Type of Talk: UTCS FoCS Corporate Connection

Speaker/A

ffiliation:  Kevin Nauer/Sandia National Laboratories

Date/Tim

e:  Wednesday, February 11, 2009 4:00 p.m.

Location:  A

CES 2.402

Host: UTCS OEA

Talk Title:  "Emerging Cyb

er Threats and Countermeasures"

Talk Abstract:

The number
of cyber attacks have risen exponentially in the past few years and the tr

end appears to be on the rise this year with attacks exploiting common user
programs such as Internet Explorer and Adobe Acrobat.  This presenta

tion will discuss several emerging cyber security threats seen in the digit

al world and some of the countermeasures that Sandia National Labs is curre

ntly developing to combat these attacks.    Threats such

as DNS covert tunneling, spear-phishing, and Internet based client-side a

ttacks will be described in detail. 

Hackers are focusin

g their attacks by collecting information about users and their habits and

then targeting those users with very well-crafted emails and embedding mali

cious code inside Powerpoint presentations, Adobe Acrobat files and legiti

mate websites in order steal the users’ authentication credentials and oth

er personal information.  These attacks are making it past the whole

gamut of Internet security infrastructure such as firewalls, email filteri

ng, antivirus and spam detection programs.  Sandia has analyzed a nu

mber of these malicious code artifacts in depth and is currently working wi

th a number of federal agencies to help design new technologies aimed at th

warting these exploits.    This presentation explores a f

ew of those technologies.