Inside the "Meet Desai" Attack: Defending Distributed Targets from Distributed Attacks

Presented at DEF CON 25 (2017), July 27, 2017, 3 p.m. (45 minutes)

In October of 2016, a teenage hacker triggered DTDoS attacks against 9-1-1 centers across the United States with five lines of code and a tweet. This talk provides an in-depth look at the attack, and reviews and critiques the latest academic works on TDoS attacks directed at 9-1-1 systems. It then discusses potential mitigation strategies for legacy TDM and future all-IP access networks, as well as disaggregated "over-the-top" originating services and the devices on which both the access network providers and originating service providers rely.


Presenters:

  • Trey Forgety / CINCVolFLT - Director of Government Affairs & IT Ninja, NENA: The 9-1-1 Association   as CINCVolFLT (Trey Forgety)
    CINCVolFLT (Trey Forgety) is Director of Government Affairs for NENA: The 9-1-1 Association. He previously served as a Presidential Management Fellow in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Emergency Communications, with rotations in the Federal Communications Commission's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, and the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. A sometimes-piratical sailor and inveterate tinkerer, CINCVolFLT's recent activities have included promoting the use of new location technologies in wireless carriers' networks, and serving as pro bono counsel to QueerCon. He holds a B.S. in Applied Physics and a J.D., both from the University of Tennessee (GO VOLS!). @cincvolflt

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