Anticipating Black Hat

I was at CiscoLive a few weeks ago in the 100 degree+ heat of Las Vegas and like other cybersecurity professionals I am off to Sin City again next week for Black Hat.

Now Black Hat has become a technically-focused little brother of the RSA Security Conference, chock full of cybersecurity geeks at the beginning of the week and forensic investigators, researchers, analysts, and hackers as Black Hat turns to Defcon.  Given this focus, I’m looking forward to hearing about a number of things including:

1.      Anti-ransomware fact and hyperbole.  Last December, I predicted a rise in ransomware in my blog, even going so far to talk about enterprise ransomware that impacted multiple systems on the network simultaneously.  Unfortunately, I was right about this one as ransomware has become a cybersecurity scourge of 2016.  Nasty stuff and once you’re hit, there is little you can do except replace the hard drive, reimage systems and hope you’ve done a recent full backup.  Alternatively, you can pony up a bunch of rubles to Vladimir in Odessa.  Nevertheless, there are in fact ways to prevent ransomware before it bricks your system.  New types of algorithms can scan files before execution and finger ransomware.  Virtual sandboxes can execute malware without impacting system resources.  You can also condition your employees to ignore social engineering scams using tools like PhishMe and Wombat Security.  Anyway, I expect everyone to be talking about ransomware and am anxious to learn the latest about threats, countermeasures and industry rhetoric.   

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