‘Windigo’ research wins first annual Péter Szőr award

The first of many awards to commemorate brilliant researcher.

When, in November last year, we heard of the

passing of Péter Szőr

, we wanted to do something to keep the memory of Péter alive.

Not only was Péter a long-serving member of the

VB

advisory board, a regular contributor to

Virus Bulletin

magazine and a regular speaker at the

VB

conference, he was also one of the industry’s brightest researchers – and of course, the author of the classic book

The Art of Computer Virus Research and Defense

. Perhaps more importantly than all that, he was a very kind and genuine person.

Following some suggestions, we decided to set up a

Péter Szőr award

, to be awarded annually at the

VB

conference for the best piece of technical security research. The first such award was presented during the gala dinner at

VB2014

last night.

Four pieces of research were nominated for this award:

• 
  Security Applications of Formal Language Theory
  
  by Len Sassaman, Meredith Patterson and Sergey Bratus,
  
  published
  
  in
  
  IEEE
  
  ‘s
  
  Systems Journal
  
  .

• 
  Operation Windigo
  
  by
  
  ESET
  
  researchers Olivier Bilodeau, Pierre-Marc Bureau, Joan Calvet, Alexis Dorais-Joncas, Marc-Etienne Léveillé and Benjamin Vanheuverzwijn (published
  
  here
  
  ).

• 
  Research on ‘Hacking Team’ spyware
  
  by
  
  Citizen Lab
  
  (published in three parts:
  
  1
  
  ,
  
  2
  
  ,
  
  3
  
  ).

• 
  A journey to abused FTP sites
  
  by Hendrik Adrian of
  
  MalwareMustDie
  
  (published in two parts:
  
  1
  
  ,
  
  2
  
  ).

We sent these nominations to the

VB


Advisory Board

for their consideration, and ‘Operation Windigo’ was the clear winner. Congratulations to

ESET

researchers Olivier Bilodeau, Pierre-Marc Bureau, Joan Calvet, Alexis Dorais-Joncas, Marc-Etienne Léveillé and Benjamin Vanheuverzwijn!

Jeannette Jarvis, a member of the

VB

advisory board and a colleague of Péter’s at

McAfee

presented the award last night, we would like to thank Jeannette for the part she played. We would also like to thank Luis Corrons for the original suggestion of setting up the award.

If you want to appreciate Péter’s contributions, you could do worse than read his book that remains very relevant today. We also recommend the touching

in memoriam

by his friends Mikko Hyppőnen, Vincent Weafer and Jeannette Jarvis.

Posted on 26 September 2014 by

Martijn Grooten