Cyber attacks and defenses

Finding the linchpins of the dark web: Understanding and detecting malicious infrastructure

Dr. Sumayah Alrwais, Assistant Professor, King Saud University, Riyadh, KSA

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B9 L2 H1 R2322

In this talk, Sumayah will survey a number of malicious hosting infrastructures for different services and approaches to detecting them. Among them are works on an emerging trend of Bulletproof hosting services reselling infrastructure from lower-end service providers, use of residential proxy as a service to avoid server-side blocking and DNS based hosting infrastructure.

Multi-layer Red Team vs. Blue Team Methods towards Secure Cyber-Physical Energy Systems

Charalambos (Harrys) Konstantinou, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering with Florida A&M University and Florida State University (FAMU-FSU) College of Engineering

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B9 L2 H1

Election hacking, power grid cyber-attacks, troll farms, fake news, ransomware, and other terms have entered our daily vocabularies and are here to stay. Cybersecurity touches nearly every part of our daily lives. Most importantly, national security and economic vitality rely on a safe, resilient, and stable cyber-space. We rely on cyber-physical systems with hardware devices, software platforms, and network systems to connect, travel, communicate, power our homes, provide health care, run our economy, etc. However, cyber-threats and attacks have grown exponentially over the past years, exposing both corporate and personal data, disrupting critical operations, causing a public health and safety impact, and imposing high costs on the economy. In this talk, we will focus on cyber-physical energy systems (CPES) as the backbone of critical infrastructure, and provide a research perspective and present red team security threats, challenges, and blue team countermeasures. We will discuss recent approaches on developing low-budget targeted cyberattacks against CPES, designing resilient methods against false data, and the need for an accurate assessment environment achieved through the inclusion of hardware-in-the-loop testbeds.

Blocking microgrid cyberattacks to keep the power flowing

1 min read ·
Power grids have become far more complex in recent decades due to energy demands, environmental regulations and small-scale renewable energy systems that turn businesses and individuals into combined consumer-producers. One way to ensure that power supplies remain resilient is to create small groups of sources and loads called microgrids. Microgrids can operate independently of the main grid when required, such as supporting hospitals during natural disasters, for example. As microgrids grow more complex, they require sophisticated computer networks to coordinate, control and distribute

Ilies Benhabbour

Ilies is working with professor Marc Dacier on the following subject: Fingerprinting of intra network semi active components in end-to-end communications. That is to say that we want to be able to identify components which may exist between two devices. It can be either something normal like a firewall or a proxy, but it can also be something malicious like a man in the middle attack. The project's goal will thus be to identify how we can do so, and what kind of experiments can be done over the packets to see if these semi active components exist. Another aim would be to create some code that