SINCON 2021 Conference — Ransomware Exploded — by Chester Wisniewski
SINCON 2021 Conference — Fix-It Talk
Day 2 (06 Nov 2021) 10.00am—10.45am @ Main Room
Ransomware Exploded: Modern Defences Against a Technological Plague
Abstract
Criminals are able to leverage increasingly smaller defensive mistakes into multi-million dollar extortion opportunities. This talk will explore the techniques, tools and procedures employed by the most prominent ransomware groups. I will also recommend what security policy changes can lower the risk of compromise and the types of skills and tools needed to detect and respond if those policies fail. As criminals continue to abuse legitimate system administration tools in conjunction with obfuscated malicious scripts security teams need "big picture" visibility more than ever to find and exterminate malicious intrusions. Threats are evolving quickly, has your security team kept up with the latest tactics?
About Chester Wisniewski
CHESTER WISNIEWSKI is a principal research scientist at next-generation security leader Sophos. With more than 20 years of professional experience, his interest in security and privacy first peaked while learning to hack from bulletin board text files in the 1980s, and has since been a lifelong pursuit.
Chester analyses the massive amounts of attack data gathered by SophosLabs to distil and share relevant information in an effort to improve the industry’s understanding of evolving threats, attacker behaviours and effective security defences. He’s helped organisations design enterprise-scale defence strategies, served as the primary technical lead on architecting Sophos’ first email security appliance, and consulted on security planning with some of the largest global brands.
Based in Vancouver, Chester regularly speaks at industry events, including RSA Conference, Virus Bulletin, Security BSides (Vancouver, London, Wales, Perth, Austin, Detroit, Los Angeles, Boston, and Calgary) and others. He’s widely recognized as one of the industry’s top security researchers and is regularly consulted by the press, appearing on BBC News, ABC, NBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, CBC, NPR, and more.
When not busy fighting cybercrime, Chester spends his free time cooking, cycling, and mentoring new entrants to the security field through his volunteer work with InfoSec BC. Chester is available on Twitter (@chetwisniewski) and can be reached via email at chet.wisniewski@sophos.com.