Phew! This should be the last conference of the year. AVAR Conference is the second largest confrence for the antivirus industry (between the Virus Bulletin and EICAR conferences). AVAR stands for Association of Anti-virus Researchers Asia, so the conference is organized annually somewhere in Asia or Australia - this time in Tokyo. In addition of the locals, AVAR conference gathers a large amount of international experts too. Just have a look at this years program.
So far, the topics in the conference have ranged from how well SPF will kill off email viruses to whether Microsoft will become an antivirus vendor or not. One interesting presentation compared the differences in amount of variants between closed-source viruses and open-source viruses - with dramatic results. When even the most rapid variants of the Bagle / Mydoom saga only produced a handful of new variants per month, some of the Randex / Gaobot / Sdbot families have produced over 600 variants in a single month. That's two new variants per day, for every day of the month.
And, this being Japan, you can except to see a confusing sign or two.
