AVAR 2018: Event That United The Who's Who Of Cybersecurity

Scientists, researches, chief information security officers, chief information officers, IT professionals, government agencies, students, name them and they were present at the 21st Association of AntiVirus Asia Researchers International Conference held in Goa this year. The 21st AVAR 2018 conference, hosted by K7 Computing, marked the collaboration and exchange of ideas between noted personalities of the cybersecurity world.

The idea behind the event was to emphasize on collective efforts and cooperation on the behalf of security specialists, government organizations, industry insiders, and security agencies because in today’s era, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the same advanced new age technologies to breach an organization, that cybersecurity companies use to protect an organization.

Therefore, AVAR 2018 saw participation from several security experts to work towards a ‘Dynamic Security Ecosystem’ in order to protect individuals as well as enterprises from the evolving threat landscape. AVAR, this year, saw participation from over 60 speakers from 25 global companies like ESET, McAfee, TrendMicro, ThreatBook, Fortinet, K7 Computing and so on, who presented around 41 research papers.

“AVAR is bringing researchers of different cybersecurity companies together who would otherwise be competing and researchers are always very cooperative about it. There’s always upcoming threats and the security landscape has been changing a lot since we started, so to be able to interact with other researchers, to exchange information and getting new perspective on things is what AVAR is about, and we hope corporates are getting value from this conference,” says Mr Allan Dyer, Chairman of AVAR.

Some of the research that was presented in the conference was based on interesting topics such as cryptojacking, banking malware, DDoS attacks, artificial intelligence in cybersecurity, cybercrime and cyber espionage and so on.

“Technical conferences like this really discuss techniques and not just share malware samples, which is really important for cybersecurity. K7 computing has been associated with AVAR for a very long time and we wanted to bring it to India because Indians are very talented and they need this kind of exposure, which is of a global level,” says Mr Jayaraman Kesavardhanan, Founder and CEO of K7 Computing.

The conference also saw participation from Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). “Quality of speakers at AVAR is phenomenal and it is a wonderful event that K7 Computing has organized. Indian companies should start taking the centre stage and this is a welcome step. Now the time is right and people are willing to become entrepreneurs and come forward, so we should see this opportunity now and momentum should be built up,” said Dr. Sanjay Bahl, Director General of the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team.

(The author was hosted by K7 Computing at AVAR 2018 held in Goa)