The conference is designed to bring together experts from industry, academia, and government to present and discuss, in an open environment, the latest advances and discoveries in the field of malicious and unwanted software. Techniques, economics and legal issues surrounding the topic of Malware, and the methods to detect and control them will be discussed.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” says the old proverb. The main focus of next year’s conference will be centered on that question. Arguably, many of the current solutions for fighting Malware (essentially based on a combination of detection, mitigation or removal) fall within the “cure” category. On the other hand, due to the increasing sophistication of Malware and of the Malware writing “industry”, the efficacy of such solutions in the long run is at stake (the so-called “scalability problem”, evoked in this year’s conference). Consequently, several companies and researchers are starting to suggest solutions that could be considered to be more on the preventative side. These include: software white listing, tighter code signature and authentication policies, tighter models of access control at the O/S level, and others.

Thus, the organizers of Malware 2009 solicit original written contributions addressing these issues and research questions. This includes (but is not restricted to) papers describing research, development or deployment of such preventative approaches, position papers (ideally backed by quantitative data) arguing for or against them, etc. The proceedings of the conference, including accepted papers, will be published as a paper and CD proceedings and will be included in the IEEE Xplore digital library. In addition, authors from the best and selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version to a special issue of the Journal of Computer Virology, published by Springer. These extended papers will undergo a separate review process.
For more information on Malware 2009 or if you are interested in contributing to the organization of the conference please contact Dr. Fernando C. Colon Osorio, General Program Chair, Malware 2009 at fcco@cs.wpi.edu or visit our web site http://isiom.wssrl.org.