Earlier this week I spoke at the CSI2009 conference in Washington DC. The talk – Cyber Protesting Innovation – was well received, and there was an interesting Q&A session that followed.
The purpose of the talk was to bring everyone up to date with whats happening from a hacktivism perspective and show how that old term had evolved in to two separate & distinct threats – the Cyber-Jihad and Cyber-Protesting. The crux of the talk really revolved around how cyber-protesting was rapidly evolving through the integration of social networking tools and how I predict the threat to evolve over the coming years.
Already, today, we’re seeing the growth of politically motivated opt-in botnets – but things get much more interesting once you factor in browser toolbar plug-ins that real-time integrate with social networking sites. I’m predicting the rapid development of online “convenience” protesting and the time-sharing of the protesters cyber-assets, along with the bleed over to cellular/SmartPhone technologies as further methods of centrally controlled cyber-protesting (adding new forms of attack – SMS DDoS, MMS DDoS, VoIP DDoS, etc.).
The session was video recorded, but I’m not sure when it’ll appear online at the CSI website. In the meantime, we’ve made available a copy of the presentation material on the main Damballa site (presentation here). If you have any questions and want to discuss the topic in more detail, I’m pretty easy to track down…
Botnets are changing rapidly.
– Gunter Ollmann, VP Research
social networking browser…
Your topic Tech and social media dominate… at was interesting when I found it on Thursday searching for social networking browser…