NSA tool released, be aware though it opens a port which ideally need closing.

At the RSA security conference today, the National Security Agency, released Ghidra, a free software reverse engineering tool that the agency had been using internally for well over a decade.

The tool is ideal for software engineers, but will be especially useful for malware analysts first and foremost.

The NSA's general plan was to release Ghidra so security researchers can get used to working with it before applying for positions at the NSA or other government intelligence agencies with which the NSA has previously shared Ghidra in private.

Ghidra is currently available for download only through its official website, but the NSA also plans to release its source code under an open source license on GitHub in the coming future.

News that the NSA was going to release Ghidra first broke at the start of the year, and the tool has been on everybody's mind for the past two months.

The reason is that Ghidra is a free alternative to IDA Pro, a similar reverse engineering tool that's only available under a very expensive commercial license, priced in the range of thousands of US dollars per year.

Being offered for free, most experts expect Ghidra to snap up a big portion of the reverse engineering tools market share within weeks, especially since early user reviews are almost all entirely positive.