Victor Alvarez
Staff Software Engineer at VirusTotal
Bilbao, Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolVictor Alvarez is a Staff Software Engineer and antivirus researcher with 17 years of experience in reverse engineering, low-level programming, and malware analysis, currently driving security engineering at VirusTotal. He brings deep knowledge of OS internals and Intel processor architecture, having built file system filter drivers and designed antivirus components early in his career. At VirusTotal he contributed core functionality to widely used open-source projects like YARA and vt-py, fixing security vulnerabilities and improving pattern-matching and Python client APIs. His work blends backend systems design with hands-on vulnerability mitigation—refactoring Aho-Corasick automata and preventing buffer overruns in real-world modules. Based in Bilbao, he combines academic grounding from the University of Havana with practical threat research at vendors and research firms. Beyond coding, he’s known for translating deep technical analysis into robust, production-ready security tools used by the broader malware research community.
17 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
B.Sc., Computer Science, B.Sc., Computer Science at University of Havana
Spanish, English
Stackoverflow
396reputation
10kreached
13answers
0questions
Github Skills (38)
asynchronous10
build-script10
python10
api-design10
async10
memory-management10
build-system10
c1110
file-parsing10
file-format10
c1710
regular-expression10
parsing10
file-parser10
build-tools10
Programming languages (8)
Github contributions (5)
VirusTotal/yara
Sep 2008 - Jan 2023
The pattern matching swiss knife
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Security Engineer
Back-end Developer & Security EngineerContributions:49 releases, 312 reviews, 2245 commits in 14 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Victor made significant contributions to the YARA project by fixing warnings and addressing security vulnerabilities in the "macho" module. Their work involved modifying the code to prevent potential buffer overruns and enhancing security. They also demonstrated their understanding of file format structures by refactoring the Aho-Corasick automaton and integrating improvements to the string matching algorithms.
yaramatchingknifepattern-matchingpattern
VirusTotal/yara-python
Sep 2015 - Dec 2022
The Python interface for YARA
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:17 releases, 41 reviews, 313 commits in 7 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Victor primarily contributed to the Python interface for YARA, focusing on enhancements and fixes within the codebase. Their work involved addressing warnings, resolving setup issues, and ensuring the code functioned correctly across multiple operating systems, including Windows. They also implemented a feature for handling includes and improved the README file, demonstrating skills across multiple areas of the project. Further, they adapted the code to the new API.
python-interfacepythonyara
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