Malware is malicious software that can destroy computer systems, steal information from businesses, governments or the community.  The impact of malware can be catastrophic in both practical and monetary terms.

Since 2012, the Internet Commerce Security Laboratory (ICSL) at Federation University Australia has been holding the Malware Reverse Engineering Conferences to bring together a range of stakeholders with exertise and knowledge in this area to share experiences and mitigation strategies.

On 11 & 12 July 2016 ICSL hosted a very successful Malware Reverse Engineering Conference (MRE-2016) in Melbourne with over 50 people attending each day. This year's plenary speakers were Daniel Plohmann, Senior Analyste, FRaunhofer Institute for Communication Information Processing and Ergonomics (FKIE), Germany with topic "The 3 Ghosts of Malware Reversing" and Alex Tilley, Senior Security Researcher, Counter Threat Unit, Dell Secure Works, whose topic was "The new cool, why reverse engineering is so in demand.

The two-day conference was targeted at cyber-security and industry practitioners with presentations from the two plenary speakers and industry representatives including Dell SecureWorks, NBN, Dept of Defence, Australian Federal Police, PwC, DST Group, Trend Micro, Mandiant FireEye, ANZ, Telstra, Phishlabs, Symantec, BAE Systems, Monash University, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, Quualys, CERT Australia, Cosive, Crypto Photo, and Deakin University.

ICSL Director, Associate Professor Iqbal Gondal, reported "the MRE Conference presents a great platform for discussions among academia and industry to transform creative research into innovative, actionable solutions for industry.

The MRE-2016 provides a bridge between a diverse range of industries, government agencies, law enforcement, and academia with a strong focus on exploring and sharing the practical results from research and the latest developments and projects in malware reversing and it was great to see participants from banking and finance, defence, security agencies, IT consultants, telecommunications, academia and other companies attending.

Following the two days in Melbourne, Daniel Plohmann, (FKIE) visited the Mt Helen Campus on 13 July 2016 to provide a workshop and seminar titled "Using Reverse Engineering to Explore the Landscape of Domain Generation Algorithms".

This year's participants are already looking forward to the next MRE conference in 2017.