The current threat landscape around cyber attacks is complex and hard to understand even for IT pros. The media coverage on recent events increases the challenge by putting fundamentally different attacks into the same category, often labeled as advanced persistent threats (APTs). The resulting mix of attacks includes everything from broadly used, exploit-kit driven campaigns driven by cyber criminals, to targeted attacks that use 0-day vulnerabilities and are hard to fend off – blurring the threat landscape, causing confusion where clarity is most needed.
This presentation analyzes a specific incident – last March?s RSA breach, explaining the techniques used by the attackers and detailing the vulnerability used to gain access to the network. It further explores the possible mitigation techniques available in current software on the OS and application level to prevent such attacks from reoccurring.
Rodrigo Rubira Branco (BSDaemon) works as Principal Security Researcher at Intel Corporation and is the Founder of the Dissect || PE Malware Analysis Project. Held positions as Director of Vulnerability & Malware Research at Qualys and as Chief Security Research at Check Point where he founded the Vulnerability Discovery Team (VDT) and released dozens of vulnerabilities in many important software. In 2011 he was honored as one of the top contributors to Adobe Vulnerabilities in the past 12 months. Previous to that, he worked as Senior Vulnerability Researcher in COSEINC, as Principal Security Researcher at Scanit and as Staff Software Engineer in the IBM Advanced Linux Response Team (ALRT) also working in the IBM Toolchain (Debugging) Team for PowerPC Architecture. He is a member of the RISE Security Group and is the organizer of Hackers to Hackers Conference (H2HC), the oldest and biggest security research conference in Latin America. He is an active contributor to open-source projects (like ebizzy, linux kernel, others). Accepted speaker in lots of security and open-source related events as H2HC, Black Hat, Hack in The Box, XCon, VNSecurity, OLS, Defcon, Hackito, Ekoparty, Troopers and others.