We had a really great time at VB2007 in Vienna. Not only were the talks extremely useful and interesting, but meeting many people from other antivirus companies and putting a face to their email address was worth every minute. I have to agree with Randy that there's nothing secretive nor restricive to newcomers in the industry, and the free flow of information was present from beginning to end.
Andreas Marx's presentation on the death of the WildList and its non-relevance for testing purposes is worth mentioning. I have to disagree with all the defenders of the WildList as, while it is true that as an industry we need a scientifically reproduceable testing methodology, using the WildList as a basis for product certification is misleading to customers at best. Not only are the most prevalent types of malware not taken into consideration in the WildList but also what is listed does not represent what is truly "in the wild".
During the conference a few representatives from Panda, Symantec, F-Secure, Kaspersky, Avira, and AV-Test (sorry if I left someone out) had a chance to meet to finalize the details of a new testing methodology of behavioral and proactive technologies. The final paper, which is a mix of the proposed methodologies mostly from Panda, Symantec and AV-Test, will be presented at AVAR Seoul in November. I am really looking forward to this.
Our own Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs, did a great presentation on the Limbo banking Trojan and MPack. He detailed how we stumbled across the MPack tool while we were investigating the Command & Control server of the Limbo banking Trojan. Following the trail of Limbo lead us not only to MPack but also to many other tools and servers used by the cyber-gangs "DreamCoders Team" and "Infected Team".
Finally many thanks to G-Data and their 2nd IT-Security Table Soccer World Championship which gave the VB conference an exciting touch of entertainment and great fun. Here's some pics of the Panda Team against the Microsoft Team whom we annihilated (sorry guys!). We managed to get 2nd place after a really close 2-3 game against BitDefender. Watch out for next year BitDefender, we'll be back !!!