Speculative Futures Symposium III: Cybersecurity

Monday, April 16, 2012
4:00-6:00PM
Broida 1640
Speaker: 
Brian Krebs

Editor of krebsonsecurity.com, a daily blog dedicated to in-depth Internet security news and investigation. From 1995 to 2009, Krebs was a reporter for The Washington Post, where he covered Internet security, cybercrime and privacy issues for the newspaper and the Web site. Krebs's blog has won numerous awards, including the honor of "Blog That Best Represents the Security Industry" two years in row at the RSA Security Conference. A frequent speaker on cybercrime topics, Krebs holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from George Mason University, and lives with his wife just outside of Washington, D.C.

Description:

In this talk, Krebs will discuss his research into the underground economy, detailing the many asymmetries and seeming contradictions in the cybercrime community -- which depends upon the honor of thieves to thrive. The Underweb marketplace is expanding by leaps and bounds, introducing new innovative criminal goods and services and lowering the barrier to entry for novices. At the same time, a relatively small and interconnected group of experienced hackers appears to provide the glue and resources for most of the major cyber crime communities and enterprises. Meanwhile, the entire world is spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year to fight the attacks that, in the end, make even the most skilled cyber crooks comparatively meager riches.
 

Panelists:

GIOVANNI VIGNA is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include malware analysis, web security, vulnerability analysis, and the study of the underground cyber-economy. He is known for organizing and running an inter-university Capture The Flag hacking contest, called iCTF, that every year involves dozens of institutions and hundreds of students around the world.

RICHARD A. KEMMERER is the Computer Science Leadership Professor and a past Department Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Kemmerer received the B.S. degree in Mathematics from the Pennsylvania State University in 1966, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1976 and 1979, respectively. His research interests include formal specification and verification of systems, computer system security and reliability, programming and specification language design, and software engineering.

BRETT STONE-GROSS is a computer security researcher at Dell SecureWorks. Brett received his B.S. in computer engineering, M.S. in computer science, and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His current research interests involve studying the underground Internet economy including botnets, spam, click-fraud, and fake antivirus operations. Brett has previously worked for NeuStar, Lastline, Citrix Online, and at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.