduces the time and effort required to reverse engineer malware.
Reverse engineering of malware is an extremely time- and labor-intensive process, which can involve hours of disassembling and sometimes deconstructing a software program. The BlackBerry Research and Intelligence team initially developed this open source tool for internal use and is now making it available to the malware reverse engineering community.
“The cybersecurity threat landscape continues to evolve and cyberattacks are getting more sophisticated with potential to cause greater damage,” said Eric Milam, vice-president of Research Operations, BlackBerry. “As cybercriminals up their game, the cybersecurity community needs new tools in their arsenal to defend and protect organizations and people. We’ve created this solution to help the cybersecurity community in this fight, where there are now more than 1 billion pieces of malware with that number continuing to grow by upwards of 100 million pieces each year.”
PE Tree supports the Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems and it can be installed and run as either a standalone application or a plugin, allowing users to examine any executable Windows file and see what its composition is.
