Sharpen Your Malware-Fighting Skills at Black Hat Europe

With weeks to go until Black Hat Europe returns to London December 3, organizers want to ensure you don’t overlook the wide array of opportunities on offer to improve your malware-fighting know-how.

In Silent Break Security’s Dark Side Ops: Malware Dev Training you’ll spend two days learning about the goals, challenges, architecture, and operations of advanced persistent threat (APT) tooling. Participants will dive deep into source code to gain a strong understanding of execution vectors, payload generation, automation, staging, command and control, and exfiltration. In addition, participants will gain hands-on experience with techniques currently used by hackers to bypass NIDS and HIPS systems, layer 7 web proxies, next-gen antivirus, and DLP solutions!

For more hands-on experience check out Advanced Malware Traffic Analysis: Adversarial Thinking, a two-day intensive Training intended to give you the experience and methodology to recognize malicious connections, distinguish normal from malicious behaviors, recognize anomalous patterns, and deal with large amounts of traffic.

Also, the Internet Institute of Japan (IIJ) will share some malware-thwarting techniques in the Deep Impact: Recognizing Unknown Malicious Activities from Zero Knowledge Briefing. In just under an hour this Briefing will show you how to detect malicious activities via techniques like pattern-matching, blacklists, behavioral analysis, and event correlation when your resources are limited and your attackers are unknown. You’ll see how to detect unknown malicious activities from typical logs of devices which are not dedicated for attack detection such as proxies and firewalls .

Red Teaming in the EDR Age will demonstrate how well-meaning Red Team pentesters can effectively thwart sophisticated Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions adopted by modern enterprises. These EDR solutions can be extremely effective at detecting bad stuff quickly, so this Briefing will also show you how to leverage the inherent challenges faced by EDR vendors to remain hidden as well as how to misdirect the teams of hunters out to get you. Example techniques include new ways of hiding in-memory, attacking least-frequency analysis, and how to keep hunters guessing. Finally, if you absolutely can't avoid being caught, this Briefing will suggest a whole range of deception techniques specifically targeted at flooding and crippling EDRs to overload hunters with alerts.

The Black Hat Europe Arsenal demo of SNDBOX: The Artificial Intelligence Malware Research Platform, which purports to be the world's first Artificial Intelligence (AI) malware research platform designed to scale up research time is another must-attend Black Hat session. Developed by researchers for researchers, SNDBOX utilizes multiple AI detection vectors which work alongside a “Big Data” malware similarity engine to reduce false positive classification errors. The benefit is that, with full access to SNDBOX data, all levels of your team can leverage information necessary for complete malware remediation and new research possibilities, while sharing insights and public samples through its community platform.

If you’re more interested in studying offensive malware, consider stopping by the CoffeeShot: Memory Injection to Avoid Detection Arsenal demo. CoffeeShot is an evasion framework designed for creating Java-based malware which bypasses most of the anti-virus vendors.  If you’re looking to test the effectiveness of security measures against Java malware this demo is a big deal since Java malware like "Jrat" and "Adwind" are used by malicious adversaries who write malware in Java to be evasive and avoid security products - including those that use advanced features like machine learning.

Black Hat Europe returns to The Excel in London December 3-6, 2018. For more information on what’s happening at the event and how to register, check out the Black Hat website.