[SEMINAR] Igor Muttik - "The deadliest computer viruses"

The Cybersecurity Institute is honored to receive Professor Igor MUTTIK of Royal Holloway (U. London) for a talk on the history of computer viruses.

 

Abstract

Viruses are no longer very popular - replication property is too noticeable for malware to stay under the radar. But we would like to rewind the time back a little bit, revisit the idea of harnessing replication for beneficial purposes and argue that it may not be the best idea. We shall dissect the only known virus which was written without the author realizing what he has done and we'll also show some hilarious examples of artificial life getting out of control in computer games when  it was given viral properties.

Short bio

Prof Igor Muttik B.Sc. (Hons), Ph.D. B.Sc. (Hons), Ph.D. received his B.Sc. (Hons) and Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics from Moscow State University (MSU) in 1985 and 1989 respectively. He was a lecturer in Low Temperature Physics and in Applied Computing at the Physics Faculty of MSU in 1988-1995. He started researching computer viruses in the 1980's when the anti-virus industry was in its infancy. In 1994, Igor Muttik joined Computer Antivirus Research Organization (CARO) and then took a position of Senior Virus Researcher at Dr Solomon's Software, UK in 1995. Igor shaped the current state of the anti-malware industry by pioneering detection of non-replicating malware in 1997 when he introduced the generic protection from AOL password stealing trojans. He discovered IRC worms in 1998. He implemented the first global commercial anti-malware telemetry and meta-data gathering system for McAfee in 2007. In 2010 he introduced the concept of cryptographically marking sources of obfuscated software (now known as 'software taggants'). Igor was the founding member and a member of the Board of Anti-Malware Testing Standards Organization (AMTSO), a Vice Chair of Industry Connections Security Group (ICSG) of IEEE and a Chair of the IEEE Taggant working group. He held the position of a Senior Principal Architect at McAfee Labs (part of Intel in 2011-2016) focusing on mobile, IoT and hardware-assisted security technologies. Igor authored more than 100 patents (issued and pending) and more than 100 publications (including 5 co-authored books) in four areas: low-temperature physics, malware reverse-engineering, anti-virus technologies and security industry cooperation. He is a regular speaker at major international computer security conferences (BlackHat, RSA, DEFCON and many others). Since 2016 he runs Cyber Curio, a UK security research company.

Audience

The talk is for general technical audience; parts requiring knowledge of x86 assembly language will be short and can be safely skipped by un-initiated.