As we begin to settle into autumn, Black Hat organizers are hard at work lining up a ton of great content for the premier information security event's return to London this December.
Technical, detailed, and cutting-edge Briefings are a cornerstone of Black Hat Europe, and today we'd like to highlight some especially relevant security Briefings you'll have access to at the show.
Machine learning became a public watchword this year thanks to the DeepFakes imbroglio, and in the upcoming Black Hat Europe Briefing on "DeepPhish: Simulating Malicious AI" Cyxtera Technologies will ask an important new question: Now that machine learning is already being used in threat detection, how might it be used maliciously?
This hypothesis is of urgent importance, considering how little research has been done on the potential consequences of the weaponization of machine learning. In this Briefing, attendees will have a chance to review how threat actors could exponentially improve their phishing attacks using AI to bypass machine-learning-based phishing detection systems. What's more, you'll learn from Cyxtera's own research and new AI algorithm, called DeepPhish. DeepPhish learns effective patterns used by threat actors and uses them to generate new, unseen, and effective attacks based on attacker data.
If you're more interested in cutting-edge sandboxing, make time to attend Black Hat Europe's session on "Cloud-Native Sandboxes for Microservices: Understanding New Threats and Attacks.". Presented by security experts from JD and Palo Alto Networks, this Briefing will demonstrate how the researchers redesigned an existing network sandboxing system by adopting new emerging container techniques.
Specifically, you'll learn about EnvBuilder, a container-based sandboxing construction technique which can efficiently build customized or heterogeneous sandbox environments for different samples, and DiffSensor, which uses Docker-based parallel to reduce analysis noises. The goal is to show you how network sandboxes built this way can make it easier and more effective to analyze environment-sensitive attacks, and it promises to be fascinating.
Last but not least, the folks at ESET will be presenting a special Briefing at Black Hat Europe about what they say is the first Sednit UEFI rootkit they've seen in the wild. Appropriately titled "Malware Buried Deep Down the SPI Flash: Sednit's First UEFI Rootkit Found in the Wild," the Briefing will detail the full infection chain and show how Sednit was able to install their custom UEFI module on key targets' computers.
Researchers will also provide an in-depth analysis of their UEFI module and the associated trojanized LoJack agent. This is important because while BIOS rootkits have been researched and discussed extensively in the past few years, there has been sparse evidence of real campaigns actively trying to compromise systems at this level. This ESET talk will reveal such a campaign successfully executed by the Sednit group and equip you with strategies that will help you combat similar attacks. Don't miss it!
Black Hat Europe returns to The Excel in London December 3-6, 2018. For more information on how to register, check out the Black Hat website.