Alexandre Borges is a Security Researcher, who has been daily working on Reverse Engineering and Digital Forensic Analysis for many years. He has taught training courses about Malware and Memory Analysis, Digital Forensics Analysis and Mobile Reversing and Forensics around the world.

Find out more abut Alexandre in the following interview and don’t miss his keynote on “ARM Assembly and Reversing” on November 24 at Cybersecurity Week! Enjoy!

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Hi, Alexandre! Can you introduce yourself in a few words?

My name is Alexandre Borges and I am 47 years old. I’ve been working with Information Security since 1997. At that time, I started working as “pentester” (the name used at that time was “Security Analyst”  and the term “pentester wasn’t used). In 2001 I was hired by Sun Microsystems, where I started learning Solaris internals (kernel), Assembly for SPARC Processors and Solaris Crash Dump Analysis in SPARC systems.

These three topics helped me to “enter” in reverse engineering area. I worked for Sun Microsystems for 10 years and Symantec for other 6 six years, but I kept a “second live” focused in cyber security. At end of 2017 I founded the Blackstorm Security and I’m focusing on reverse engineering (Windows, Android and iOS), malware analysis and digital forensics. Fortunately, I had the honor to speak in several conferences around the world such as DEF CON USA (2018 and 2019), DEF CON CHINA (2019), SANS (2020), HITB Amsterdam (2019), NOHAT (Bergamo/Italy), DC2711 (Johannesburg), Confidence Conference (Krakow) and other ones.

What is a day in the life of a Director and Cyber Security Researcher at Blackstorm Security?

Alexandre Borges: My day life takes place fast because I need to manage the company (business aspects), do research, provide technical help for complex projects, having meetings… I work fifteen hours per day!

What do you think about the future of Cybersecurity/security industry?

Alexandre Borges: Cybersecurity has become the core of the world. Everything is based on it, countries have executed several cyber-operations against valuable targets, malware threat are in everywhere (taking control, stealing data and making money) and people are obliged to have minimal concepts about cyber security to survive and keep their privacy. Nowadays, cyber security is extremely critical for any country, which can suffer devastating attackers like Sandworm operation against Ukraine.

What is Cybersecurity? Describe Cybersecurity in 5 words.

Alexandre Borges: Cybersecurity means knowledge, power, challenge, control and…life.

A superpower I’d love to have…

Alexandre Borges: No doubt, the “master superpower” would be to be able to speak in any language such as French, Chinese, Russian, Italian, Polish and… Romanian! Why? Because our world is based on people and nothing could be more important than understand each other. At the end, the best thing in our life are people.

What about your work-life balance?

Alexandre Borges: Working focused on researching it’s not a work because I breath “cyber security”. Of course, I have a very lovely and harmonious life with my wife, I like watching movies (“The Inside” – 1999 — starring Al Pacino and Russel Crowe is the best film I ever seen) and drive cars.

Please give us a short overview about your keynote at DevCon 2020.

Alexandre Borges: My talk will cover an overview about malware obfuscation. Although most malware threats are used in a well-known obfuscation, there’re some threat deploy sophisticated methods and technics as virtualized packers. Of course, this is an introductory talk because this topic is huge and there’d be too much to explain.

What is your message for the Romanian IT community?

Alexandre Borges: My message is: work really hard, keep studying, learn programming because it is a key-skill for a distinguished cyber security researcher and always believe in yourself.

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