Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, held the international press tour ‘Cyberthreat Landscape 2009: Outcomes, Trends and Forecasts' in Moscow from 28-31 January. Kaspersky Lab's leading specialists supervising the company's operations...
Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, held the international press tour ‘Cyberthreat Landscape 2009: Outcomes, Trends and Forecasts' in Moscow from 28-31 January.
Kaspersky Lab's leading specialists supervising the company's operations in various parts of the world gave presentations on the most important information security issues to representatives of the international IT mass media.
Alexander Gostev, Director of the Global Research and Analysis Team, opened the press tour with a review of the most significant incidents in the IT underworld in 2009. The major trend of the year was a slowdown in the growth of newly emerging threats. According to the company's figures, the number of new malicious programs detected in 2009 was virtually the same as in 2008 – about 15 million. Other peculiarities of the cyberthreat landscape in 2009 included: increasingly sophisticated malware, a growth in the number of global epidemics, infected web resources, a variety of scams, and the development of malware for alternative platforms and devices. In his conclusion, Alexander offered a malware evolution forecast for 2010.
The evolution of threats targeting social networking sites was a major trend in the cyberthreat landscape in 2009, and was the topic for the discussion moderated by Stefan Tanase, Kaspersky Lab's Senior Security Researcher, EEMEA, and Ryan Naraine, Senior Security Evangelist, Kaspersky Lab Americas and Editor-in-Chief of Threatpost. In his presentation – "Why Does Disaster Always Strike in Your City? Evolution of Social Networking Threats" – Stefan Tanase gave an expert evaluation of the contemporary threats to social networks. He stated that at the current time we are seeing a rise in these threats to a new level involving automated targeted attacks against users.
In the presentation "How much do you cost? The black market price of your digital data", Dmitry Bestuzhev, Kaspersky Lab's Senior Regional Researcher in Latin America, described the types of personal information which may be of interest to cybercriminals and what determines the price of stolen information on the black market.
The internal aspects of the antivirus industry's development were covered in a presentation by Magnus Kalkuhl, Kaspersky Lab's Senior Virus Analyst in Germany. The industry has made a quantum leap in technology in recent years. As well as basic signature-based detection, vendors now provide a wide range of proactive defense technologies. However, information security products are still widely tested using static tests that evaluate their signature-based detection capabilities. "What can a quest for better test results lead to?" and "How to improve testing methodologies?" were just two of the topics proposed by Magnus Kalkuhl and Ryan Naraine for discussion during the workshop "Are signatures the new mp3? How to fight the misuse of intellectual property".
A total of 36 journalists from 24 countries participated in Kaspersky Lab's international press tour. They each had an opportunity to interview Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and Co-founder of Kaspersky Lab as well as several of the company's other leading experts.
The journalists also had a day of sightseeing and relaxation which included a visit to the Kremlin and ice karting.
The material from the press tour is available here.
