Gruezi (Swiss for "hello") from the Hashdays conference, together with my colleagues Marta Janus and Marco Preuss, held in beautiful Lucerne in Switzerland . The event is hosted by DEFCON Switzerland, which was founded in 2008. Their mission is to educate in IT security skills and know-how. According to them, the best way to show how to prevent systems from becoming unsecure or getting hacked is to introduce and demosntrate current attack techniques. Additional fact: this is the third edition of the conference and it's sold out for the first time. This already proves the high quality of the event. Honestly, this is easily one the best conferences I attended so far. The quality of both the content and the delivering has been outstanding so far. I can recommend anyone interested in IT security taking part in it.

Every company has its basis, the community, which greatly helps to improve the products by giving feedback and input. Kaspersky Lab can count itself lucky to have very diligent people which honorary moderate our official Kaspersky Lab forums, test our beta versions to find bugs before new products hit the market and create community projects.

This week we finally met some of our friends in person since they visited our German office in Ingolstadt to exchange ideas and discuss possibilities to improve our cooperation. Colleagues from retail support, the localization and testing team as well as virus analysts attended the meeting from our side.

We learned about community projects and what role Kaspersky Lab could play in it to support the undertakings. We discussed our products and my colleague Stefan Ortloff demonstrated how to reverse malware.

Looks like Moscow, but it isn't. Winter has now officially started off in Germany.

Overall, this was a very fruitful event. Thank you all for visiting us despite the adverse weather conditions. And an additional BIG thank you to all the active people in the community, your help is greatly appreciated!

This was the first meeting of this kind in Germany, but certainly not the last!

It’s the same every year: as soon as Valentine's Day gets close, all the spammers concentrate on this event to spread unsolicited mails – sometimes with malicious little gifts.

An alltime favorite gift when it comes to Valentine's Day: flowers! This spam offers great savings when you buy flowers, but tries to trick you into a subscription, where you’ll get charged $9.95 every month via your credit card. Make sure you don't fall for it!