Malware is malicious software that can destroy computer systems, steal information from businesses, governments or private citizens.  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 expertise and knowledge in this area.

On the 1st & 2nd October, ICSL hosted a very successful Malware Reverse Engineering Conference (MRE) 2015 in Melbourne.

This year's plenary speakers were Professor Arun Lakhotia, Centre for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Louisiana, USA whose talks were titled "Attacking and Defending Computer Programs" (Day one) and "Harnessing Intelligence from Malware Repositories" (Day two) and Dr Mike Davies, Research Leader Cyber Assurance and Operations, Degence Science and Technology Group (DST Group) whose talk was titled "Combatting Anti-Reverse Engineering Techniques".

Day one was targeted at Cybersecurity and Academia and Day two was targeted at Cybersecurity and Industry, with presentations from the plenary speakers and industry representatives including Dell SecureWorks, GE Capital, Trend Micro, Mandiant FireEye, Qualys, CERT Australia and the Commonwealth Bank.

Sponsorship was provided by NICTA and the Defence Sciences Institute, Mandian FireEye and Enex Testlab.

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

The MRE 2015 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 and companies, academia and students attending.

Following on from the success of this year's event, planning has commenced for a combined Malware Reverse Engineering and Cybercrime and Trustworthy Computing (CTC) Conference will be held on 4-7 July 2016 in Melbourne.