Conventions

DefCon is known as a hacker’s convention. As a first timer at DefCon, there were key things that my cyber security friend mentioned to me prior to attending; bring a burner phone, do not connect to a WI-FI, have an RFID, and only bring cash. I did everything the opposite of what was recommended. The reason being is that I still know how to protect myself but for the public, this will be a great I idea. Which brings to us how we can ‘best’ protect ourselves from black hats. There were many workshops, villages and talks in DefCon, however, you must sign up ahead of time to get into the workshops and activities were usually packed. I still managed to go into a some of the events. However, one thing that was the most intriguing and interesting was the village of Embedded Systems Village Activities. This village teaches you how to ethically hack using the software they use to teach. There were different tiers of levels for the students: expert, advanced and beginner. The experts have a screen that showed instructions one what to do and what to achieve. For beginners, it was a different area. Using a laptop and software, they provided, I started using commands ping, tracert and Nmap. It was interesting to know how much information can easily be retrievable. Understanding and applying a defense strategy against simple retrievable info is by learning how to defend against a black hat. To basically think like one. Simple things such as using a VPN to hide your IP address to avoid being detected in ping or tracert. In addition, not connecting to the network that is publicly accessible to limit the pings that can reach an endpoint. Updating your software ensures that security packages are updated against new attacks. The Embedded village opened my eyes on how easy to navigate a user’s information. Imagine how an expert black hat can retrieve even more. For them to successfully hack into an endpoint is to make an endpoint susceptible to attacks. By mitigating the risk and applying security protocols will ensure that we have the security protocols to defend against black hats.

 

CompTIA ChannelCon 2023

In ChannelCon I attended 3 key events: Cybersecurity Meets AI: Revolutionizing Digital Defense, Navigating IT Supply Chain Risk: Strategies for Mitigation and Management, and Ask the Cyber Experts. In these talks, I have learned one thing in common, how to mitigate risks. Majority of the speaker were vendors, which upsells their software to people who are attending. The people attending ChannelCon were mainly people who work for a company looking for an IT product to purchase for their company or their MSP. They introduced their software’s and how their software auto detects certain malwares. What I found the most intriguing was the talk about A.I. Artificial intelligence has become even more prevalent since the rise of Chat GPT. Because of this, script kiddies have a potential to do even more damage. One of the cyber experts, started mentioning the use of artificial intelligence to hack. How black hats writes an AI bot/virus that knows how to maneuver the system. One of the audiences ask the expert, ‘how do we mitigate the risk of A.I? How do we stop A.I since A.I is only growing?’. Their solution was, that it was not possible. And the only thing we can do is mitigate the risk. This is by always upgrading our own A.I system that constantly detects malware A.I. This means that cybersecurity defense can only keep upgrading their artificial intelligence knowledge. Since this is now an A.I cyberwar. It is a method of who can out-do each other. Black hats will continue to create an A.I. that will attack, while our defense A.I can only become better to detect these new upcoming virus machine learning bots. Mitigating the black hat artificial intelligence system can only be the solution that will be continuous throughout as long as A.I exist. A.I cannot be stopped but can lessen the impact it will cause. During the talk, we were flabbergasted about the expert’s answer. This is when I truly realized how dangerous A.I is. The expert did reassure us that A.I will not outsmart humans anytime soon because, A.I was created by a human themselves. What they have is accurate data with unlimited energy working 24/7. In order to fight an A.I from a black hat is to create another one that will outsmart their A.I. and the only way to mitigate the risk.


References

https://wallpapercave.com/dark-web-wallpapers