December 3-5 marked the 9th annual AVAR conference. This year yours truly got to be the conference chairman and ESET hosted the conference in New Zealand. AVAR is the Association of anti Virus Asia Researchers (http://www.aavar.org) and has a mission to prevent the spread and damage caused by malicious software, and to develop cooperative relationship among anti malicious software experts in Asia.

The cooperative relationships truly extend outside of Asia. This year, as has long been the case at AVAR, we had guests and presenters from all over the world. Not only did ESET (www.eset.com) sponsor the conference, but Canon System Solutions, Inc. (http://www.canon-sol.co.jp/english/index.html), Chillisoft (http://www.chillisoft.co.nz/), Symantec (http://www.symantec.com/), AVG (http://www.grisoft.com), and Ahnlab (http://www.ahnlab.com) did so as well. The speakers came from India, Europe, The United States, New Zealand, Russia, and other regions and countries. As you can see, AVAR is not only about Asia.

I would be remiss not to mention Convention Management Services (http://www.cmsl.co.nz/) who took over most all of the arrangements for running the conference and left me completely stress-free. Every detail was accounted for and the execution was perfect. The attendees had a great time.

All of the anti-virus vendors strive to have the best possible solutions, but we also realize that none of us can do it alone. In the spirit of cooperation researchers from a variety of companies shared information about fighting our common enemies: No not Microsoft, they are one of us there!

A variety of presenters too numerous to list spoke on topics of rootkits, kernel malware, PE packers, attacks on virtual machines, Attacks on VoIP, and other subjects. Sharing information is the spirit and legacy of the anti-virus, and now anti-spyware industry. It drives our marketing departments crazy :)

AVAR does not own the copyrights to the presentations, the speakers do. I'll contact all of the speakers and see if I can compile a list of links to their papers so you can read them as well!

People who have never attended an anti-virus conference are always amazed at how well we cooperate with each other to combat digital threats. The anti-malware industry truly embraces coopetition - competition with a healthy dose of cooperation.

Randy Abrams
Director of Technical Education