Outbreaks during conferences!

Will there be a launch of a new aggressive virus or worm during the EICAR conference that remains the question for the next days. During our observations for the last 3 years we always got some outbreaks during several anti-virus conferences like EICAR, Virus Bulletin and AVAR. The EICAR conference is nearly ready to start so lets see what we will get. At this moment I'm not thinking we will see a large outbreak as most of the attacks are a little bit under control these days but you'll never know.
Hopefully we don't get an attack inside like happened on WLAN IT conference in London just a week ago. Apparently the hackers created malicious WLAN hotspots with forged log-in web page, that tries to install malware on users computer that logs to the hotspot and tries to access web over it. While technically this kind of attack is rather simple to accomplish, it raises worrying implications on use of free wireless hotspots. As business travellers frequently use whatever connection is available, and carry quite important data in their laptops. The best way to protect yourself against such attack, is to have up to date operating system and browser, with Anti-Virus and firewall installed. Also it is important to have any critical connections done over VPN, and not to use unsecure connection for any service that requires user name and password. So if you are using open WLAN connection, do not log in to any service that requires user name and password and does not use SSL. If you really need to use such service, use VPN connection to your company office and route the connection from there. Or use some proxy service that provides SSL such as Anonymizer
Oh yes, keep your eyes open at this spot as I will report to this Blog straight from the EICAR conference in Malta with some pictures. You can find more about the conference at www.eicar.org .