CERIAS Weekly Security Seminar - Purdue University

Protection against HEMP (High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse) and GMD (Geomagnetic Disturbance in a CME/Coronal Mass Ejection context) is a nascent science. Until recently, these have only been the concern of Department of Defense insiders, over-the-top "preppers", and physics aficionados. Due to current events and an increasing reliance of all facets of 1st world civilization upon ICT (Informatio...

We face an existential threat of permanent damage to critical physical components in our national infrastructure as a result of their poor resilience against cybersecurity attack. A Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) commonly provides the control system for such components, e.g., bulk power generators. Our proof-of-concept implementation dramatically mitigates threats to such cyber-physical syste...

From compliance in the classroom to compliance on the street, important lessons that every cybersecurity professional should know.  We'll cover proven approaches for compliance and risk assessment for a variety of industries, and present specific scenarios and strategies for addressing real challenges facing organizations with PCI, HITRUST, FedRAMP, CMMC and Privacy. Below are some of the examples...

Cyber security data  in many ways mimics the behavior of organic systems. Individuals or groups compete for limited resources using a variety of strategies, the most effective of which are re-used and refined in later ‘generations'. Traditionally this behavior has made detection of malware very difficult because 1) recognition systems are often built on exact matching to a pattern that can only be...

The last 5 years have seen a marked shift inhow companies view cyber threat intelligence (CTI) as a building block of theirsecurity strategy, but there still is a lot of confusion about how to build aprogram that provides utility. At its core CTI aims to provide informationabout motivations, methods and characteristics of attackers. In today's rapidlyevolving threat landscape having timely access...

QoSient and a DHS independent SOC have been working together on an innovative pilot program called "Elimination of Unmonitored Space" (EUS) that strives to detect and respond to internal cyber threats through pervasive network sensing and sense-making in an enterprise network.   Modeled after the NSA's Integrated Active Cyber Defense (IACD) architecture and the US DoD CENTAUR / Acropolis programs,...

The adoption of advanced data technologies is one of the defining characteristics of the connected world. From ML to AI, we are getting a smarter, more personal world. The dystopic view is that not only Big Brother but many parties can monitor, control and manipulate us. What are the implications for trust? The need for privacy-enforcing technologies is now, not after the ghost is in the machine....

Q & A: https://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/blog/post/summary_of_july_15th_2020_purdue_seminar_on_control_system_cyber_security/Critical infrastructures such as electric power, oil/gas, water/wastewater,pipelines, transportation, and manufacturing utilize process control and safetysystems to monitor, control, and assure safe operating conditions. Controlsystems consist of Internet protocol (IP)...

Digital Transformation has fundamentally affected the conduct of elections since 2000. This webinar shares the perspective of a former senior Federal official who worked to help secure US elections against foreign interference during a 30+ year career in the US Government and who now works as a Chief Information Security Officer for a leading global cyber and network security company. This present...

Using semi-supervised learning, I propose an anomaly-based network intrusion detection system (NIDS) to detect and classify anomalous and/or malicious traffic. With this proposed machine learning approach, we detect botnet traffic and distinguish it from the normal and background traffic in the IPv4 flow datasets. I evaluate the prediction performance results for the flow-based NIDS algorithms. I...

Cyberattacks are increasing in frequency, severity, and sophistication. Target systems are becoming increasingly complex with a multitude of subtle dependencies. Designs and implementations continue to exhibit flaws that could be avoided with well-known computer-science and engineering techniques. Cybersecurity technology is advancing, but too slowly to keep pace with the threat. In short, cyberse...

Cyber security resources remain limited. Organizations that attempt to broadly protect their data from all cyber threats tend to inefficiently invest these resources, making them slower to adapt to the changing trends and techniques of cyber threats. – Carnegie Mellon. This talk will discuss some of the basic principles of Cyber threat intelligence, and how proactive collection of information can...

