Finishing off strong, today saw the last day of Hacker Halted 2020 talks
Zoey Selman shared her expertise on OSINT with tips and tricks based on years of experience on how to better search for targets from other countries. There are a lot of different cultural and technical differences between every country on the planet and if you try searching for a foreign user the same way as you would a local user it’s likely to be a lot more fruitful if you know which social networks and search engines are popular in which country.
Tyrone Wilson tackled the age old problem of “I cant get a job without experience and I can’t get experience without a job”. by Demonstrating how to build a practice environment using the Security Onion distro of linux and using pcap files from CTF events to give yourself real life data to practice blue teaming and analysis on. The majority of recruiters pay attention to how much self-study time people are putting into learning cyber security outside of their day job. So having documented proof of your lab activities gives you a boost.
Sean O’Connor has obviously spent a lot of time tracking and documenting the workings of all the active groups behind name and shame ransomware, and kindly shared a large chunk of that research with us. Each group behaves slightly differently and they are all somehow interlinked with members changing teams/names and sharing techniques. We also see how most of these firms tend to operate in ex-soviet union countries and as long as they target western countries and avoid friendly neighboring countries seem to enjoy some level of impunity from prosecution.
Briana Leddy finishes off the conference with a sales pitch / demonstration of her companies software. But as a technically minded person she gives some good insight and description into how AI can be setup to help spot and respond cyber threats quicker and cheaper than a human team.
Big thanks to EC-Council for setting this up and not letting Covid stop all the presenters delivering very useful and interesting presentations to the rest of us.
Urban Security Research 