Daniel Peck

Research Scientist, Barracuda Networks

http://www.barracudanetworks.com/

Biography

Daniel Peck is a Research Scientist for Barracuda Labs at Barracuda Networks. His current interest is in applying social media analysis to existing security solutions. Other notable research includes being the co-creator of Caffeine Monkey, a tool for performing behavioral profiling of javascript, and demonstrating widespread validation vulnerabilities control system field devices. Prior to joining Barracuda Networks, Peck was the Offensive Security Researcher at Digital Bond, and prior to that, he was a security researcher for SecureWorks. Peck has a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Presentation: Collecting Eyeballs: Measuring and Analyzing Malicious Activity on Twitter and Facebook

Social networks are becoming the way that non technical users interact with the rest of the world on the web, using them as forums, search engines, and publishing platforms. This popularity (and explosive growth rate) coupled with the the accessible API and an environment that foster a false sense of trust make it easy to spammers and attackers to exploit.

In this talk, we discuss the scale and history of malicious activity on social media, and, based on a comprehensive research study, we demonstrate how attackers respond rapidly to the large increases of users driven by celebrity attention, as well as review attacks across trending topics, URL shorteners, and applying ML techniques to reveal associations, weak and strong, between users and establish the beginnings of a trust model that can be applied to users across multiple social networks.