European venture capital and private equity firm Smartfin on Tuesday announced a deal to acquire Hex-Rays, the Belgian company behind the widely deployed IDA Pro software disassembler.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released but Smartfin said IDA Pro creator Ilfak Guilfanov joined a consortium of investors putting cash back into the restructured company.

Hex-Rays, based in Liège, Belgium,  was founded in 2005 by Guilfanov with reverse engineering power tool IDA Pro as its flagship product. 

IDA Pro is used by cybersecurity professionals to effectively translate a software’s binary code (consisting of ones and zeros) into a human readable text (an approximation of the software’s actual source code), to reveal and understand its original design, architecture, and logic. 

[ READ: NSA Makes Reverse Engineering Tool Freely Available ]

The company said the main software use cases are IT security audits, internal stress testing, bug bounty programs, investigating new virus samples and validating security concerns.

Following the acquisition, Hex-Rays plans to expand operations and speed up automation and simplification of its software products.

"This partnership is an important milestone and opens new horizons for Hex-Rays,” Guilfanov said in a note announcing the acquisition.

"[This allows] Hex-Rays to further professionalize its organization and accelerate its product innovation efforts, as a means to jointly unlock the numerous international growth paths we have identified so far,” he added.

By Ryan Naraine on Tue, 18 Oct 2022 15:33:19 +0000
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