MoMusings

Well, the annual Virus Bulletin International Conference has come and gone again. This year it was held in the ‘Windy City’ (Chicago, USA) between the 29th of September and the 1st of October.

As usual there were over thirty top speakers there to present their papers. These ranged from ‘Spammers Trickery’ on the new SPAM stream added this year, to a number of panel discussions on diverse malware related topics, and numerous excellent technical presentations.

The ‘Technical’ stream was once again the most interesting (from my perspective), although I did sit in on several ‘Corporate’ stream presentations as well.

Pre-conference activities:

I attended the WildList meeting held the day before the conference.

Later the same day I also took part in the AVIEWS session where I presented on ‘Defence in Depth’ as part of a panel session. The other panel members were: David Phillips, Shawn Campbell, Shane Coursen, and Jeanette Jarvis.

The following were the top presentations that caught my interest from the conference:

Day 1:

• A traveller’s diary – one organization’s journey to improve its anti-virus infrastructure - Margaret Patton, Government of British Columbia.
• Gatekeeper II: New approaches to generic virus prevention - Richard Ford and Jason Michalske from the Florida Institute of technology.
• The return of script viruses – an overview of Microsoft shell - Eric Chien, Symantec
• Unpacking strategies - Alex Shipp, Messagelabs

The Gala Dinner:

Well, what can I say, the gala dinner was excellent as usual, this year we were entertained by Husband and Wife team (Ross and Eliza Hartzell) that liked to shoot arrows at each other, using a variety of bows and crossbows! They also have the World record for the ‘Most Crossbows Triggered in an Arrow Relay’, which they performed for us live on stage. You can see the original recording of this record here. RealPlayer version or Windows Media Player version

This was followed up by a wonderful menu, and more entertainment; this time in the form of Chicago’s own Blooze Brothers band and dancers, so lots of blues and rock-n-roll music was enjoyed by all!

Day 2:

• Advanced survival techniques in recent Internet worms - Gabor Szappanos, VirusBuster
• A worm’s evolution - Tomer Honen, Aladdin
• Secure by design, a new start for file formats - Daniel Wolfe, McAfee
• How to achieve 10Gbps performance for integrated anti-virus and anti-spam network-based security systems - Jon Curnyn, Detica
• Trapping worms in a virtual net - Hamish O’Dea, Computer Associates

Conclusion:

VB2004 was the best attended of the VB conferences over the last 4 years or so (330 delegates), lots of new faces, lots of old faces too. This has helped to keep VB fresh and interesting and, as far as I’m concerned the best security conference for the area that I’m interested in.

For those that are interested this is the seventh time I’ve presented at a Virus Bulletin International Conference; the paper I presented this year can be found here.
This covers the use of Bayesian Filtering to detect/block e-mail borne malware. All feedback is most welcome.