Posted by Martijn Grooten on Nov 27, 2017
Next week, Virus Bulletin will attend a number of important security conferences in Beijing, China and Montpellier, France.
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In Beijing, security product vendors and testers will get together for a meeting of the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO). As a company with more than two decades' worth of experience testing security products, Virus Bulletin recognizes the importance of these meetings and our team members are looking forward to attending and contributing.
The AMTSO meeting is directly followed by the 20th edition of the AVAR conference, also in Beijing. AVAR is an annual security event, organized by the Association of anti Virus Asia Researchers, that travels around the Asia Pacific region.
The AVAR programme looks interesting, and for those who have attended recent VB conferences it will include many familiar names. For example, ESET's Filip Kafka will speak about FinFisher, which he also spoke about at VB2017, while his colleagues Anton Cherepanov and Robert Lipovsky will speak about Industroyer. Meanwhile, Bitdefender researcher Tiberius Axinte will speak about the macOS malware used by APT28 (a.k.a. Fancy Bear), a subject which he also spoke about at VB2017 in Madrid.
Sophos researcher Rowland Yu, who has spoken at several VB conferences in the past, will speak about attacks against Android-based point-of-sale systems, while NewSky researchers Ankit Anubhav and Scott Wu (a past VB author and conference speaker, respectively) will discuss the evolution of threats against the Internet of Things. I also think the talk on machine learning-based malware detection, by Rising researcher Chao Ye, will be very interesting to watch.
In the same week, the 5th annual Botconf conference will take place in Montpellier, France. Just as in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016, Virus Bulletin will be present to enjoy what once again looks like a very interesting programme, and one which also includes many past VB conference speakers.
For example, CERT Poland's Maciej Kotowicz and Jarosław Jedynak spoke together at the two most recent VB conferences. In Montpellier, they will both be speaking: Maciej on the Lazarus incident in Poland and Jarosław, together with Paweł Srokosz, on using bots to detect botnets.
Cisco Talos researchers Paul Rascagneres and Warren Mercer also spoke together at VB2017; in Montpellier they will each take part in group presentations, on the MEDoc link to the Nyetya campaign and on the Necurs spam botnet, respectively. Other potential highlights on the programme include a talk by Fox-IT's Pedro Drimel Neto on current Android banking trojans, a talk by Google's Łukasz Siewierski on Android apps that try to break its sandbox model, and Maria Jose Erquiaga's talk on how intercepting HTTPS affects botnet behaviour.
If you've got nothing planned for next week, why not consider going to either AVAR or Botconf – if you like what is typically on the VB conference programme, you'll certainly enjoy either event. And remember to say 'hi' if you see us!
