I’ve been extremely happy over the last several days when I discovered that the FAR Manager, one of the tools that we use quite a lot in Avert Labs, has recently been released as open source under a BSD license. What is exactly FAR? Well, FAR is an advanced file manager that is heavily customizable and extensible.

Such a tool is very effective when dealing with malware, and through customization it is possible to turn FAR into a sort of “command center” for malware analysis. For example, you can tell FAR to associate a disassembler like IDA to executable files, so that whenever you select one, the disassembler will be fed such file, as well as telling FAR to use Wordpad to display the contents of text documents.

Of course, its set of capabilities is far bigger, and it is not the purpose of this post to document such a complex program in detail; instead, we want to express our interest in this initiative.

Keep up the good work guys!