At the 2017 2nd International Anti-Virus Conference

Updated: 11^th November 2017

The 2017 2nd International Anti-Virus Conference was held in Tianjin, China on 8th - 9th November. The conference opened with various leaders emphasising the importance of cyber-security, nurturing talents and the correct application of President Xi Jinping Thought in the field.

The specialist presentations included speakers from many Chinese organisations and foreign experts. Mr. Ni Guangnan, Academician of China Academy of Engineering, explained his vision of a secure and controllable information technology system, based on Linux. Mr. Christophe Durand, Head of Cyber Strategy and Outreach of INTERPOL introduced INTERPOL's history of introducing technology to policing, and how this continues in the information era. Mr. Yale Li, Executive Vice Chairman of China Cloud Security Alliance, saw new challenges in lack of boundaries, massive data leakage, permission mismanagement, ransomware and other attacks, and recommended solutions of big data analysis, software-defined boundaries, data self-protection and trusted authentication. Mr. Chen Jianmin, Executive Director of National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center, explained problems with Mobile App growth and the application of regulations and revealed that of 17,191,287 Apps in China, 6.9% are malicious. Scott Molenkamp of Microsoft detailed the Microsoft Approach to ransomware, reducing the attack surface, protecting faster and enabling recovery.

Ransomware, Mobile Apps, IoT and Artificial Intelligence were strong themes across multiple speakers. Mt. Gleb Gritsai of Kaspersky Lab shared some case studies. In one, criminals used vulnerable routers belonging to a large Telecom to infiltrate malware to ATMs that collected credit card information of other banks in order to make cash withdrawals. In the second case study, a 6-month long breach of over 500 endpoints in an Enterprise was discovered when a botnet operator who had bough access to the Enterprise made a mistake and encrypted a disc, thus triggering the investigation. These cases highlight the sophistication of some of the attackers, and the convoluted lengths they go to for their schemes.

Mr. Ma Jie of Baidu described their deep neural network for mobile antivirus and their research in cracking biometric authentication, including iris recognition, fingerprint recognition and facial recognition.

The conference split into three streams on the second day, covering Ransomware, Mobile Applications and Innovation and Development.