LEVIATHAN: Command and Control Communications on Planet Earth

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Presented at GrrCon 2014 by

This presentation draws a new map of Planet Earth, based not on traditional parameters, but on hacker command and control (C2) communications. The primary data points used in this worldwide cyber survey are more than 30 million malware callbacks to over 200 countries and territories over an 18-month period, from January 2013 to June 2014. First, this talk covers the techniques that hackers use to communicate with compromised infrastructure across the globe. It will explain how covert C2 works, and how attackers keep their communications hidden from network security personnel. Second, this talk looks at strategic impact. Traffic analysis is used to deduce important relationships, patterns, and trends between the targeted industries and countries and the first-stage malware servers communicating with them. This section correlates C2 communications to traditional geopolitical conflicts and considers whether computer network activity can be used to predict real world events..