Month: October 2022

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November 4th, 2022 meeting & AGM

DATE:November 4th, 2022
TIME:2:00pm to 4:00pm (PST)
VENUE:Zoom Online meeting
TOPIC:Advanced Persistent Cybercrime
PRESENTER: Derek Manky
RECORDING: 
The AGM was delayed from September to November.

ABSTRACT

We are seeing a shift on the threat landscape where cybercrime, including ransomware, is becoming more destructive and targeted towards high valued assets and services. Nation state attacks that target critical infrastructure, government and healthcare are now having an impact across the entire attack surface including businesses’ IT networks. This is the result of the converging threat landscape, where nation state threat actors are working jointly with cybercriminal enterprise, hitting IT and OT networks in tandem. Businesses that were not concerned of being a target from sophisticated APT attacks in the past, are now impacted. Similarly the public sector is further impacted by the larger threat of cybercrime. This elevated game from the adversary has raised the level of risk to organizations to a high watermark never seen before. FortiGuard Labs observed an increase of nearly 100% in 1H 2022 of ransomware variants, driven by the Ransom-as-a-Service (RaaS) model and a growing cybercriminal workforce.

BIOGRAPHY

Derek Manky plays a strategic and visionary role in consulting with leading CSOs/CISOs of Fortune 500 companies worldwide across multiple industries, bringing with him over twenty years of cyber security experience. He leads FortiGuard Labs’ Global Threat Intelligence Team. Mr. Manky has established frameworks in the security industry including responsible vulnerability disclosure, which has exercised the responsible handling of over 1000 zero day vulnerabilities. Manky has been with the Cyber Threat Alliance since it was founded in May 2014 and sits on the steering committee. He has helped to build collaborative platforms in the cyber security industry for over 15 years. Manky collaborates with global forums and expert groups alongside leading political figures, key policy stakeholders and law enforcement, including the World Economic Forum C4C, NATO NICP, INTERPOL, and FIRST.org. His vision is applied to help shape the future of proactive cyber security, with the ultimate goal to make a positive impact towards the global war on cybercrime.

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October 14th, 2022 meeting & AGM

DATE:October 14th, 2022
TIME:2:00pm to 4:00pm (PST)
VENUE:Zoom Online meeting
TOPIC:Is the Cookie Monster compromising your identity? How cookies undermine multi-factor authentication
PRESENTER: Chester Wisniewski (Principal Research Scientist at Sophos)
RECORDING: 
The AGM was delayed from September to October.

ABSTRACT

As organizations continue to adopt multifactor authentication (MFA) criminals are now being forced to find ways around it. There has been no shortage of high-profile instances of MFA being bypassed including Electronic Arts, Uber, and YouTube. How strong are the MFA solutions we can choose from and how do criminals bypass them? Why is the Cookie Monster moving from the category of childhood friend to authentication enemy? We’ll explore all of that and more. Join us.

BIOGRAPHY

Chester Wisniewski is a principal research scientist at Sophos. With more than 25 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 analyzes the massive amounts of attack data gathered by SophosLabs to distill 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 organizations design enterprise-scale defense 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.


As a former President of the Vancouver SecSIG he is grateful for no longer being responsible for the meetings, but excited to continue to share and contribute to the security knowledge of our community. You may recognize me from my appearances on Global News, CBC and CTV if you are old enough to still watch news on a TV.