BlackHat Europe 2010 Conference

Hello from Barcelona, where me and my colleague Sergey Novikov are attending the BlackHat Conference Briefings, 2010.

This year marks an important milestone, as the conference was relocated from Amsterdam to Barcelona in order to accommodate the increasing number of delegates. Another change is the number of tracks, with three this time round compared to two last year.

The conference started with a keynote presentation from Max Kelly, CSO of Facebook:

Max provided a very interesting insight into how Facebook handles attacks. He pointed out that while vulnerabilities are important, they are at the lower end of the priorities scale; the top priority is going after the attackers themselves. Long term, this could work better than the usual game of hack and patch, but of course it requires a certain amount of resources to be invested in lawsuits and the tracking down of cybercriminals.

Another very interesting presentation came from Stephan Chenette, from Websense. Stephan presented FireShark, a new free project that can be found on the internet as of today at:

http://www.fireshark.org

FireShark is a browser plugin which can be used to automate the process of browsing malicious websites and extracting malicious links from them in order to build visual graphs of criminal connections and to identify injection patterns. If you are interested in web injections, or researching threats such as Gumblar and Pegel, be sure to check it out.

If you want to stay in touch with what’s happening here, the live Twitter feed is quite active: #BlackHatEU – enjoy!