This summer FireEye put out a series of seven reverse engineering challenges called the Flare On Challenge. The challenges all have a malware theme to them as it was presumably an avenue of recruiting for the team. A friend brought Flare On to my attention so I decided to register and give it a go once it went live. I played when I could find some free time outside my internship and ended up squeezing onto the honor roll, finishing in ~2.5 days.
A lot of people choked on level six in the series and looking at the released statistics, ~42% of the people that made it to level six did not solve it. The biggest drop rate for any of the Flare On levels. There have been two or three eager write-ups released for level six so far, but the methods I've seen involved tedious amounts of stepping through the spaghetti monster or a lot of deobfuscation + reversing. I did it pretty differently and figured some of the late solvers might appreciate how myself (and probably a few others) cut through this challenge so quickly.
more here...............http://gaasedelen.blogspot.com/2014/09/solving-fireeyes-flare-on-six-via-side.html
A lot of people choked on level six in the series and looking at the released statistics, ~42% of the people that made it to level six did not solve it. The biggest drop rate for any of the Flare On levels. There have been two or three eager write-ups released for level six so far, but the methods I've seen involved tedious amounts of stepping through the spaghetti monster or a lot of deobfuscation + reversing. I did it pretty differently and figured some of the late solvers might appreciate how myself (and probably a few others) cut through this challenge so quickly.
more here...............http://gaasedelen.blogspot.com/2014/09/solving-fireeyes-flare-on-six-via-side.html