MRE 2026
Malware and Reverse Engineering Conference 2026
Reverse engineers and malware researchers enjoyed high-quality speakers and networking at MRE 2024, and we are now preparing MRE 2026, which will be held on Thursday and Friday, the 26th and 27th of February, 2026 as a part of our BSides Ballarat event.
MRE-2026 is a bridge between industry, government and academia, with a strong focus on practical results from research and development projects in reverse engineering and malware research.
The conference aims to cover:
- AI security,
- Automated cyber operations,
- Reverse engineering and compiled program analysis,
- Behavioral and attribution analysis of malware,
- Incident response,
- Impacts into critical infrastructure,
- Threat intelligence.
Venue
Emerging Technologies Hub (ETH),SMB Technology Park
107 Lydiard St South,
Central Ballarat.
Registration
Tickets for MRE 2026 are available from Eventbrite.
Keynote Speakers
| Name | Organisation | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Richa Arora | IBM | AI Security & Autonomous Threat Operations |
| Richard Grainger | Triskele Labs | Responding to Ransomware in Australia - Are Threat Actors as Sophisticated as They are Made Out To Be? |
| Mayur Kriplani | Grounding the Unknown: Neurosymbolic Approaches to Zero-Day and Polymorphic Malware Analysis | |
| Thomas Roccia | Microsoft | The State of Malware Analysis: How to Stay Relevant in the AI Era |
Speakers
Some of the presentation titles shown below are works in progress and will change slightly as the presentation is developed.
| Name | Organisation | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Chathura Abe | CYNQ | Threat Informed Assurance for Critical Infrastructure |
| Neda Afzali | Victoria University | Reducing SOC Analyst Workload Through AI-Based Narrative Intelligence |
| Riyaz Ahamed | University of Malaya | When Malware Crashes the DevOps Party |
| Raashid Bhat | Independent Security Professional | Malware Binary Detection: From Trace to Similarity |
| Gyle dela Cruz | Mind Games: Crafting Convincing Online Personas Using Psychological Principles for Cyber Deception | |
| Smita Jhajharia Ajat Sharma | RMIT Check Point, Australia | Cybersecurity & the Offensive Misuse of AI |
| Sanam Makadia | Datacom | Critical Infrastructure Security - Protecting the Backbone of Modern Society |
| Paul McCarty | OpenSourceMalware | From Npm to VSCode: Reversing Engineering DPRK's Contagious Interview Campaign |
| Andrew McDonnell | Independent Cybersecurity Contractor | CVE waste? Come on a journey about finding and reporting exploits that nobody cares about |
| Jonathan Oliver | Carbon Black / Broadcom | Working With Fileless Malware at Scale |
| Noushin Shabab | Kaspersky | HoneyMyte's new attacks targeting Asia, Africa, and Australia |
| Sam Tseitkin | ExeQuantum | Quantum Computers are Coming, are you Ready? |
| Rue Maharaj | Melbourne Water | Silence of the LANs |
| Martijn van Praag | Microsoft / ICSL | Automatic Deobfuscation of a Complex Malware |
| Wei Shao | Data61 | Adaptive Cyber Attacks in the Era of AI: Lessons from Adversarial Reinforcement Learning in SDN |
| Abhay Vaish | Palo Alto Networks | Using AI to make Cyber Threat Intelligence Work |
