FLARE VM is the first of its kind reverse engineering and malware analysis distribution on Windows platform. Since its introduction in July 2017 FLARE VM has been continuously trusted and used by many reverse engineers malware analysts and security researchers as their go-to environment for analyzing malware. Just like the ever-evolving security industry FLARE VM has gone through many major changes to better support our users’ needs. FLARE VM now has a new installation upgrade and uninstallation process which is a long anticipated feature requested by our users. FLARE VM also includes many new tools such as IDA 7.0 radare and YARA. Therefore we would like to share these updates especially the new installation process.We strongly recommend you use FLARE VM within a virtualized environment for malware analysis to protect and isolate your physical device and network from malicious activities. We assume you already have experience setting up and configuring your own virtualized environment. Please create a new virtual machine (VM) and perform a fresh installation of Windows. FLARE VM is designed to be installed on Windows 7 Service Pack 1 or newer; therefore you can select a version of windows that best suits your needs. From this point forward all installation steps should be performed within your VM.Once you have a VM with a fresh installation of Windows use one of the following URLs to download the compressed FLARE VM repository onto your VM:Figure 1: Download FLARE VM repoThen use the following steps to install FLARE VM:Figure 2: Start PowerShell as administratorFigure 3: Ready to install FLARE VMThe rest of the installation process is fully automated. Depending upon your internet speed the entire installation may take up to one hour to finish. The VM also reboots multiple times due to the numerous software installations’ requirements. Once the installation completes the PowerShell prompt remains open waiting for you to hit any key before exiting. After completing the installation you will be presented with the following desktop environment:Figure 4: FLARE VM installation completesCongratulations! You have successfully installed FLARE VM. At this point we recommend you power off the VM switch the VM networking mode to Host-Only and then take a snapshot to save a clean state of your analysis VM.The biggest improvement for FLARE VM is the ability to perform a proper update and uninstallation. The older version of FLARE VM came as a PowerShell script to install many chocolatey packages one at a time; therefore we were unable to include new packages when updating FLARE VM. In the past our users had to reinstall FLARE VM completely which is time consuming or manually install the new package which is error prone. To solve this issue we have converted FLARE VM itself into a chocolatey package. Whenever a new tool is available we will also release a new version of FLARE VM. With this new design we can simply execute “choco upgrade all” to get the newest version of FLARE VM along with any new packages we have released. You can also safely uninstall all FLARE VM packages by executing “choco uninstall flarevm.installer.flare”.Our new FLARE VM is also updated to use Python 3.7 as the default Python interpreter. As a result many python scripts may fail to execute. To maintain support for older scripts we keep Python 2.7 installed in parallel with Python 3.7. We can easily switch between different versions by using the Python launcher. Run “py -2.7 <path_to_python_script>” to use Python 2.7 or “py <path_to_python_script>” to use the default Python 3.7 interpreter. For more details on the Python launcher please refer to the following URL: https://docs.python.org/3/using/windows.html#launcher.Additionally the new FLARE VM changes the location where Fakenet-NG saves its output when launched via the shortcut in the FLARE folder or taskbar pin. Instead of saving directly to the desktop to reduce clutter Fakenet-NG will store all its output in “Desktop\fakenet_logs”.Compared to older versions this version of FLARE VM comes with many new tools and software packages. Most notably this release adds the following:While we attempt to make the tools available as shortcuts within the FLARE folder there are several available from command-line only. Please see the online documentation for the most up to date list. Here is an incomplete list of some major tools available on FLARE VM:The FLARE team continues to support and improve FLARE VM to be the de facto distribution for security research incident response and malware analysis on Windows platform. We greatly appreciate the numerous bug reports tool requests and feature recommendations from everyone. We hope FLARE VM along with many other FLARE open source projects can help you do your work better easier and faster.We are always looking for talented folks to join our team. The FLARE Team may be a good place for you if:Please check out our careers page or send us an email. Happy Reversing!