Websense at Pacsec 2011 and AVAR 2011

Last week, some members from the Websense Security Labs™ had a busy week because they attended the Pacsec 2011 and AVAR 2011 conferences.

The Pacsec 2011 conference was held in Tokyo, and addresses the increasing importance of information security in Japan. Many well-known figures in the international security industry got together with leading Japanese researchers to share best practices and technology.

The AVAR 2011 conference was held in Hong Kong, and has a reputation in the Asia Pacific IT industry as being the leading industry conference on anti malware technologies and threats. This conference is not relevant only for virus researchers, but also for corporate IT professionals who have a business and technical need to secure their system, and for those who wish to have a safe and secure computing environment and be protected against Internet threats.

Ulysses Wang and Nick Guo from Websense delivered the presentation "A New Approach to Automated JavaScript De-obfuscation" at Pacsec 2011. They presented the latest research project in Labs (which was about Javascript De-obfuscation), and showed a demo of the de-obfuscate engine with high performance. Good coverage was shown at the conference. Other researchers from different parts of the world also gave excellent presentations. 

Xue Yang and Elson Lai from Websense delivered the presentation "Dissection of exploit kits" at AVAR 2011. The team at Websense Security Labs have been tracking exploit kits threats for long time. In this presentation, they showed the analysis statistics of the top 10 exploit kits (based on the Lab research findings), and used some typical exploit kits as examples by highlighting their key features and differences. They also compared the exploit kits with current APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) attacks from several aspects. Furthermore, they dived deep into protection mechanisms that are often used by exploit kits in an attempt to evade detection. They concluded the presentation by giving predictions on what Websense sees as emerging trends in exploit kit development, and gave viable solutions to these developments.

Websense Security Labs™ will continue its focus on all threats, and keep innovating on defense technology.