Peter Gutmann: The Commercial Malware Industry

Malware has come a long way since it consisted mostly of small-scale (if prolific) nuisances perpetrated by script kiddies. Today, it's increasingly being created by professional programmers and managed by international criminal organisations. This talk will look at the methods and technology employed by the professional malware idustry, which is turning out "product" that matches (and in some cases even exceeds) the sophistication of standard commercial software, but with far more sinister applications. Peter Gutmann is a researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, working on the design and analysis of cryptographic security architectures. He helped write the popular PGP encryption package, has authored a number of papers and RFC's on security and encryption including the X.509 Style Guide for certificates, and is the author of "Cryptographic Security Architecture: Design and Verification" (published by Springer-Verlag) and the open source cryptlib security toolkit. In his spare time he pokes holes in whatever security systems and mechanisms catch his attention and grumbles about PKIs and the (un-)usability of security applications.