First published: 05th August 2011
The safest thing to say about the presentations is that they are all about malware, beyond that, it is difficult to group them. The two most common themes are e-Commerce and regional or country influences, but the approaches are diverse. Cao Yang and Jeff Li both look at the dangers of online payments, but Cao Yang considers mobile payments, and Jeff Li looks at popular Chinese services Taobao and Alipay. Conversely, Jeffrey Ma proposes an in-depth defensive framework and Marco Dela Vega looks at the rise of Mac rogue anti-virus software.
Kazumasa Itabashi will present his case study of targeted attacks abusing regional software, and Young Jun Chang looks more specifically at attacks using Korean cultural characteristics.
There is more on mobile platforms, V Dhanalakshm will present a detailed account of the Android threat landscape, and Tony Lee will examine phishing and data theft on mobile platforms, and its various attack vectors and impact to the users.
For reverse engineering, Jim Wang will explain the difficulties in analysing Easy Programming Language (EPL) code and KM Darsham will present some techniques for products which use COM and API technologies. Also in analysis, Igor Muttik will demonstrate the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) shell and NSH scripting offered by it and discuss the implications and look at the arsenal of EFI tools available.
Presentations looking at particular malware techniques include Lukas Hasik's examination of image poisoning, Xue Yang's dissection of exploit kits and Zheng Zhang's detection of anti-analysis techniques in packers.
Matt Garrad will consider how best to implement a more rounded measure of Anti-Malware product testing than just traditional detection rate evaluations, extending the metrics to include hardware impact performance statistics.
Many of the presenters will be backing up their assertions with demonstrations, hard data and statistics from their organisations, so the conference will provide some solid insights into the state of play in the malware arena.
For a lively debate, there will be a panel session on "Freedom vs. Security". Overall there will be a broad cross-section of the continuously developing threat of malware and how to defend against it.
Of course, the programme might change as the conference approaches, but the updated information will be at the official website.