The Malwarebytes team was at the annual Black Hat USA event held in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Hotel from August 4–9. Large crowds walked through the expo floor, attended talks, and participated in trainings.
Among the many topics discussed, ransomware came up as one of the main issues that both consumers and businesses face. While it has been slowing down from previous years, ransomware remains a threat, in particular to enterprise users with more targeted and costly attacks. For instance, the SamSam ransomware, which we featured in our Black Hat booth, continues to hit large targets and cause a lot of financial damage.
Helge Husemann presenting about the impact of SamSam ransomware
The number one threat that has taken over, and which was a recurrent theme during Black Hat, was malicious cryptominers. While not as crippling as ransomware, miners play the long game and can affect businesses in different ways, including wearing down machines faster and impacting worker productivity. Miners, along with other threats such as banking Trojans, are propagated via many possible attack vectors, including phishing, backdoors, malspam, malvertising, drive-by mining, and more.
Top attack vectors for the 2018 threat landscape
Both Helge Husemann and Dana Torgersen, our product marketing managers, kept visitors to our booth informed about the latest threats, while our sales engineers performed demos showcasing our products.
Cameron Naghdi doing a demo of our solutions
Finally, we took part in a panel with fellow security researchers, discussing some of the hottest topics of the moment, including our biggest concerns of the threat landscape and which technologies we think are most vulnerable.
To watch the full video, check out our Facebook Live video here.
Other heated topics that kept people animated were the recent changes regarding privacy, for instance with GDPR in Europe and the impact on whois data. At the same time, threat intelligence as a discipline showed that it can fall back on other indicators of compromise to connect the dots.
Despite the crowds and excessive heat in Vegas, Black Hat was a successful event where we got to meet many of our existing customers as well as new folks. See you next year!
