Back from AVAR 2006

I am just back from the AVAR (Association of anti Virus Asia Researchers) 2006 conference that was recently held in Auckland, New Zealand.

The conference had a large variety of papers from various security organizations and companies, and I'm delighted to be one of the presenters in this year's conference.

Some of the papers that interested me the most were:

• Eric Chien's (Symantec) presentation on gadgets
• Igor Muttik's (McAfee AVERT) presentation on the web of sin
• Peter Ferrie's (Symantec) presentation on attacks on Virtual Machine emulators (Slides and Paper on his homepage)
• Kimmo Kasslim's (F-Secure) presentation on kernel malware
• Maksym Schipka's (Messagelabs) presentation on the prevalence of PE Packers in email traffic

The best part about attending conferences such as the ones by AVAR, Eicar and Virus Bulletin are the informational exchange that the attendees do, either officially during the conference presentations, or socially in the gatherings in the restaurants or pubs. I think it's a surprise for folks to realize how much cooperation there is between the different companies and organizations.

Throughout the conference, i was still doing some final revisions to ensure that i can get my subject matter through within the allocated time. The organizers were pretty strict on the timing of the papers! Thankfully, i think i did my presentation without too much of an issue.

tags: antivirus, AVAR, antimalware