IDA cybersecurity software provider Hex-Rays acquired

[pseudo0]

Hopefully this works out for Hex-Rays, allowing them to invest more into developing IDA and expanding their low-cost product offerings. The general sentiment I have seen among people doing SRE is that IDA is rapidly losing market share to Ghidra. While it excels in some areas, the licenses are pricy even for tech employers, and entirely out of reach for students or colleges. It's hard to convince an employer to fork out cash for IDA licenses when new employees are asking to use Ghidra, because that's what they use at home and at school.

[Test0129]

I am not going to hold my breath on extending their hobbyist offerings.

I own a copy of IDA (legally). It was an absolute pain to purchase and it seems that a large portion of their margins are dedicated to piracy control. I won't detail the process...but it seems unusually personal.

If I had to guess they will expand their decompilers (the actual flagship project). It will be years before Ghidra + a community catch up to them and Binary Ninja (I also own a copy of it) may never. The disassembler is just a familiar tool. Their decompilers are way, way far ahead.

[dwheeler]

> The general sentiment I have seen among people doing SRE is that IDA is rapidly losing market share to Ghidra. While it excels in some areas, the licenses are pricy even for tech employers, and entirely out of reach for students or colleges. It's hard to convince an employer to fork out cash for IDA licenses when new employees are asking to use Ghidra, because that's what they use at home and at school.

I don't have formal data, but in my narrow slice of the world that's what I'm seeing as well.

IDA's price is so high that it's easy to justify using Ghidra instead. Heck, if Ghidra does something less well, it might be cheaper to pay to improve Ghidra (and then you can use those improvements forever). I encourage organizations who are thinking of using Ghidra to contribute back to it; if those improvements get integrated back in, then those improvements will continue into the future along with other improvements.

[rjzzleep]

For me I got the Company I was contracting for to buy me an IDA license and as I was trying to take over from there Hexrays never responded to any requests.

I'm guessing that I'm on the same pirate blacklist that a lot of people landed. I guess I should have expensed it instead of having the Company buy it. I was the only person doing RE work, it was a single user person license and I was also the only linux user out of that 300 people org.

I think there are a lot of people that would like to pay for IDA but can't get it.

On the other hand I really don't like the Ghidra user experience.

Is there something similar to FLIRT in r2 or ghidra?

[crote]

There have been acquired by a venture capital investor, and the press release mainly focuses on their rapid growth and "extraordinary margins".

I think it is safe to assume that offering cheaper products will be the last thing they are going to do.

[maldev]

There's also competitors like Binary Ninja. Ida is best at Mac/ios and Windows by far though, so it's still used in those spaces alot. But for embeded, linux and whatever else, Ghidra/Binja are good enough that employers literally won't buy it anymore and are refusing it to senior engineers and telling them to use something else.

[batch12]

I have forced myself to move to other tools like Ghidra, x32dbg, ollydbg, etc. I haven't settled yet on a perfect workflow, but I have found that most of my needs are met without having to launch IDA nowadays.

[stolen_biscuit]

Does anyone know what impact if any the release of Ghidra had on Hex-Rays?

IDA never really accommodated to the hobbyist, so I wonder did it have any impact on the commercial side of things apart from the IDA Home release?

[mike_d]

Very little. Everyone who was passing around pirated copies of IDA continued to do so before and after the release of Ghidra. More than anything I think binary.ninja started to eat their lunch because it was a far superior experience and up front reasonable pricing.

Hex-Rays did ultimately release IDA Home, but you have to sign up for an account to even find out what their hobbyist license costs.

I cannot underscore how much Hex Rays never wanted to have customers or sell products. Maybe this restructuring will fix that?

[yakkityyak]

I ended up buying Binary Ninja for hobbyist projects instead. Worked great for doing a bit of Gameboy Advance rom hacking.

IDA Pro for ARM w/ a decompiler is the cost of a used car.

[super256]

> Does anyone know what impact if any the release of Ghidra had on Hex-Rays?

They added an undo button to IDA.

[Beached]

in my world of embedded reverse engineering, very few people use ghidra for their daily work. we use ida or binja or vivisect. we all know how to use it more or less at a hobbiest level, we even teach it at cons and trainings because it's free and people have heard of it.

but for reeeeaaal work, that needs to be done by the deadline, it rarely gets considered.

