Record number of presentations dedicated to threats affecting smartphones.
The significant increase in mobile threats is reflected in the
VB2013
programme, which includes seven presentations on mobile malware.
Security experts have always been fascinated by mobile security, a subject which has been covered at many previous VB conferences. As far back as 2002,
T-Mobile
‘s Markus Schmall gave a
presentation
on the security of a mobile platform, in this case Java 2 ME.
The first VB
presentation
on the
iPhone
was given by Marius van Oers, then of
McAfee
, five years later, while it wasn’t until VB2011 that
Kaspersky
researchers Timothy Armstrong and Denis Maslennikov gave the first
presentation
on
Android
malware.
However, despite researchers’ fascination, the quantity of mobile threats long lagged behind expectations. Mobile malware has long featured in most vendors’ end-of-year predictions, but for a long time the number of actual threats seen in the wild remained small.
In 2013, however, their predictions are finally coming true, and the number of mobile malware samples has skyrocketed since the beginning of the year. This was also reflected in the abstracts that were submitted for VB2013. Seven talks will deal with the subject of mobile threats, conveniently following each other up on Thursday morning and early afternoon.
The morning begins in the technical stream, where
Sophos
‘s Rowland Yu will
discuss
the ‘GinMaster’ family of trojanized Android apps. The next presentation is by
K7
‘s Samir Mody, who will
explain
how obfuscation is used in Android malware. His talk is followed by a
presentation
from three researchers from the Institute of Space Technology in Islamabad, who will discuss a framework to detect malicious
Android
apps.
After the tea and coffee break, the mobile presentations continue in the corporate stream where
Fortinet
researchers Karine de Pontevès and Axelle Apvrille will
analyse
in-app advertisement kits, again focusing on the
Android
. Then Vanja Svajcer and Sean McDonald, both of
Sophos
, will
explain
why Potentially Unwanted Applications are an even bigger problem on mobile platforms than they are on the desktop. After them,
Kaspersky
‘s Roman Unuchek will
discuss
how malicious redirection is used to target mobile users.
The common trend among these presentations is that most of them focus on
Android
which, when it comes to malware, is for the phone what
Windows
still is for the desktop. We are thus excited that right after the lunch break, three researchers from
Google
‘s Android Security Team will
explain
their approach for securing the Android platform against malware.
The full programme for the conference can be found
here
, and interviews with many of the presenters about their research interests and what they hope to bring to the conference can be read in the ‘
speaker spotlight
‘ series of blog posts.
VB2013 runs from 2 to 4 October in Berlin, Germany.
Registration is still open
, so why not use your mobile phone – or your desktop computer – to buy a ticket and join us for what promises to be an exciting event!
Posted on 19 September 2013 by
Martijn Grooten
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