Botconf 2022
Last week Botconf held its 9th edition in a beautiful town, Nantes, in France. There were around 300 participants. After the year of the online conference, it was such a great experience to be able to meet with people again and enjoy the great talks about security, malware analyses, and botnets.
Nantes
Nantes is the sixth-largest in France on the Loire river. I enjoyed the week in this beautiful city. The weather was very friendly, and I had several opportunities to walk around the city. There are several interesting sights and places to see. I would recommend mostly two locations that I liked the most:
This place called The machines of the isle of Nantes is magical and full of breath-taking machines in the shape of different animals, from small butterflies to a gigantic elephant. All machines have moving parts, or they can even move as a whole. To our luck, the conference organizers chose this place for the gala evening, so we could enjoy the company of these beautiful animals while chatting with other attendees. It was a very lovely evening, not to mention the great food and drinks that were served to us.
In the center of the city is a beautiful and relaxing Japanese-style garden on an artificial island created in 1831. It is a great place to sit down and meditate for a bit before returning to a busy modern everyday life.
Bonus fun fact
You do not need to mow the grass if you have animals to eat it for you. Yes, Nantes moved from noisy mowers to adorable animals, and I am delighted about that. Just next to my hotel, I have a perfect view of these two sheeps living their best life in the city’s center. I also saw a couple of them around the Castle of the Dukes of Brittany, so this is probably not such a rare thing. Now I want them in Brno as well.
Interesting Talks
During the three days of the conference, there were plenty of interesting talks. Once the recording is available, I would recommend giving a watch to the following:
- Private Clubs For Hackers: How Private Forums Shape The Malware Market presented by Luca Brunoni, David Décary-Hétu
- Identifying Malware Campaigns On A Budget presented by Max ‘Libra’ Kersten, Rens Van Der Linden
- See Ya Sharp: A Loader’S Tale presented by Max ‘Libra’ Kersten
- A Fresh Look Into The Underground Card Shop Ecosystem presented by Beatriz Pimenta Klein, Lidia López Sanz
- Detecting Emerging Malware On Cloud Before Virustotal Can See It presented by Anastasia Poliakova, Yuriy Yuzifovich
- Jumping The Air-Gap: 15 Years Of Nation-State Efforts presented by Alexis Dorais-Joncas, Facundo Munoz
- Qakbot Malware Family Evolution presented by Markel Picado Ortiz, Carlos Rubio Ricote
Note that some of the talks were targeted at the present audience only. More reasons to come next year, right?
My Talk
I gave a talk about my research and experience with Yara called Yara: Down the Rabbit Hole Without Slowing Down. It was short talked, focusing on practical aspects — how to write effective and fast rules and how even simple change can drastically improve the speed of scanning. I also mentioned my paper that is proposing changes in Yara for even faster matching for regular expressions.
I am also planning to write a longer blog post about proposed changes following the update of my PR in the upstream repository because there are several merge conflicts, and the PR deserves an update overall.
I am sharing my slides, and once available, I will also add the link for the recording that should be published on the YouTube channel.
More Resources
I would like to also share with you a few other blog posts about Botconf where you can read more about further talks and overall experience:
- The final schedule with slides from other talks
- My impression of Botconf 2022 by Max Kersten
- Amazing wrap-ups by Xavier Mertens
Botconf 2023
Next year, there will be an incredible 10th edition of Botconf, which this time should be held in Strasbourg, again during April. I am definitely planning to attend, and I am looking forward to seeing you there.
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