Talks & Bios

Keynote

Myriam Dunn Cavelty is a Senior Lecturer for Security Studies and Deputy for Research and Teaching at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich. She studied International Relations, History, and International Law at the University of Zurich. She was a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies (Brown University) in 2007 and fellow at the stiftung neue verantwortung in Berlin, Germany 2010–2011.

Her research focuses on the politics of risk and uncertainty in security politics and changing conceptions of (inter-​)national security due to cyber issues (cyber-​security, cyber-​war, critical infrastructure protection) in specific. In addition to her teaching, research and publishing activities, she advises governments, international institutions and companies in the areas of cyber security, cyber warfare, critical infrastructure protection, risk analysis and strategic foresight.

You can find more information on her work and publications on the official ETH website

Talks

Tracking threat actors based on publicly available data

Most malware campaigns are carried out in different phases. If we focus on attacks that affect the endpoint, web downloads and e-mails are the preferred initial access vectors. In both cases, a so-called dropper or loader is usually distributed as the first stage. If an infection occurs, the second stage, based on the initial choice, is either unpacked or downloaded from a payload delivery server. If this payload is executed, it connects to a command-and-control server, where the attacker gives specific instructions and thus controls the post-infection phase. During these phases, the malware repeatedly contacts attacker-controlled infrastructure. In this talk we want to focus on these infrastructures and try to identify and report them as quickly as possible using publicly available information.

Bio: Patrick Schläpfer - @stoerchl

Patrick is a malware analyst. Whether he is manually reversing malware or tracking threat actor infrastructures based on their domains, in almost any security area he has interest and curiosity guiding him.

Bio: Beni Urech - @beniurech

Beni is a curious security engineer with many years working in cyber defense. He likes creating tools and building systems to automate his work and to get new information out of large piles of data.

Golden mistake

In my presentation, I will focus on the anomalies that can occur when adversaries utilize golden tickets and the methods to detect these anomalies. The primary point is not the process of stealing the krbtgt account hash. I believe the artifacts surrounding the use of golden tickets are more relevant than how the theft of a krbtgt hash occurs. Using > stealing The use of golden tickets generates a lot of artifacts and anomalies that should be monitored and detected.

Bio: Alexander Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko is senior SOC Analyst at SOC Security Research Group for Kaspersky, with responsibility for investigating industry events and trends, monitoring and threat hunting. Joining Kaspersky in 2016 as an analyst in SOC Security Research Group, Alexander was engaged in the international forum of practical cybersecurity PHDays in 2019 and 2021, where – as an experienced speaker - he presented his discoveries on SOC as a way of detecting abnormal CLR activity. Beginning his career with OJSC RosNeft, he led industrial safety, troubleshooting and audits. Alexander now uses his expertise to advise customer threat detection/hunting teams on the appropriate responses for threats and trends.

Paralyzing the Node one RegEx at a time

Imagine a single input being able to takedown millions of websites. This talk delves into the significant yet frequently underestimated world of Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) vulnerabilities and their significant threat to modern web applications. We first provide a primer on the often overlooked vulnerability class and explain how it affects different popular runtimes. After, we share our research findings from scanning the most popular packages en-mass, revealing the existence of unsafe expressions in critical libraries that underpin millions of applications.

Bio: Elliot Ward

Elliot is a security researcher @ Snyk, with many years working on application security and offensive security topics. Elliot is from the United Kingdom but has been living in Zurich now for 6 years. He enjoys hacking, craft beer, cats, skateboarding and snowboarding.

TA505 and the Dark Side of GoogleAds: Unraveling the Dangerous Campaigns

The e-crime group TA505 has been observed to leverage campaigns using Google Ads. The Command and Control (C&C) server used in this latest campaign was reportedly recycled from a similar operation that took place on February 7th 2020. The similarities in the initial attack chain, including the reuse of the C&C server, is in line with the group’s operations. The group’s modus operandi usually involves a multi-stage process of downloaders and short-lived C&C servers. The recent campaigns and the use of new tools shed light on the group’s evolving tactics, which now seem to target not just organizations by extortion and file encryption using the infamous Cl0p ransomware, but also regular individuals’ cryptocurrency wallets and accounts.

Bio: Antonis Terefos - @Tera0017

Antonis Terefos is a Threat Intelligence Researcher focusing on Cybercrime. His expertise includes reverse engineering, malware analysis and creating tools automating malware reversing.

How to break, then fix, differential privacy on finite computers

Differential privacy is a provable approach to publishing or releasing insights from sensitive data, without inadvertently leaking individual information. In many ways, differential privacy is like cryptography: even though its basic building blocks are conceptually simple, their implementation can be surprisingly tricky. This talk presents the result of our applied research about floating-point vulnerabilities on differential privacy implementations. First, we explain what it means for differential privacy software to be vulnerable to attacks, and how to reason about the severity of such vulnerabilities. Second, we present precision-based attacks, a new class of vulnerabilities which affects several open-source libraries. Finally, we outline a new technique to address this vulnerability, and all other possible attack vectors based on floating-point behavior.

Bio: Damien Desfontaines - @TedOnPrivacy (Twitter), @tedted@hachyderm.io (Mastodon)

Damien works as a Scientist at Tumult Labs, a startup focusing on making it easier to share or publish insights from sensitive data, using differential privacy. Before that, he led the anonymization consulting team at Google, and got his PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich.

Cultural Differences in Social Engineering: A Swiss Perspective

This talk will discuss the role of cultural differences in social engineering attacks in Switzerland. Examples of real-world attacks will be presented based on what cultural differences made them successful.

Bio: Dominik Nufer - LinkedIn

As a senior security tester, Dominik improves the integral security of a wide range of systems and organizations: from electronics and networks to web applications, attack simulations and social engineering. After working as a software engineer for over ten years, he joined the testing team at Redguard AG in 2016. Dominik not only tests systems and hardware, but also additionally leads one of the technical security testing teams at Redguard AG. He holds a Master of Advanced Studies in Information Technology with specialization in Security (BFH Bern) and teaches at BFH in the area of Internet of Things (IoT).