BlackBerry Releases Free Reverse Engineering Tool to Help Fight Cybersecurity Attacks

WATERLOO, Ont. – August 3, 2020 – Black Hat USA 2020 - BlackBerry Limited (NYSE: BB; TSX:BB) today announced it is making available a free open-source tool for cybersecurity professionals, called PE Tree that significantly reduces the time and effort required to reverse engineer malware. Today’s announcement demonstrates BlackBerry’s continued commitment to the cybersecurity community in the fight against constantly evolving cyber threats.

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.”

The PE Tree enables reverse engineers to view Portable Executable (PE) files in a tree-view using pefile and PyQt5, thereby lowering the bar for dumping and reconstructing malware from memory while providing an open-source PE viewer code-base that the community can build upon. The tool also integrates with Hex-Rays’ IDA Pro decompiler to allow for easy navigation of PE structures, as well as dumping in-memory PE files and performing import reconstruction; critical in the fight to identify and stop various strains of malware. PE Tree was developed in Python and supports the Windows®, Linux®, and Mac® operating systems. It can be installed and run as either a standalone application or an IDAPython plugin, allowing users to examine any executable Windows file and see what its composition is.

Also this week at Black Hat USA 2020, Kevin Livelli, BlackBerry’s Director of Threat Intelligence will be presenting on Decade of the RATs on August 5 at 11-11:40 am PT. BlackBerry will also be presenting a sponsored webinar about its partnership with Intel to stop cryptojacking malware, and drill down into BlackBerry® Optics AI-based EDR technology for Linux.

To learn more about the PE Tree, please visit https://blogs.blackberry.com/en/2020/08/blackberry-open-source-pe-tree-tool-for-malware-reverse-engineers.

About BlackBerry

BlackBerry (NYSE: BB; TSX: BB) provides intelligent security software and services to enterprises and governments around the world. The company secures more than 500M endpoints including over 175M cars on the road today.  Based in Waterloo, Ontario, the company leverages AI and machine learning to deliver innovative solutions in the areas of cybersecurity, safety and data privacy solutions, and is a leader in the areas of endpoint security management, encryption, and embedded systems. BlackBerry’s vision is clear - to secure a connected future you can trust.

BlackBerry. Intelligent Security. Everywhere. 

For more information, visit BlackBerry.com and follow @BlackBerry.

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About Black Hat

For more than 20 years, Black Hat has provided attendees with the very latest in information security research, development, and trends. These high-profile global events and trainings are driven by the needs of the security community, striving to bring together the best minds in the industry. Black Hat inspires professionals at all career levels, encouraging growth and collaboration among academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the public and private sectors. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held annually in the United States, Europe and Asia. More information is available at: blackhat.com. Black Hat is organized by UBM, which in June 2018 combined with Informa PLC to become a leading B2B information services group and the largest B2B Events organizer in the world.

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