[Updated. Twice. :)]
'Tis the season to get ready for the autumn round of security conferences. For me, it starts at the beginning of September with a small but perfectly formed Forensics conference at Canterbury Christ Church University, in the UK, where I'll be presenting on "Man, Myth, Malware and Multiscanning" - a presentation I'm putting together with Julio Canto of Hispasec / VirusTotal - and "The Virtual Tsunami: Global Disasters and Security Disasters". I'd normally have papers prepared for at least one of these by the time of the conference, but because of other pressures and commitments, it seems unlikely to happen this time. However, there will be a paper on multiscanning before the end of the year, as it's a topic that Julio and I have been anxious to put the world straight on for a long time.
October sees the Virus Bulletin 2011 conference in Barcelona, one of the most important events of a researcher's year. Which is why ESET is a platinum sponsor, of course. But we're also pretty well represented in the conference programme.
- Pierre-Marc Bureau will present his paper on Same botnet, same guys, new code. [Update 1] Thanks to @adulau for pointing out that "Pierre-Marc Bureau will also give a keynote "Human After All" at hack.lu 2011 (19-21 September)." See the comment below.
- I'll be presenting a paper on Daze of whine and neuroses (but testing is FINE) with Larry Bridwell of AVG. If you think there might be an AMTSO connection there, you are not wrong.
- Robert Lipovsky, Daniel Novomeský and Juraj Malcho will present on Fake but free and worth every cent
Robert looks to be pretty busy, as he's also slated for a vendor presentation. I'm expecting to be fairly busy too, meeting ESET people, chairing some conference sessions, and attending some other meetings such as an AVIEN get-together.
[Update 2] Martijn Grooten has reminded me that there is still a call for last minute presentations for Virus Bulletin at http://www.virusbtn.com/conference/vb2011/call/.
Later in October, there's an AMTSO workshop in Bratislava, which ESET will be hosting, so I have twice as much incentive to be there. Though as a director of AMTSO, it would be hard to avoid going if I wanted to.
And in November, there's the AVAR (Association of Anti Virus Asia Researchers) conference in Hong Kong. I'm not going to be at that one, for the first time in several years, but ESET is Principal Sponsor for that one, and I've never been to a bad AVAR. The full programme isn't up yet, but the principal speakers are listed at http://www.aavar.org/avar2011/program/. But by then I'll be home tidying the loose ends of the relocation of my own company (that's going on at the moment...), wondering where the year went, and starting to worry about RSA, AMTSO, CARO and EICAR in the spring...
David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP
ESET Senior Research Fellow
