From the Ukrainian International Legion and Cyber Memes Forces to internet army recruitment and operational planning via social media and instant messaging platforms, the War in Ukraine has pushed cyber operations into unprecedented territory. Aggressors around the world are watching closely and evolving their tactics and strategies as innovations emerge. We are entering a new era of online conflict and it isn’t pretty. As defenders, we have to up our game or be left vulnerable.
Based on real-time research conducted since the war began, this talk will cover the recent evolution of the threat to our networks, data, people, and infrastructure, as well as enterprise and government operations. Topics will include the large-scale emergence of rogue (and sometimes “rogue”) hacker groups, crowdsourced OSINT, ubiquitous influence operations, new forms of network attack, exploitation of software dependencies and supply chains, and the combined de-platforming might of hundreds of companies worldwide, among numerous other topics.
We’ll end this talk with techniques to counter emerging threats, including ways to increase situational awareness, improve threat modeling, manage our attack surfaces, gain insight into new threat actor capabilities and TTPs, and better inform risk calculations and defensive investments. You’ll leave with an improved awareness of new threats emerging from the War in Ukraine and a toolkit of techniques to better protect your enterprise.
Greg Conti is a Principal at Kopidion, a cyber security training and professional services firm. He is a seven-time Black Hat speaker and teaches courses at Black Hat Trainings and in private engagements on military strategy and tactics for cybersecurity, information operations, hacking bureaucracy, adversarial thinking, and election security. Formerly he served as Director of Security Research at IronNet and on the West Point faculty for more than a decade where he led their cybersecurity research and education efforts. A career military intelligence and cyber operations officer he also served at NSA, U.S. Cyber Command, and in two combat zones. Greg is the co-author of the recently published book, On Cyber: Towards an Operational Art for Cyber Operations, as well as approximately 100 articles, papers, and talks covering attack surface analysis, security analytics, cyber conflict, cybersecurity innovation, and security visualization. He holds a B.S. from West Point, an M.S. from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, all in computer science.
