Next week, Virus Bulletin will attend a number of important security conferences in Beijing, China and Montpellier, France.
![]() |
![]() |
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!
Leave a Reply