VB 2009 Gala Dinner Pics
Tonight was the Gala dinner. Very fun experience with very nice service and entertainment.
I was at a table with the Intego folks, seen here with Philippe Devallois as well as a large number of guys from Avira. Avira is conveniently located in nearby Germany.
Those are pretty long pipes and make some unique sounds:
I like the little touch with the wheat:
Those actors were insanely funny. They slapped each other in the face countless number of times (for real).
The night ended around 11 PM I think. I stayed a little longer to chat with some folks including Ivan Macalintal from Trend Micro. He is a fun guy… long trip for him, jet lagged and all he did a presentation about Koobface today for his fellow researchers who could not make it to Geneva.
Back to the room checking what the others are saying… We have Internet tonight… Last night the wi-fi was cut off!! The free wifi is provided by Beijing Rising.
And that’s our beds. The room is nice but for the price I’m not too impressed. It has some faults too, like a sink that has a leak… Hmmm… Anyway, I can’t complain, we are treated very well after all.
Tomorrow is the conference’s last day. Kind of strange to have the Gala night tonight.. it feels like it’s over and people are going to be drinking all night… Meh, there must be a reason…
Jerome Segura
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Mac OS X threats at VB 2009
Methusela CEBRIAN FERRER did a great job presenting at VB2009 on the Mac OS X topic.
Methusela Cebrian Ferrer.
The presentation was solid, underlying the motives and methods of infections for the different Mac Malware threats. The only glitch happened when the Mac she was using to present froze and then the keynotes program crashed. The audience was a little shocked for a minute until somebody made a joke about getting a PC instead.
There have actually been rumors about somebody in the conference trying to hack into Macs. Is that possible? Well, certainly with some many security professionals carrying their laptops, there is a lot of information worth stealing. After all we are all on the same Wireless network and intercepting communications is definitely possible.
Anyway, the conversation went on after for a little while. I chatted with Meths, as Graham Cluley had just finished congratulating her. Some folks (Philippe and Jack) from Intego (a French company who makes a really good Mac security product called VirusBarrier) were there as well. Those guys actually were the first to name what we now know as Jahlav, RSPlug. Very soon after a big AV company (which will remain nameless) sort of took their finding as if they were the one discovering it.
It is quite unfortunate that Intego is not listed on Virus Total as they have probably one of the best security product for the Mac. According to Philippe, they have more than a thousand RSPlug (Jahlav) samples (that includes variants). Anyway, I have been promised a command line version for Linux so that I can do some testing before blogging and saying that no one detects this or that threat 
That concludes a well packed second day at VB 2009.
Jerome Segura
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VB 2009 Day 1 finished
Wednesday was a very full day.
In the evening we had a chance to go out explore Geneva a little bit:
And returning to the hotel I played Foosball with a guy from G-Data as a lady from Sunbelt is watching to learn some tricks:
The evening was concluded with a drinks reception. and a little party involving some singing of Swiss songs. Also, I got to meet the locals
Jerome Segura
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VB 2009 Geneva
I am in Geneva, Switzerland for the Virus Bulletin Conference. The conference started off this morning with a keynote address from Google about Malvertising.
Right behind me is Graham Cluley from Sophos, typing away and bursting an occasional laugh.
Too bad they weren’t taking any questions said Mikko Hypponen (F-Secure) – sitting on my right – who told me he wondered how much money Google makes from Malvertising and what they do with it. Good point Mikko.
A site to check out will be anti-malvertising.com from Google.
The next session is about exploit shell code (MS Blast) presented by three folks from Microsoft. There’s a section about the infamous Conficker Worm.
More stuff later… Follow me on Twitter for more regular updates.
Some pics below.
Jerome Segura
Me:
My colleague, Tim Lefler:
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