Conferència: Fighting botnets - the core of the crime

Abstract: 
Botnets comprise of computers - often in thousands or even millions - which have been compromised and taken over by third parties. The Botmaster, controlling the infected machines, can now use these for a large variety of malicious purposes including information theft, email spam, click fraud and distributed denial of service attacks. In the first part of the talk I will talk about how botnets work, and how we can fight them. Particular focus will be on how traffic analysis can be used to detect communication between infected machines and their command and control servers in order to deal with the infections at an early stage, and hopefully before harmful activities are carried out. I will also demonstrate how we run infected machines in a controlled yet realistic environment, and give examples of some of our recordings of botnet behavior. In the second part of the talk, I will demonstrate how different kinds of malicious behaviour can look like, using some standard tools for penetration testing. Bring your own laptop if you want some practical experience with the tools yourself.

About Jens Myrup Pedersen: 
He is Associate Professor in Department of Electronic Systems at Aalborg University. His research focuses on network-based detection of malicious activities, and includes both academic and more industrial oriented projects. He is involved in both Danish and European educational initiatives, and teaches among other courses in the IT-Vest Master in IT-Security. He is coordinator of the Colibri project (erasmus-colibri.eu), which is an Erasmus+ project exploring new teaching methods. It covers 7 universities (including UPC-ETSETB) and 3 companies from all over Europe.