The Hacker Mind

Internet domains are brittle. One could hack into a military, a foreign government, or even global commercial web services domain using flaws in the underlying architecture. Fredrik Nordberg Almroth, co-founder of Detectify, talks about how he did just that -- hack .mil, hack the top level domain of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and even Gmail or Wordpress -- just by looking for basic misconfigurations. Transcript.

Phishing is everywhere. Who among us has not seen phish in their inbox? Aviv Grafi, from Votiro, gets into the weeds about how malicious documents are formed and how they might (despite good secure posture) still end up in your inbox or browser. He’s created a rather novel method to strip out the good content from the bad without affecting your overall productivity. And maybe, just maybe, stop phishing as a viable attack vector.

Could the nudges and prompts like those from our Fitbits and Apple watches be effective in enforcing good security behavior as well? Oz Alashe, CEO and founder of CybSafe, brings his experience in the UK Intelligence Community to the commercial world along with some solid science around what motivates us to make changes in our lives. It’s not just one-off phishing examples, it’s also about providing positive feedback, even gamification, to make things stick in future insider trust programs.

Transcript here.

Say you’re an organization that’s been hit with ransomware. At what point do you need to bring in a ransomware negotiator? Should you pay, should you not?  Mark Lance, the VP of DFIR and Threat Intelligence for GuidePoint Security, provides The Hacker Mind with stories of ransomware cases he’s handled and best practices for how to handle such an event.

Small to Medium Business are increasingly the target of APTs and ransomware. Often they lack the visibility of a SOC. Or even basic low level threat analysis. Chris Gray of Deepwatch talks about the view from the inside of a virtual SOC, the ability to see threats against a large number of SMB organizations, and the changes to cyber insurance we’re seeing as a result.

More and more criminals are identified through open source intelligence (OSINT). Sometimes a negative Yelp review can reveal their true identity. Daniel Clemens, CEO of ShadowDragon, talks about his more than two decades of digital investigations, from the origins of the Code Red worm to the mass shooter in Las Vegas, with a fair number of pedophiles and human traffickers identified as well. Find out what Daniel looks for and how he does digital forensics using social media and other open source resources. 

It’s time to evolve beyond the UNIX operating system. OSes today are basically ineffective database managers, so why not build an OS that’s a database manager?  Michael Coden, Associate Director, Cybersecurity, MIT Sloan, along with Michael Stonebreaker will present this novel concept at RSAC 2023. You can learn more at dbos-project.github.io 

Incident response in the cloud. How is it different, and why do we need to pay more attention to it today, before something major happens tomorrow. James Campbell, CEO of Cado Security, shares his experience with traditional incident response, and how the cloud, with its elastic structure, able to spin up and spin down instances, is changing incident response. 

We’ve seen drug marketplaces and extremists use the Dark Web. Will generative AI tools like ChatGPT make things crazier by lowering the barrier to entry? Delilah Schwartz, from Cybersixgill, brings her extensive background with online extremism to The Hacker Mind to talk about how she’s seeing a lot of chatter in the dark web.about AI online. She discusses what is and what is not likely to happen next. 

Booth babes and rampant sexism were more of a problem in infosec in the past. That is, until Chenxi Wang spoke up. And she’s not done changing the industry. She’s an amazing person who has done an incredible number of things in a short amount of time -- a PhD in Computer Engineering, inventor of a process still used by the DoD today, a successful teaching career at CMU, a role as security analyst at Forrester, and then a role at Intel McAfee.  Today she runs a 100% woman owned VC.