Work in the public sector differs from that in the private sector in ways that on the one hand present challenges unique to public sector work but also sometimes produce unexpected rewards also unique to public sector work.  Mr. Coffing will share some of his experiences gained over the last eighteen months leading cybersecurity for the nation's third largest municipality as well as over the cours...

As more Personally Identifiable Information is collected, stored or created, the specter of customer privacy issues are looming large. Privacy and Security methodologies are starting to be dictated by those in State houses, Congress and Supra-regional governments. Enterprises need to take a long hard look at the information they are capturing and how they secure it to determine whether the potenti...

In late 2016, the Mirai Botnet launched the largest DDoSattacks ever recorded. Learn about the teams of researchers racing the stop theattacks, and the criminal groups who were competing to launch ever largerattacks. The presenter will discuss roles played by educational institutions aswell as the impact to the IoT landscape. About the speaker: Elliott Peterson is a Special Agent assigned to the F...

Empirical digital forensics examines real-world digital storage media to develop theories about it.  We have built a library of real-world data from 4000 copies of secondary-storage devices including purchased ones.  One project looked at patterns of malware to determine where they were most likely to appear.  A recent project examined software versions, including malicious ones, and tried to dist...

How does an organization know which security controls, applications, or programs to implement, when everything is a threat and every system is vulnerable? Looking at cybersecurity through a risk management lens is one way of reducing the noise of the threat environment. This presentation will discuss why having a Cyber Risk Management (CRM) program is a critical piece to an effective cybersecurity...

The upcoming smart transportation systems which consist of connected autonomous vehicles, are poised to transform our everyday life. The sustainability and growth of these systemsto their full potential will significantly depend on the robustness of these systems against securityand privacy threats. Unfortunately, the communication protocols employed in these systems lackmainstream network securit...

Our reliance on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is growing. As CPS infrastructure becomes exposed to the contested world through networks, CPS security becomes much more important. In a CPS, the cyber components manage the physical components. We propose that the overall goal for CPS resiliency is to have the physical systems behave properly regardless of fault and disruption. Our approach to CPS res...

A long-standing challenge in analyzing information leaks within mobile apps is to automatically identify the codeoperating on sensitive data. With all existing solutions relying on System APIs (e.g., IMEI, GPS location) or features of user interfaces (UI), the content from app servers, like user's Facebook profile, payment history, fall through the crack. In this talk, I will introduce ClueFinder,...

Imagine a world where data is currency. A world where the majority of the data is owned and traded by 6 international data barons who are constantly at war with each other. In this world, rogue AI persecutes whole segments of the population while nations become Petri dishes for mind control. Most people move about daily life oblivious to the knowledge that someone is controlling them, telling them...

Distinguished social psychologist Geert Hofstede observed the "dominance of technology over culture is an illusion. The software of the machines may be globalized, but the software of the minds that use them is not."  The role of culture in the thought process is so prevalent, yet unstated, that many cultural beliefs and biases are accepted as truths.  These cultural beliefs and biases are commonl...

Cellular technologies enable a wide array of critical services, from personal communication, autonomous vehicles and telemedicine to critical infrastructures, such as smart grid electricity distribution. Unfortunately, security and user privacy for such complex networks are often considered as afterthoughts. These lead to inadequate security evaluation early on the development cycle that fails to...

The Virtual Reality (VR) market could surpass $ 40 Billion by 2020. The U.S. Military recently closed a deal worth $ 480 Million for the Microsoft HoloLens Mixed Reality (MR) device. Oculus has already released the first immersive VR system that is mobile with no wires and no need for a high-end gaming PC for $399. While these are exciting times, an important question needs to be inves...

In this talk, we'll explore how internet scan data layered with different open-source tools can start to make sense of what is publicly exposed and potentially a threat.  Predominantly, we'll focus on three investigations:  1. how to find attacker infrastructure, using IOCs from MITRE and Web Application Logs2. how to identify trends in common misconfigurations and vulnerabilities3. how to find as...