Next week at the 23rd Virus Bulletin International Conference (VB2013), this year located in Berlin, Germany, I’ll be co-presenting a paper with David Harley from ESET. For those of you who’ll be attending, be sure to stop by and watch us! We’ll be at the first Corporate Stream presentation after lunch, at 2PM on Thursday.
The presentation itself is called “Mac hacking: the way to better testing?” We’ll be discussing whether it’s possible to do meaningful, real-world tests on OS X anti-malware products, in light of Apple’s many security features. We also plan to talk about the challenges of testing on other emerging, popular operating systems.
Testing is always a controversial topic, because there’s about as many opinions on what constitutes a relevant and accurate testing methodology as there are stars in the sky. It’s also a bit trickier to negotiate on OS X. While there are fewer samples to sort through than on Windows, that doesn’t make it any quicker or easier, especially since Mac malware testing is a new area for a lot of testers.
Both David and I have been involved with Mac malware and third-party testing in different capacities for quite a number of years, so it was a lot of fun for us to be able to combine these two areas of interest and really dig in. If you want to read a little more from David and me about the paper, and about the both of us, Virus Bulletin has a speaker spotlight article here. If you do attend the presentation, be sure to stop by and say hi!
