Getting ready for Flare-On Challenge
Next Friday, September 1st the Flare-On challenge will start for the fourth time and after a few months off reversing I’ve decided to get back on track and try to catch up with some of the latest trends.
I was not fully aware of this contest but it was a good sync and it gives me an opportunity to try the FlareVM tools published by Peter Kacherginsky a few weeks ago.
If you’d like to participate I’d recommend you to take a sneak peak to the website and play around with challenges from other editions. I’ll be playing around a little with those, but for getting ready I’m testing the Flare-VM and the pack of tools available on it.
What I liked about the script is how easy it makes it for having all the tools installed on an analysis VM, it’s pretty easy to install following the notes or with the guide you can find here. You can take a sneak peak in the Git repo too if you’d feel you can find more usages for this script, I’ve installed it in a Windows 10 machine with only a few try/runs.

By default the packages that are being install comes with a lot of handy tools I’m used to need while reversing malware but quite a few I’ve never touched. As an addition to the default arsenal that this tool brings into place I’ve also included my IDA x64 as I feel more confortable with it and planning on getting use to this setting in the long run.
I’ll try to keep posting about the past challenges and the new ones (once the competition is over) to get back on track on my reversing duties after a few months off with other topics.
