Three importants AV industry events in a row

EICAR
While the EICAR conference 2011 was dominated by the buzzword cyberwar, the 2012 EICAR conference, actually the 21st, was focusing on ‘Cyber Attacks – Myths and Reality in Contemporary Context’. The conference took place at the Marriott Hotel in Lisbon.
The recent past brought a considerable shift in the underground malware authors’ mentality; a swing from the thrill-seeking geek striving for flame or glory to the professional culprit methodologies and, even more importantly, the inadequate expertise of the average user, for monetary gain. The next contemporary threat scenario calls for an adaptation of the technology and the defense methodologies. Even if scientific research would provide the baseline for some innovations, we still need to have a more holistic approach on the implementation of new innovations. This conference therefore invited researchers to address some of these issues in their papers.
This year’s event was another great one and we are already looking forward to the next one, including some new initiatives from EICAR which should appear soon on the EICAR’s website. If things turn out as planned, the EICAR 2013 conference will be held in Cologne, Germany, 9-11 June 2013. 

CARO
The second major event was the CARO Workshop, held on 14-15 May 2012, outside the city of Munich, Germany, near to the towns of Erding and Freising. The CARO workshops are unique in the sense that no media is allowed to join and because of a strict no recording policy.
This year, the focus was on web vulnerabilities and remedies: “WWWTF – The Web: It’s broken, but can it be fixed?” While the workshop is conference in character – talks in front of an audience – discussions are the key point. Most of the presentations are deeply technical and really dedicated to the security and anti-malware industry. You can find more info, presentations and event pictures on their website. Part of our Security Lab attended this interesting workshop. The next CARO Workshop will be held on 16 and 17 May 2013, in Bratislava, Slovakia. The subject of this upcoming workshop will be: “The What, Where and When of Targeted Attacks”.

Reception of CARO participants, One of the first in line is Prof. Dr. Klaus Brunnstein one of the founders of CARO

 AMTSO
G Data is one of the members of AMTSO, an organization representing testers, vendors, academics and publishers involved in anti-malware research. This time, the AMTSO meeting was held at the same location of the CARO workshop and was focused at the future of the organization. Several board members’ positions are due and elections will come up next month. I was officially co-opted as board member for the next month until the elections for new board members will come up. Interesting to note is that I am the first and only in Belgium being on the board of 2 (EICAR and AMTSO) international AV security organisations at the same time.

Furthermore, the future of AMTSO was discussed intensively during this meeting: A new structure of the board, new positions like executive officers and some new ideas to improve the visibility of AMTSO will be the first steps. If you want to know more about this or even want to become a member or subscriber of AMTSO, please have a look at their website. AMTSO will continue to focus on the following areas:

• Providing a forum for discussions related to the testing of anti-malware and related products.
• Developing and publicizing objective standards and best practices for testing of anti-malware and related products.
• Promoting education and awareness of issues related to the testing of anti-malware and related products.
• Providing tools and resources to aid standards-based testing methodologies

Read this blog also at the G Data SecurityBlog page.