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29 Apr 2008

Sophos malware experts to speak at 2nd International CARO Workshop

Paul Ducklin gives keynote address at Computer Anti-Virus Researchers' Organization event

Paul Ducklin
Paul Ducklin, Head of Technology for Asia Pacific will be giving the keynote address at the CARO event.

Sophos, a world leader in IT security and control, announced that Paul Ducklin, Head of Technology for Asia Pacific, has been selected to give the keynote address at the 2nd International CARO Workshop. CARO, the Computer Anti-Virus Researchers' Organization, is meeting on 1-2 May in The Netherlands to discuss the technical issues surrounding malware packers, decryptors and obfuscators.

"These days, packing and obfuscation tools, even those commonly and unashamedly associated with malware, are frequently used by apparently-legitimate software vendors. Programming techniques which greatly benefit malicious code are thoughtlessly copied by legitimate users, even though any number of alternatives might be available," said Paul Ducklin, head of technology asia pacific at Sophos. "Security professionals alone cannot fix this. The industry as a whole needs to go through a continuous, iterative process of identifying programming practices which can be considered lost to cybercrime; describing safer replacement techniques; and vigorously insisting that coders, vendors, suppliers, ISPs and the like make the switch from bad to good."

Ducklin is considered one of the world's leading virus experts and has presented at various industry events including: Virus Bulletin, ICSA and AVAR conferences. He has also written many articles on the virus threat and is a respected industry commentator.

Separately, on Friday 2 May at 15:45, SophosLabs malware expert Boris Lau will be presenting his paper "Dealing with virtualization packers".

"Virtualization packers translate the original code of a malware sample into their own unique set of instructions which is then interpreted by the embedded virtual machine. Unpacking samples protected by a virtualization packer is very expensive in terms of both analysis effort and the efficiency of unpacking," explained Lau. "My paper explores a new technique to deobfuscate virtualization packers to achieve semi-automated analysis of samples."

For more information on the 2nd International CARO Workshop, please visit: www.datasecurity-event.com

About Sophos

More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.

Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.