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NEWS FROM THE LAB - Friday, November 6, 2009
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Greetings from AVAR 2009! Posted by Fei @ 06:21 GMT

One thing that I have always found fascinating about Japan is definitely its rich and unique culture. However, there is just one other thing — vending machines. You not only find them everywhere, you can buy all sorts of things, including adult movies, from them (except for a security product, but that's probably just a matter of time).

Anyway, AVAR 2009 was held in Kyoto, Japan this time around and the turnout was just amazing, especially when coupled with very interesting presentations on how the threat landscape has been evolving and what every vendor is doing to tackle it.

AVAR2009, swan

For the first time, there were two concurrent sessions running. This year's keynote was by Jimmy Kuo (Microsoft), and he presented the key findings from Microsoft's Security Intelligence Report v7.

Interestingly, this time around there were several presentations on cloud-based security, one of which was by Dr. Igor Muttik (McAfee). In it, he mentioned the benefits of having antivirus technology in-the-cloud, as well as concerns surrounding privacy issues. One interesting fact he shared was McAfee verifies the robustness of their servers every Friday by DDoS-ing themselves. Coincidentally, that's when McAfee products are scheduled by default to run a full scan.

Also, Stefan Tanase (Kaspersky) gave an entertaining presentation about how there has been a exponential growth in attacks on social media on Facebook and Twitter. Tony Lee (Microsoft) too highlighted the same fact, as Microsoft found that the attacks on social media are dominating the threat landscape.

Signing off,
Fei

AVAR2009, performance