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Back from Vienna/VB2007

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Hi again, WOW so a month now since the VB2007 Conference in Vienna, Austria. Vienna was beautiful!

Where has the time gone, since then!?

I couldn’t let too much more time pass before saying a few words, as I’m finally off the road to be able to sit and gather some thoughts on it.

 We (The Microsoft Malware Protection Center, a.k.a The MMPC) were a platinum sponsor of this year’s conference and many folks from the team traveled far and wide to get there from our Ireland, Australia, and U.S. labs to attend and present at the event.

I want to thank all who attended my Sponsor's Presentation at the conference. During the presentation I gave an overview of Microsoft’s entry into the anti-virus market, how we have been working to continually improve our research and response capabilities, and also introduced some of the key industry hires we have made over the past year.

As usual, it was great to see everyone; the best and brightest folks in the anti-malware industry who do this work; keep you protected and informed and talk about what’s been, what’s next and what needs to be done. It also gave attendees the chance to meet and discuss important issues with some of our researchers, including Jimmy Kuo, Katrin Totcheva, and Jakub Kaminski, all who’ve been in attendance at VB for years. Folks also got to meet some of the team who attended for the first time, like Alex Carp, Kyle Larsen and Todd Gaiser.

We had some productive discussions with attendees regarding new threats to Internet users, anti-virus testing methodologies, how the MMPC is evolving, and where the best restaurants in Vienna are located. J  Much discussion went into how to transform the WildList to better represent the real threats of today. Those conversations, as I’m sure you can imagine, were quite lively and just an opinion or two were shared.

 We look forward to the changes that are likely to develop from these discussions. I really enjoyed the session on sample sharing that Dmitry Gryaznov and Joe (Feech) Telafici presented, as well as the discussions that followed – especially the interview Feech gave to the “BBC” J. The explosive growth in malware presents some interesting engineering challenges, like in the area of storage that the anti-malware industry needs to address.

Onward we continue to go, both as a collective industry and as individual organizations, to drive these programs and change forward. I’m looking forward to see how some of these conversations play out; I clearly plan to have the MMPC at the forefront (hehe) of those conversations, as we have had many customers tell us they want and expect us to be there. They can count on it.

October and November are busy months for us…stay tuned!

Vinny Gullotto

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