Posted by Virus Bulletin on Jul 26, 2013
We speak to VB2013 presenters Axelle Apvrille and Karine de Pontevès about their research interests and what they aim to bring to VB2013.
The VB2013 conference takes place this autumn (2-4 October) in Berlin, with an exciting programme that covers many of today's most pertinent security-related topics.
Today, we speak to Axelle Apvrille and Karine de Pontevès, who will speak at VB2013 about Android in-app advertisement kits.
Tell us a little bit about yourself - your job and your responsibilities.
Axelle: "I am part of a small mobile malware research team at Fortinet. We receive mobile malware and focus on the most interesting/new pieces of malware to reverse engineer them and understand what they're doing. Then, we write papers about that research."
Karine: "I work as a reasearcher/virus analyst for Fortinet. My job is basically to provide reliable malware protection through malware analysis and detection, and raise and assert Fortinet's profile through both technical and all-audience papers/articles."
Can you give us a brief outline of what you will be speaking about at VB2013 and why your presentation particularly relevant to the security community?
"We will be presenting our findings on security and privacy issues of Android adkits."
"What's particularly interesting is that we haven't done the study on 10 pieces of malware, or on one adkit in particular, but on over 100,000 samples and over 60 adkits. Also, our study is not focusing on permissions but rather on exactly what the code does, regardless of permissions it asks."
What can delegates learn from your presentation?
"Everybody knows that adkits have security and privacy issues. What people do not know is exactly to what extent. We provide (short) code examples which are really striking. Delegates will probably try to install an anti-adkit after the talk."
What other presentations are you looking forward to?
Karine: "In particular, I'm looking forward to the Ruhr University Bochum team's 'Hypervisor-based, hardware-assisted system monitoring', Gunter Ollman's 'Pentesting with live malware' and Cathal Mullaney's 'Billion dollar botnets'.
Axelle: "I'm looking forward to the paper on in-memory ROP payload detection; Samir Mody's paper on Android malware obfuscation; the nexGIN RC team's paper on hunting for rogue smartphone malware applications; the Sophos paper on classifying PUAs in the mobile environment and the Bitdefender paper on the security of applications in the Google and Apple markets.
Have you visited Berlin before? What are you looking forward to seeing/doing whilst in town?
Karine: "Yes I have. My suggestion: rent a bike during the day and party at night!"
What else are you looking forward to at VB2013?
Axelle: "I'm looking forward to meeting contacts and colleagues."
Karine: "I'm looking forward to making new contacts and to sightseeing in Berlin."
Axelle Apvrille and Karine de Pontevès will present 'Analysis of Android in-app advertisement kits' at 10:50 on Thursday 3 October.
The full programme for VB2013, including abstracts for each paper, can be viewed here.
Read more about why you should attend VB2013 - and download our letter templates as a guide for justifying to your budget holder why you should attend VB2013.
VB2013 takes place 2-4 October 2013 in Berlin, Germany - online registration is now open - we'd love to see you there!
Posted on 26 July 2013 by Helen Martin
