SECURITY AVAR AND THE FUTURE OF


MALWARE PROTECTION Allan Dyer reports from the 15th Association of Anti-Virus Asia Researchers (AVAR) Conference, which was held this year in China.


I


have just returned from the 15th Association of Anti-Virus Asia Researchers (AVAR) Conference, held this year in Hang Zhou, China and I can say I was surprised by some of the speakers. Perhaps it would be better to say that my preconceptions were challenged. I heard Microsoft staff saying that monoculture was bad; a Chinese official publicly announce the numbers of hacked Government websites; how software developers blamed for making malware more difficult to recognise are cooperating with the security industry; and how digitally signed Windows executables can be modified without invalidating the signatures. For the first surprise, Dennis Batchelder, partner group program manager at Microsoft, was speaking on sustaining a healthy anti-virus ecosystem. Based on data from Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report, Mr Batchelder covered the worldwide threat landscape and introduced four key metrics used by his team to assess their performance. His objective is to defend the brand, and the strategy is threefold, ensure that all customers are protected (whether by Microsoft’s anti-virus or another product), disrupt the malware ecosystem by removing the value proposition and encouraging diversity, unity and value across the anti-virus ecosystem. Mr Batchelder does not want everyone using his company’s anti-virus product, because he recognises that a diverse range of protection makes it more difficult to create successful malware.


We have to be prepared to abandon outdated preconceptions to take advantage of new opportunities and to counter emerging threats


20 December 2012 | Volume 22 – Issue 4


The second surprise was from Zhang Jiang, executive deputy director at the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center of China and Computer Virus Prevention and Control Product Inspection Center, who presented his group’s research into the prevalence of malware in China. This included a survey of over seven thousand provincial government websites, 29% of which were infected.


The first two surprises were not in the message, but who the messenger was. Diversity of anti-virus protection and co-operation


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