Agnitum guys attended VB2012 in Dallas

This year’s VB conference took place 26-28 September 2012 and was stationed in Dallas, TX, USA. It’s been the first US-based event since 2004 (Chicago). Berlin will host the event in 2013.

As VirusBulletin web-site goes "Over its 21-year history, the VB conference has become a major highlight of the anti-malware calendar, with many of its regular attendees citing it as the anti-malware event of the year."

This year Agnitum guys decided to go transatlantic and check for themselves. Konstantin Kutikov, Head of Malware Research & QA, and Alex Kazachkovsky, Chief Software Engineer, were delegated to contribute their technical insights to the conference, as well as do some competitive intelligence and benchmarking.

Since Agnitum acquired a virus lab from VirusBuster and integrated it with onshore resources, we’ve reinstated ourselves as antivirus vendor and researcher. Although we’ve been on the antivirus market since 2007 it was our first conference as AV provider, unlike before when Agnitum was viewed as old school firewall guys.

VB conference — one of the most influential in the industry — was, no doubt, a cool coming-out party for us. The general impression was: "Heck, all this isn’t just about booze!" In fact, it was several hectic hours of presentations before one had a chance to unwind :-) And the speakers are top notch. A kaleidoscope of opinions, papers, experts and enthusiasts.

As always at VB, the program offered two streams: technical and commercial. Both attracted mixed audience including zealous anti-malware researchers and cyber-security experts along with profit and non-profit enterprises from across the globe.

Participants and attendees could choose from 10+ presentations per day. Follow the link to view the abstracts.

In general, VB2012 touched upon the most burning issues of modern Internet security, like user privacy, as well as industry trends. It was good to make sure we are totally in the loop of things and have work-outs in many vulnerable aspects brought up by conference speakers. Our users will be able to check out these, yet anonymous, work-outs in future Outpost versions and see for themselves.

All in all, it was a bunch of great meetings and useful conversations. Now that Konstantin and Alex are home safe and sound, they have a lot of ideas to process and that feeling of plentitude, mind-wise and stomach-wise (as partying was awesome by all means!). It’s always good to be part of the community, however tough and competitive, and know your product and yourself developing that product make real impact.

Networking with other industry professionals makes a lot of good. Likewise, we can give those guys some hints as of how to boost antivirus performance or apply preventive measures where reactive fails to work. We guess this is the spirit and this is why VB conferences have been assembled for so many years with equal success.

Long story short, we are looking forward to attending VB in the future!