Attending AusCERT

Hi, Ziv Mador here from the antimalware team at Microsoft. Last week I attended the AusCERT conference in Gold Coast, Australia. The conference was organized by the Australian Computer Emergency Response Team, AusCERT. We have worked with this team for a long time to maximize the detection of threats that exist in Australia. Some of the signatures for these threats are added to the monthly release of the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool which is delivered to Windows systems in Australia and in other regions primarily through Automatic Updates.

During the conference, experts from Microsoft presented two sessions: Jesper Johansson gave a presentation entitled “Is that Application Really Safe?” about how to identify obvious security holes in software applications. Mark Estberg from Microsoft's IT team gave a keynote session on “Information Security as a Strategic Asset at Microsoft”. We also had an open Q&A session where delegates freely presented questions to folks from Microsoft, including myself. We received some great questions and the feedback following this session was positive. Some of the questions were around our enterprise and consumer anti-malware products and other questions focused on security features in Windows Vista.

- Ziv