With its 3500 computer seats and 5000 visitors, Assembly is one of the world's largest computer and demo happenings in the world. The event has become something of a phenomenon in Helsinki where it has been held now for 15 times. This year, Assembly was held in Helsinki's Hartwall Areena in August and F-Secure were there to sponsor the event and meet the people.
As a Finnish data security company, F-Secure are an important link in the Assembly chain. With F-Secure's intervention, computers, networks and smartphones at the convention are kept virus-free to ensure maximum game play and minimum downtime for its visitors.
This year, F-Secure also hosted a booth to present its latest technology including a crowd-pulling Bluetooth honey, a prototype technology that displays all Bluetooth-enabled devices in its range and disinfects those that are carrying mobile malware. Interest in mobile technology was high this year otherwise at Assembly with a large number of mobile demos and seminars on offer.
Another feature at the event drawing crowds to the F-Secure booth was the F-Secure Virus World Map - a live feed of the current virus situation in the world with colour codes to represent the infection levels from quiet to epidemic. The same technology is available on your computer screen via the F-Secure webpage at: http://worldmap.f-secure.com/
Behind the scenes
Behind the scenes, F-Secure Network Control, a piece of hardware that delivers high performance deep analysis of Internet traffic was working hard to detect malicious malware-originated traffic in Assembly's operational network. Now, in its third year of operation at the event, the number of infected computers had nearly doubled from 121 in 2005 to about 200 this year. Visitors continued their game play oblivious while Network Control went about its business quarantining, disinfecting and reconnecting offending computers back to the Net.
During the four-day event, F-Secure also held an F-SECURE Reverse Engineering Challenge competition for Computer hobbyists where the contestants needed to understand the inner workings of complex computer programs with only the binary code in their hands. Prizes including a 60GB iPod, Sony PSP including a game and an iPod Nano drew more than 600 competitors from all around the world.
Telling it how it is
F-Secure's Chief Research Officer, Mikko Hyppönen was present to talk about the world of viruses, demonstrating to all enthusiastic audience how investigators work in the Virus lab. In addition, Hyppönen touched on hot topics such as the threat of cyber terrorism, the criminals who use the Net for gain and the rise of mobile malware.
F-Secure, for its part was happy to ensure a smoothly-functioning event and at the end of the four day event bid farewell to an exhausted, happy and malware-free band of computer hobbyists.
You can read more about the event from www.assembly.org
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