Austrian Woman Wins International Female Reverse Engineering Challenge
Vienna (pts022/11.04.2013/13:30) – In April, it was finally time for a graduate of St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences, Marion Marschalek, to win the international competition „Female Reverse Engineering Challenge“ after three months of work.
„Reverse engineering is hardly known to many people – for some it is still a kind of ‚dark art'“, says Thomas Dullien, the organizer of the challenge.
In this special form of analysis, a software program, in this case a malicious program, is carefully examined for its functions with a so-called debugger. In the meantime, reverse engineering has become an indispensable technology for troubleshooting and optimizing program code. Unfortunately, this technology is also used by the dark side: many criminal hackers successfully detect gaps in software programs and then misuse them for their purposes.
Thomas Dullien – internationally known IT security expert
Thomas Dullien or better known as halvar.flacke, it was important to encourage talent with this competition: „The problems in reverse engineering are tricky and we would be stupid if we did not strive for every talent in this field.“
Thomas Dullien inspired the wide range of methods used, each analyst shows a kind of own „handwriting“.
He keeps a continuation of the competition open: „I think about it at the earliest in December – it would be exciting.“
The Challenge
The task was to investigate spy software, presumably of Chinese origin. The malware was by no means easy to analyze and opposed initial investigations in various ways. The challenge was to find these concealment mechanisms and explain the functions of the malware. “Both in terms of technical depth as well as structure and legibility convinced the analysis report of the Austrian Marion Marschalek,” judged the six-member jury.
Marschalek receives for the 1st place, a visit to the international security conference SyScan 2013 in Singapore, which she already looks forward with pleasure.
The Winner in the Portrait
Name , DI Marion Marschalek
Age , 25
Work, IKARUS Malware Analyst – In her job, Marschalek uses her skills to improve the scan results of IKARUS antivirus products.
Education , 2006: Degree HTL for IT in St. Pölten, 2011: Degree University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten for IT- & INformation Security: http://www.fhstp.ac.at/index & Universidad de Guadalajara and Instituto Técnologico de Buenos Aires
Her motivation, the most important points for Marschalek were to try and learn something new, gain experience and further education. “Of course you also want to prove something to yourself.” The whole thing is like a big puzzle, you use existing and newly gained knowledge to put the analysis results step by step into a big picture.
Their biggest challenge, the biggest challenge was never to lose track of the whole project and then present a picture of the malware in the final report in a short and, above all, comprehensible way.
The work of Marion and the interviews of Marion Marschalek and Thomas Dullien can be found here:
http://www.ikarus.at/fileadmin/user_upload/Download/Report_MarionMarschalek.pdf
http://www.ikarus.at/ueber-ikarus/info-center/news/interview-mit-marion-marschalek/
http://www.ikarus.at/ueber-ikarus/info-center/news/interview-mit-dem-veranstalter-der-reverse-engineering-challenge-halvar-flacke/
(End)
Source: IKARUS Security Software GmbH
Contact person: Christiane Steiner
Tel: +43 1 589 95-114
Email: steiner.c@ikarus.at
Website: www.IKARUS.at
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