Security experts pool ideas at European conferences

Research and expertise shared at CARO and AMTSO meetings.

Last week saw two major gatherings of top security and anti-malware experts from across the globe, as the third annual CARO conference was held in Budapest, Hungary, followed by a well-attended meeting of the AMTSO testing standards group, which saw the ratification of several significant documents.

CARO The CARO meeting focused on the major issue of vulnerabilities and exploits, with insights into the latest research and discoveries shared with an audience made up of leading technical staff from most of the major players in the anti-malware industry. Issues with specific software and operating systems, the patching problem, flaws in security solutions and even undocumented features in the PE file format were covered in a wide-ranging programme of talks, and discussed in depth during group Q&A sessions and in the surrounding corridors. The latest research on the notorious Conficker worm were shared, along with analysis of other topical issues such as PDF viewer exploits.

The third outing for this tightly focused conference, hosted this time by Hungarian security firm VirusBuster, proved as successful as the previous meetings, which covered packing and obfuscation in Amsterdam in 2008 and testing in Reykjavik in 2007.

AMTSO Many of the delegates remained in Budapest for the second half of the week, which saw another meeting of the AMTSO group, founded after discussions begun at the Reykjavik conference. Over 40 delegates, representing security vendors, testing labs, publications and academia, debated the future of anti-malware testing, ratifying two new guidelines documents and a process for analysing and commenting on how well tests conform to the principles already laid down.

Insights into testing "in-the-cloud" technologies and validating malware samples were collated into the new guidelines papers, which will support the earlier documents providing advice on dynamic testing and a list of the fundamental principles all testers should abide by. The members also approved plans to provide official support or condemnation of published tests and reviews highlighted by members as worthy of attention. The latest documents should soon be made public on the group's website, a radical redesign of which was also approved of by members. The second part of the meeting saw work commence on a range of new projects.

Many security experts will be staying on in Europe for further discussions, with this week seeing the annual EICAR conference in Berlin and the APWG's 'Counter eCrime Operations' summit in Barcelona. Details of these upcoming events are here and here, while comment on last week's meetings is in blog entries here, here, here and here. A full report will appear in next month's issue of Virus Bulletin (publication date 1 June).

11 May 2009

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