This year’s Association of Antivirus Asia Research (AVAR) conference was held in Seoul, Korea. The conference ended this evening after two days of presentations and discussions.
The conference was a good opportunity to learn more about specific threats targeting Asia. We learned that online game information stealing is prevalent in this part of the World and most experts agree that things will only get worse with the growing popularity of such entertainment. There was also a presentation on botnet tracking and mitigation in Korea given by Dong-Ryun Lee from the Korean Information Security Agency (KISA).
Eugene Kaspersky and Vincent Weafer both highlighted the rise of cyber criminality in malware during their presentation. ESET had a great presence at this conference. Andrew Lee and David Harley presented on antivirus testing, highlighting the need for meticulous methodology and transparency from testing organizations. Randy Abrams gave a presentation on understanding heuristics. Randy is a very good speaker and was able to catch everyone’s attention with a presentation that attracted both technical people and a broader audience with entertaining and relevant examples.
Overall, this conference was informative and, as usual, a good opportunity to meet follow researchers from around the globe but in my personal opinion, the talks could have been a little bit more technical.
Pierre-Marc Bureau
Researcher
