We just got
back from the AAVAR 2007 conference in Seoul,
Korea
(Association of AntiVirus Asia Researchers). I have to
say that it was a great conference where members from AV companies from around
the world got a chance to get together, discuss new malware and anti-malware
tendencies and, of course, have a good time.

Before the
actual conference we had a couple of meetings with WildList Reporters and AVPD
(AntiVirus Product Developers) of ICSALabs. Even though it's good to see that
some people are worried about maintaining the WildList as-is, it is very
important that the WildList innovates and adapts to current times and malware
peculiarities. This is particularly relevant as the majority of Antivirus
product certifications and testing are based on the WildCore, which does not
include Trojans, Ad/Spyware, rootkits, bots, etc.

The
conference itself was a two day event where people from different parts of the
world presented about their views of malware attacks, testing methodologies,
new protection technologies, etc. Some were very interesting, such as the
presentation by AhnLab's Deokyoung Jung (Andy)
titled "New Attacks in Online Game Security" and Mr. Chen Rui of
Kingsoft with his presentation on "Research & Defense on
Password-stealing Trojans in China", which is a good trend in modern
anti-malware techniques similar to our Panda Collective Intelligence.
The other really interesting presentations from AV testing perspective were
"Testing, Testing: Anti-Malware Evaluation for the Enterprise" from Andrew Lee and
specially "Testing of Dynamic Detection" by Maik Morgenstern &
Andreas Marx from AV-Test.org, which has gotten some people's attention here and here.

After the
conference we had a chance to get to know some of the better things of Korea. The
organizers took us to see the DMZ with North Korea, which was awesome. I
have to praise our hosts and friends at AhnLab and specially Andy for a great time and their
efforts to make us feel at home, specially the visit to BTB 😉