The first week of December was packed with security conferences, and
VB2017
speakers were busy presenting their research at no fewer than four different events: FIRST in Prague, Black Hat Europe in London, Botconf in Montpellier, and AVAR in Beijing. Security researchers were spoilt for choice, and while other members of the VB team
headed to Botconf
in France, I journeyed slightly further afield, to Beijing, to attend my first AVAR conference.
Though a global event, the annual conference of the
Association of Anti-Virus Asia Researchers
is naturally biased towards Asian attendees and speakers, giving the audience some interesting insights into the particular threats facing this most populated part of the world.
A good example of this was a presentation by
AhnLab
‘s Minseok ‘Jacky’ Cha, on targeted attacks faced by South Korean industry. Though some of these attacks have made the global security news – especially those linked to the Lazarus group, which is often linked to the country’s northern neighbour – there are far more attacks than often we see reported in the rest of the world, and certainly not all of them come from Korea.
The Lazarus group was the subject of a talk by
ESET
researcher (and regular
VB speaker
) Peter Kálnai, who described his and Michal Poslusny’s hunt for the toolset of this notorious group, based on the properties of malicious
Windows
executables, thus giving some new insight into the group’s activities. An interesting conclusion was that there are probably multiple cells or subgroups that share the same code, yet that have different building environments.
Another toolkit used in targeted attacks is EHDevel, which was the subject of a
talk
by
Bitdefender
researcher Cristina Vatamanu. EHDevel is a specialized framework, with a plugin-based architecture, that uses some novel techniques for C&C communication. It has been linked to the Operation Hangover APT campaign.
Cristina Vatamanu. Photo:
SKD Labs
.
Cristina’s colleague, Tiberius Axinte, was one of several speakers who delivered talks similar to those they had delivered at VB2017. Tiberius
revisited
the topic of the
macOS
component
used by APT28/Fancy Bear.
ESET
‘s Robert Lipovsky
discussed
Industroyer, as he also
did
in Madrid, and his colleague Filip Kafka once
again
spoke about FinFisher – though he did add that, shortly after his
VB2017 talk
, a campaign that had been using FinFisher had
switched
to using StrongPity-like spyware.
Unsurprisingly, a number of talks dealt with the threat coming from vulnerable smart devices. One such talk was by Ankit Anubhav (
NewSky
), who
said
that IoT-attackers will have to start working harder, as all the easy ways to attack them have already been exploited – I am still not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing.
As a means to researching smart devices efficiently, two talks discussed setting up IoT honeypots:
one
by
Tencent
researchers Jingyu Yang and Fan Dang, and
one
by Andrew L. Go and Wren Fer M. Balangcod from
G DATA
‘s Manilla-based research lab. The latter pair swapped roles between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys in their presentations, using a ‘hacker hoodie’ to indicate which role they were representing.
A
talk
from
Sophos
‘s Rowland Yu, on malware targeting
Android
-based
POS, was also very timely, while his colleagues, William Lee and Jagadeesh Chandraiah (both former VB speakers), also spoke about
Android
malware: about
using
recurrent neural networks to detect it, and about
malware
that makes it onto
Google Play
, respectively.
Testers’ panel. Photo:
SKD Labs
.
Given that many members of the audience represented anti-virus companies, a
talk
by
VirusTotal
‘s Karl Hiramoto on how his company works with the community was both interesting and relevant. Equally relevant, I hope, was a testers’ panel, in which I joined colleagues from
AV-Test
,
NSS Labs
and
SKDLabs
on stage to discuss the state of testing.
Machine learning was also featured on the programme, and a
presentation
by
Kaspersky Lab
researcher Alexander Chistyakov was one of the best I have seen on the subject, providing a good introduction into its use in cybersecurity without shying away from the important, but often very technical details. The philosophy that adding ‘good’ code to malware can’t make the file any less bad was an important take-away from this talk.
An equally
good introduction
, and probably my favourite talk of the conference, was that by
Symantec
‘s Dennis Tan, who discussed spam botnets. He provided a very good overview of the subject, using details on specific botnets to highlight certain aspects of the general spam botnet landscape.
Dennis Tan.
Photo:
SKD Labs
.
This was the 20th
AVAR
conference, but only my first. I was pleasantly surprised both by the quality of the talks and by the organization of the event, which this year was in the hands of Beijing-based
SKDLabs
. The organizers deserve full praise for their hard work, and I have no doubt that next year’s event in Goa, India will be just as good.
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