[fragmede]

They accommodated them by it not being too hard to crack using itself, which must have had a commercial impact.

[Thaxll]

Not sure why Hex-Rays spends so much time fighting piracy and making the purchase a very complicated process, it's a lost battle, there will always be pirated copy of IDA, stop fighting it and embrace it to make a better offering.

[luma]

It seems like a completely senseless waste of their efforts, given the nature of the product they are selling and the user community who knows how to use such a thing.

[kurisufag]

For reference, I downloaded a cracked copy off TPB (or some such place) when I was in high school for reversing video games, and I've never seen a legitimate reason to upgrade or get a real license.

It's really a testament to the robustness of the software.

[IYasha]

I've heard rumors of Ilfack's level of anality being legendary, but seeing so many confirmations!..

[rychco]

This makes me hopeful that users will switch to Binary Ninja. I picked up Binja a while ago (because it’s actually affordable for an individual) & haven’t felt any need to return to IDA. There’s also Rizin which seems pretty robust from what I’ve seen (haven’t tried it myself), & of course there’s also Ghidra. IDA isn’t the only effective disassembler in town anymore.

[Beached]

I see people going to binja in waves. not only is it easier to acquire, but it's freaking good and intuitive to use.

they cater to the hobbiest market to, with a free version that will honestly work for soooo many things. I don't understand why people use ghidra honestly. but hey, nsa has some good pr people

[arsome]

Did they ever fix the debugger situation in Binja? Looks like it's still in beta.

I really hated using Ghidra and Binja compared to IDA as I'm a bit reliant on dynamic RE for some purposes, while IDA is able to bridge the gap between static and dynamic without the need to break out x64dbg or similar.

[throwaway24424]

I personally gave up on this product a long time ago. The only way I see this panning out is via extremely aggressive enterprise sales schemes and a further reduction of hobbyist accessibility. Good riddance from the hobbyist perspective...

[willk]

I hope this doesn't lead to stagnation in the product with ever increasing licensing costs. IDA is expensive enough as it is.

[ylk]

More details here, but the article is in Dutch: https://archive.ph/Abxqp

[tux3]

Quoting from the translation:

""" With the new shareholders on board, Hex-Rays must evolve from an engineering company to a commercial company. “After the takeover, we want to structure the company, develop a commercial team and a management team and continue internationalization,” say Ingels and Luyten.

The intention is to transform the current commercial model of perpetual licenses into a recurring model. In the first model, customers pay a large amount at the start and then annually for updates and maintenance. The other includes an annual payment for the license and all associated services.

Hex-Rays' next growth phase will be led by a new CEO, who will take over from Guilfanov. He will eventually become chief technology officer (CTO) of the Liège company and chairman of the board of directors. """

[genmud]

I was a heavy ida pro user from 2008-2012. I have probably been responsible for or directly approved giving them 35-40k at different places over the years.

I wanted to do some pic disassembly a while back and out of curiosity asked if they had a low cost personal license for non commercial use and basically got told to pound sand. They said the price for the full version was what it was, no discounts. Then they came out with their ‘home’ edition which is an insult at $365 per architecture and not all architectures are available.

I don’t care how much better it is than open source stuff, until they have a full featured personal version and lower their price, they won’t be getting a dime of my (or my companies) money. It isn’t 2008 anymore.

[tptacek]

This seems like "acquired" in a different sense than we normally mean; it's more like an announcement of an investment round than an acquisition, right?

[WirelessGigabit]

He sold majority share to an investment group. So every button will now become an in-app purchase. Function decompilations will cost in-app currencies.

And today they’re offering the pro-pack. 10,000 decomp units for $1,200 bucks. Of course now they can devalue the value of a unit at will.

[brokenmachine]

Can one of the experts commenting here let me know a good process to get started with learning to decompile/reverse engineer/modify Windows programs?

Is it worth doing any of those online ctf thingys? Any recommended resources or books I should check out?

[WirelessGigabit]

What’s the current best tool to reverse engineer C++ exe’s? I want to reverse engineer an old game!

[jnk345u8dfg9hjk]

I think you're looking at it in this thread

[Demonsult]

https://github.com/radareorg/iaito