I'm sending greetings from Canada, where I'm attending the 6th annual SecTor Security Education Conference in the very impressive city of Toronto.

With almost 70 talks and nearly 50 exhibitors there are a lot of opportunities to learn about new techniques and meet interesting people from all over the world. In addition there is a “LockPick Village”, a robotics-showcase and a capture the flag competition located in the expo area.

Last but not least, Kaspersky Lab is exhibiting in the expo area.

Q: What is the Hlux/Kelihos botnet?
A: Kelihos is Microsoft's name for what Kaspersky calls Hlux. Hlux is a peer-to-peer botnet with an architecture similar to the one used for the Waledac botnet. It consists of layers of different kinds of nodes: controllers, routers and workers.

Q: What is a peer-to-peer botnet?
A: Unlike a classic botnet, a peer-to-peer botnet doesn't use a centralized command and control-server (C&C). Every member of the network can act as a server and/or client. The advantages from the malicious user’s point of view is the omission of the central C&C as a single-point-of-failure. From our point of view, this makes it a lot harder to take down this kind of botnet.

Architecture of traditional botnet vs P2P:

Last September, in partnership with Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), SurfNET and Kyrus Tech, Inc., Kaspersky Lab successfully disabled the dangerous Hlux/Kelihos botnet by sinkholing the infected machines to a host under our control.

A few months later, our researchers stumbled upon a new version of the malware with significant changes in the communication protocol and new “features” like flash-drive infection, bitcoin-mining wallet theft.

Now, we are pleased to announce that we have partnered with the CrowdStrike Intelligence Team, the Honeynet Project and Dell SecureWorks to disable this new botnet.

Since yesterday I've been attending the annual Hack-in-the-Box Quad-Track Security Conference in Amsterdam/NL. There's a very nice and open atmosphere here at the conference, besides the beautiful city of Amsterdam.

First, Joe Sullivan (CSO at facebook), held a very interesting keynote about the development of security innovations at facebook. For him innovation is „these hacking culture, we think about each day at facebook“. After explaining some of the newer security innovations (https-only, login notifications, login approvals [if e.g. geo-location of a user is suspicious], recognized devices, recent activity) he talked about the recent fb-scams with malicious scripts. „No one would do that, copying and pasting a script into the browser! - Yes, they do...“, he said.

Also a remarkable talk I attended was about binary planting, given by Mitja Kolsek (CTO at ACROS Security). In "Binary Planting: First Overlooked, Then Downplayed, Now Ignored" Mitja also showed a new method he called "advanced binary planting", which uses a feature from Windows' special folders (like control panel, printers, etc.) and clickjacking to make it possible to own the users' computer.

In the winter garden of the conference hotel there's a technology showcase area. Hackerspaces from all over Europe and the Netherlands are showcasing their projects here. There also is a capture-the-flag competition happening, a lock-picking and (sponsor) companies-showcase.

For more informations please see the conference website.

Since Monday, my colleagues and I have been attending the annual Chaos Communication Congress 27C3 in Berlin. For the past 27 years, the Chaos Computer Club has organised this four day conference for hackers from all over the world.

The sold-out event at Berlin's bcc covers a wide range of topics, separated into six different tracks: Community, Culture, Hacking, Making, Science and Society. Take a look at what's known as the Fahrplan or schedule.

All the talks are streamed and recorded. Check out the conference wiki.

Yesterday also marked the start of a new, CCC independent side event called BerlinSides, which focuses on infosec and is organised by Aluc.TV and SecurityBsides.com. This free event takes place at one of the oldest hackerspaces in the world, Berlin's famous c-base.