There's no better place to brush up on the latest malware than Black Hat Asia in Singapore next month with a cornucopia of practical Trainings, Briefings, and Arsenal tool demos.
There's no better place to sharpen your cybersecurity skills than Black Hat Asia in Singapore next month, where you'll have access to a cornucopia of practical, hands-on Trainings, Briefings, and Arsenal tools intended to help you master even the trickiest malware.
If you've never been to the Black Hat Asia Arsenal before, know that it's a hub of live tool demonstrations in an open, conversational environment where presenters are able to interact with attendees and provide a hands-on experience.
For example, stop by at 10 AM on Thursday, March 28th to check out a live demo of "Unprotect Project: Unprotect Malware for the Mass." Malware remains effective by staying hidden or otherwise hard to study; the Unprotect Project is an open-source countermeasure aimed at classifying all known malware evasion techniques that help you analyze and understand potential threats. While the project is currently focused on Windows PE (Preinstallation Environment) malware, the plan is to extend it to other platforms in the future.
On Friday at 10 AM, come back for the "Weapons of Office Destruction: Prevention with Machine Learning" demo, which promises a fresh perspective on the ever-present problem of preventing malware distribution via Microsoft Office documents and other common currencies of the modern workplace.
To better leverage the rules already used in traditional anti-virus solutions, the presenters of this Arsenal demo use a simple random forest-based machine learning (ML) classifier model trained on a comprehensive list of over 3,000 existing heuristic rules drawn from around 92,600 real-world benign and malicious MS Office documents (including Word, Excel and PowerPoint file formats.)
They'll show you how the model works and reveal why this approach exhibits enhanced performance and significantly outperforms 11 well-known commercial anti-virus scanners, with a much higher true positive rate of 98.46% achieved while maintaining a low false positive rate (0.33%). Of the evaluated commercial AV scanners, the best one achieves a TPR of 87.5%, which is more than 10% lower than the proposed ML model you'll see in this demo.
Complement that hands-on look at fighting Office-spawned malware by attending the 50-Minute "Office in Wonderland" Briefing, in which security researchers Peter Ceelen and Stan Hegt explore a wide range of novel techniques that abuse Microsoft Office features for offensive purposes. The pair will disclose details on new Word and Excel vulnerabilities, release attack vectors that Microsoft deems as features, and demonstrate the security impact of the architectural design of the MS Office suite.
If mobile malware is more of a concern for you, make time for this year's "When Voice Phishing Met Malicious Android App" Briefing. Presented by expert Min-Chang Jang, this 50-Minute Briefing will showcase the results of a live study of various strains of Android voice phishing malware.
These malicious mobile apps can intercept outgoing calls to trusted institutions (like banks or government agencies), creating opportunities for innocents to be scammed by imposters. In this session you'll get a unique look at how they're distributed and deployed, using data gathered by a crack team who broke into distribution servers (as well as a central command & control server) and analyzed about 3,000 voice phishing apps. Don't miss it!
Black Hat Asia returns to the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore March 26-29, 2019. For more information on what's happening at the event and how to register, check out the Black Hat website.