Twice every year, analysts from Kaspersky meet for a couple of days to brainstorm over ongoing security issues, think about new ways to protect the users and fight against new breeds of threats.

The first summit for 2011 took place earlier in February, and brought together over 100 people from various departments inside the company. Although the exact subjects of the talks are secret as usual, the discussions revolved around subjects such as Android threats, targeted attacks, whitelisting and digital certificates.

After an amazing weekend in Erfurt, Germany I’m back to an even colder Sweden. This weekend I participated in the annual Kaspersky Student Conference: IT-Security for the Next Generation (European Cup). This is a conference where we at Kaspersky invite students who have submitted interesting and innovative research papers to come and present them. So we don’t just read about their research, but also get the chance to meet them face to face and share some of our research.

As a participant from Kaspersky I was also a speaker at the event. During the two days I gave one speech about the false perception that Unix/Linux based operating systems do not need any protection against malicious code. To demonstrate my points I also invited everyone to a workshop where they had achance to get their hands on this topic practically.

Last week I got the chance to drop by the IIT campus in Mumbai, India, for the Techfest 2011 conference.

This was a great opportunity to meet some of the world’s brightest students and to listen to some very interesting lectures from people such as Richard Stallman – who needs no introduction, William Baker – the structural engineer for the famous Burj Khalifa, KS Pua – the inventor of the pen drive, or Jaap Haartsen, the engineer who developed the Bluetooth specification. For a full lineup of the speakers, you can go here: http://www.techfest.org/lectures/

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.

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!

Apa kabar! AVAR 2010 has just finished. It took place on the beautiful Bali island of Indonesia.

AVAR is the biggest international anti-malware event in the Asia-Pacific region. It is one of the best opportunities for industry experts from around the world to get together in a relaxed environment and discuss the latest hot topics. The papers presented in the last two days cover subjects ranging from PDF exploits, targeted attacks and mobile malware, to AV testing and rogue software.

We are proud to announce that Kaspersky Lab was the most active presenter here, with exactly 4 speakers:

• Roel Schouwenberg - Adobe: The currently most exploited software in the world
• Denis Maslennikov - Getting rich with mobile malware: the how, the where, and the $$$
• Evgeny Smirnov - Image spam filtering by optical pattern matching
• Stefan Tanase - Surviving Targeted Attacks: Beyond Today and Tomorrow

And that’s not all: our own Stefan Tanase managed to win the Best Speaker Award, for the second year in a row. Congratulations!

We're spending our last day here in paradise enjoying the beautiful places this island has to offer. Until next year, selamat tinggal and have a wonderful weekend!

    This year the Virus Bulleting Conference, one of the most prestigious annual events in the anti-virus industry, took place in Vancouver, Canada.

It was a special event for Kaspersky Lab since we had a record-breaking total of seven speakers:  who covered the most interesting and hot topics such as mobile malware, on-line fraud and black markets, targeted attacks. Last, but not least, we were able to reveal some new details about Stuxnet in a joint presentation with Microsoft. The VB conference demonstrated again how important cooperation between researchers is. Between the joint work on Stuxnet and the Zeus-related arrests we saw how AV researchers from different countries; cultures and companies join forces to fight cyber crime and to make this world safer.

Every year the AV community gathers at VB - next year it will be in Barcelona, Spain and I hope we will also have good news to share again.

PS We will be posting the Kaspersky VB papers online over the next few days here http://www.kaspersky.com/VB_2010

There are people who think that all hackers should be sent to the desert - well, once a year this dream comes true.
Greetings from Las Vegas where two major security conferences just ended.

As every year Black Hat took place here at the Caesars Palace. People from around the globe gave presentations about ATM-hacking, reverse-engineering and other security related topics distributed over 11 tracks in two days. The host casino offers for this event lots of space, so you walk long until you get in the target room where you want to attend the presentation.
At the vendor area you may always find interesting people to talk to or get information about security products and services. This year a big group of Kaspersky people attended Black Hat 2010 (from the US, Japan, Romania, France and Germany).

Last year when we were in Dubrovnik, Croatia, I made a WiFi study. The statistics I obtained showed quite a dangerous situation regarding security in the local WiFi networks. In many cases the network traffic wasn’t encrypted at all and susceptible to a data leak.

One year later the subject of WiFi security is even more apparent. If you remember, the Google Sniffing beta recently made their own study, and my colleague Costin Raiu wrote a blog post about it, giving important security tips to protect yourself and your network from intruders.

This year our Security Analysts Summit takes place in Limassol, Cyprus. So, I decided to see what the local WiFi security situation is, and what the Google Sniffing beta would find if they performed it right here.

Aside from the beautiful views (you can see in the picture above) we can say the following:

Today was the opening day of the CARO 2010 Workshop, which is hosted by F-Secure in Helsinki.

Mikko Hypponen, the CRO of F-Secure opened the conference by announcing this year's theme, which is Big Numbers. With between 30,000-50,000 new malicious samples daily, this is a very hot topic in the industry.

One of the highlights of the conference was undoubtedly the keynote address by Dr Alan Solomon.