Several important events in one month

4 fruitful meetings and thriving events: G Data at AMTSO, RSA , CeBIT and Infosecurity Belgium

The end of February and March have always been dedicated to several traditionally important security industry events of the year. This year, it started with an AMTSO Meeting and was followed by the RSA conference, the biggest IT security conference in the US, in the beautiful city of San Francisco.  CeBIT, is still one of the most important events in the world for the digital industry, held in Hannover, Germany. The RSA conference and CeBIT traditionally have a lot of other, minor security related meetings where we also participated in.

AMTSO
G Data is one of the members of AMTSO (www.amtso.org), an organization currently comprised of around 35 members, representing testers, vendors, academics and publishers involved in anti-malware research. As always, a lot of work was done during the workshops: The documents ”Sample selection for testing” and “The use and misuse of test files in anti-malware testing” was developed jointly, by testers and vendors. The new papers are the latest in a succession of guidelines and best practice documents already published.
The AMTSO members also discussed the problems related to testing mobile malware and agreed to expand the range of documentation to produce some easy-to-read summaries of some existing and future documents. By this, AMTSO tries to reach people who mostly don’t want to read the full deep technical details.
Furthermore, the future of AMTSO was discussed intensively at the end of this meeting and will be focused on in the next meeting, which will be held in Munich, just before the CARO workshop in May 2012. If you want to know more or even want to become a member of AMTSO, please have a look at the AMTSO website.
RSA
The main topic of the RSA conference is “The Great Cipher Mightier Than the Sword”, reflecting the history as if cryptography was being used during ancient wars and battles. As noted in an official RSA Youtube video, “today, we have sophisticated ciphers, algorithms and technology at our disposal, but these tools can only succeed in staying ahead of threats when combined with the ability to continually innovate.” A goal that can be reached if we all share our ideas and work together, during conferences like the RSA.
During this conference one can select from over 220 sessions across 17 tracks covering a wide range of critical themes and topics. Every aspect of security is being touched in the conference and especially mobile security is one of the big new topics. Have a look at the official RSA webpage if you want to know more about it or download the recorded tracks and presentations. The RSA Conference 2012 features over 350 exhibiting companies and G Data was, of course, represented at the expo exhibition hall, showing the latest products and research data.
CeBIT
With the keynote theme “Managing Trust – Trust and security in the digital world”, this year’s CeBIT was held entirely under the banner of IT security. Protection against online attacks is of fundamental significance for both businesses and private users. In line with this key subject, G Data was presenting its new 2013 security generation in Hannover. Principal highlights are the new security solutions for smartphones and tablets and the G Data 2013 security generation for home users. Besides product innovations, G Data was also presenting its new partner programme at CeBIT.
InfoSecurity Belgium
After CeBIT this event in Belgium is still the place to go to. And take if from me, this event is not the last one yet for me this year. Also InfoSecurity UK (Europe) is coming up in the next couple of weeks.

My personal schedule is nearly full for the first half of this year. With upcoming security events like the ‘CleanIT project’ and another project about ‘Fighting Botnets’ I see a good secure future ahead of us.