Presented at
CactusCon 12 (2024),
Feb. 16, 2024, 3 p.m.
(60 minutes).
“Natalie Hamiilton,” a previously known phishing persona, has reemerged both with a vengeance and a power drill, as part of a never ending scam. She was first discovered in November of 2022 and is still active with no signs of slowing down. Scams like Natalie’s are not only working, they’re working for a very long time - showing us where we fall short as an industry. We are addressing the symptom, but not the problem: large-scale and resilient attack infrastructure. These attackers are intimately aware of defense TTPs and as such have built and maintained entire operations specifically curated for obfuscation and continuous operation. This makes it extremely difficult to defend against them.
As we dive into the story featuring Natalie and the power drill, we will show evidence on how adversaries created an infrastructure for delivering scams weaponized by cloud services capabilities to create distributed, ongoing stealthy and persistent attacks.
To address the gap between defense and the adversaries, we will cover attack tactics and correlate them to security tools, threat intelligence capabilities, and processes. As defenders we mainly focus on the detection and mitigation, which the adversaries acknowledge and adapt accordingly to maximize scam revenue. We are helping the adversaries by focusing on the front end rather than the infrastructure powering these scams. This dichotomy causes a gap between attackers and defenders, and we typically end up on the losing side.
Presenters:
-
Or Katz
- Akamai, Principal Lead Security Researcher
Or Katz is a security veteran, with years of experience at industry leading vendors, currently serves as principal lead security researcher for Akamai. Katz is a frequent Speaker in security conferences and published numerous articles, blogs and white papers on threat intelligence and defensive techniques. Data driven security researcher that is constantly looking on how to move security challenges into the science and solutions space.
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