"As in previous years, it was an exciting meeting, with key figures of the sector from all over the world", comments Gábor Szappanos, the head of VirusBuster's virus lab, and board member of the virus lab, and board member of the Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO), an international alliance of leading antivirus companies. "The conference was also a great opportunity for informal, personal discussions with our colleagues. We had a busy, but inspiring and very useful time", adds Péter Sulyok, VirusBuster's director of product development.

Virus Bulletin, an independent medium of the computer security industry, has carried out comparative testing of antivirus products for over a decade. It issued its first prestigious "Virus Bulletin 100%" awards back in 1998. The magazine's annual conferences have also gained worldwide reputation. This year's event in Vancouver marked the 20th anniversary of this global forum.

Below, VirusBuster's experts provide a brief overview of what they found the most interesting in VB2010's presentations.

The threat of social networking

The fact that the anniversary conference's keynote address was delivered by Facebook's Nick Bilogorskiy rather than a representative of a security software or analyst company highlights the pivotal role that social networks play in today's corporate and home IT security landscape. As it could be expected, Bilogorsky's presentation, entitled "Threats to the Social Web", discussed, among others, the botnets targeting Facebook.

These include Zeus, Bredolab, and the infamous Koobface, which was even named after the leading community portal. Bilogorsky surprised his audience by announcing that members of the Koobface gang have been identified, but he said that he couldn't disclose details due to the ongoing investigation.

According to the Facebook expert, e-mail is dying. "If you want to know what future looks like, check what teenagers are doing", he said, quoting survey data, which showed that social networking (in hours spent) has surpassed e-mail. One statement he made on his company's hierarchy is also a good indicator of our age: Facebook's security team reports to the lawyers and not to engineering.

Stefan Tanase from antivirus company Kaspersky Lab investigated another aspect of social networking: its role in automated targeted attacks. Cybercriminals are using such attacks to get deep inside corporate networks, through targeting one or several specific employees. All the personal information they share can easily be collected by someone with bad intentions. Given the popularity of intellectual property theft and corporate espionage, it is becoming extremely important to implement new, effective security strategies, the expert said.

Another social phenomenon, file sharing, was also brought into limelight at the conference. One morning John Alexander from defense giant Lockheed Martin woke up to headline news that plans for a US presidential helicopter had been leaked to an Iranian IP address via peer-to-peer (P2P, file sharing) software

Though he was happy to discover that the story wasn't about his company, the case made him start a project to review their policies, processes, and controls around P2P software. The expert arrived at a very logical question: Why put so much effort into this problem, instead of forbidding the users from installing unauthorized applications?"

Source: VirusBuster