14 DAY TRIAL // In a rather surprising move, Google has acquired Zynamics, a German company which develops malware analysis and reverse engineering products.
The announcement was made on the Zynamics blog by the company's founder and CEO Thomas Dullien, a renowned security researcher who is better known in the security industry as Halvar Flake.
The researcher has a lengthier post on his personal blog in which he claims that Google's offer came as a complete surprise for him too.
"Zynamics was never designed to be acquired. To be quite honest, zynamics wasn't designed at all -- it mostly just 'happened," Halvar writes.
"We never had a plan outside of "build the tools that we want to have, others will then want to have them too'," he adds.
Zynamics develops several reverse engineering and binary analysis tools such as BinDiff, BinNavi, VxClass, BinCrowd and PDF Dissector.
BinDiff is capable of identifying similarities between executables, VxClass is an automated malware classification tool, while BinCrowd is a platform for managing and sharing reverse engineered information.
It's unclear how Google plans to integrate these niche tools into its products and one might be inclined to think the Mountain View giant was more interested in the zynamics team rather than its products.
Some industry observers note that Google has been hiring a lot of security researchers lately and it already has an impressive security team counting prolific white hat hackers like Michal Zalewski, Tavis Ormandy or Chris Evans.
Halvar said in his blog post that the zynamics team will join Google and this was also confirmed in a statement released by the company.
"We’re delighted to have the zynamics team aboard and hope their tools and skills in fighting malware will help us better protect Google’s users," a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch.
"The zynamics team will continue to develop innovative ways of applying their software analysis tools to protect users from malicious software. Their goals overlap with the commitment that Google has already made to ensure online security for our users," he added.