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Lastline Co-founder and CTO, Dr. Giovanni Vigna's Malware Expertise Featured at Enigma 2018
Joint presentation with Dr. Davide Balzarotti will show how innovative malware uses packing techniques to evade detection

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 9, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ENIGMA 2018 – Lastline, the leader in advanced network-based malware protection, announced today that CTO and Co-founder Dr. Giovanni Vigna will deliver a presentation at Enigma 2018 on how malware uses packing and other obfuscation techniques to avoid detection by anti-virus (AV) systems. The presentation, "When Malware is Packin' Heat," will be delivered jointly with Dr. Davide Balzarotti, a Professor in the Digital Security Department at Eurecom Graduate School and Research Center in France. It will highlight how packing works and will show, with experimental data, that many leading anti-virus products do not really understand if programs are malicious or not, but only if they are packed or not, resulting in false positives and alert fatigue.

"Categorizing files as malicious simply because they're packed is a by-product of the pervasive and incorrect use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in malware detection," commented Dr. Vigna. "The inconvenient truth is that unless the AV industry does better than simply detecting packers, we are doomed to live in a world in which good and bad programs are misclassified, causing pain to the users, and eventually resulting in alert fatigue and missed detections."

Dr. Vigna's selection to present at Enigma 2018 reinforces his reputation as a leading malware expert and researcher. The presentation features the results of recently completed research jointly conducted with Dr. Balzarotti. The authors performed a systematization of the behavior of packers (published in the IEEE Security and Privacy Symposium) and have now applied this analysis to a large corpus of real-world malware observed across thousands of corporate networks worldwide.

The presentation will take place Wednesday, January 17th at 1:30pm. For more information, or to schedule a meeting with Dr. Vigna or Dr. Balzarotti at Enigma 2018, please contact Lastline at press@lastline.com.

About Enigma 2018
Enigma centers on a single track of engaging talks covering a wide range of topics in security and privacy. Our goal is to clearly explain emerging threats and defenses in the growing intersection of society and technology, and to foster an intelligent and informed conversation within the community and the world. Enigma is committed to fostering an open, collaborative, and respectful environment. Enigma and USENIX are also dedicated to open science and open conversations, and will make all talk media freely available on the USENIX website.

About Lastline
Lastline provides breach protection products that are innovating the way companies defend against advanced malware. We deliver the visibility, context, analysis, and integrations enterprise security teams need to quickly and completely eradicate malware-based threats before a damaging and costly data breach occurs. Headquartered in Redwood City, California with offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia, Lastline's technology is used by Global 5000 enterprises, is offered directly and through resellers and security service providers, and is integrated into leading third-party security technologies worldwide. www.lastline.com

SOURCE Lastline

For further information: press@lastline.com