Tuesday may 21st 2024
As an initiative of Howest, they allowed students to invite speakers over to the new campus to come talk about topics related to tech. Afterwards they scheduled some time to talk and broaden your network in the professional world.
On the 21st of may, it was i-Force’s turn to talk about digital forensics, with Pieter Van Der Hulst and Tjebbe Van Quickenborne as the guests of the day. They consult clients who are victims of cyber attacks by finding out when and how they got attacked and what needs to be done.
In this presentation they started off by looking at some info and numbers in cybercrime. I now know for example that attackers always try to go for the lowest hanging fruit and that ransomware is a billion dollar business.
Ransomware was overall a big part of the talk. It is the most seen type of attack, the main distribution methods are through brute forcing access / via RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) or by email (through phishing for example). The reason that ransomware is so big now is because it has been going through some phases in which it gets more sophisticated. It evolved from just locking the victims internet browsing to a malware which first extorts data, OS files and backups, while using botnets for bigger reach. Due to this evolution, there is now also the extra risk of losing backups and having the threat of the attacker leaking the extorted data.
When they were done talking about ransomware, the attention shifted to some cases that they worked on. Like a case in which attackers got in between communication of a business and their supplier. This way, the business was contacting the attacker thinking it was the supplier and the supplier was contacting the attacker thinking it was the business. This all happened through email with typo squatting domains and this back and forth forged communication went on for 5 months. This case was the one that stayed with me the most because of how long this man-in-the-middle was going on without anyone ever noticing the domain name wasn’t correct.
Throughout the whole presentation they also often asked a question and those who could give a good answer got candy, which was a great way to keep everything interactive and make sure people paid attention. Overall it was an interesting topic and Pieter and Tjebbe were fun hosts to listen to. If you have the chance to catch one of the tech & meet events at Howest, whenever they are hosted, I can recommend going to them.