So if you happen to be in town for B-Sides or RSA, we're going to have the following talk at Noisebridge (Mission St.) in the main area. Noisebridge is a very cool Hackerspace and you should definitely at least swing by to check out the space. Just buzz in at the understated entrance, come up, and say you're new and want a look around. I normally wouldn't post to this list but due to the conferences and the web app sec subject matter, I thought this was apropos. ==== Announcement ==== On 13 Feb 2011, 1400 (that's 2pm for the subtraction-impaired), The Bay Area Hackers Association will host the following talk: Counter-Exploitation: Pwning Botmasters We'll have Billy Rios talking about exploiting the ZeuS botnets and the people who control them. Zeus is a Trojan horse that steals banking information by keystroke logging. Zeus is spread mainly through drive-by downloads and phishing schemes. First identified in July 2007 when it was used to steal information from the United States Department of Transportation, it became more widespread in March 2009. In June 2009, security company Prevx discovered that Zeus had compromised over 74,000 FTP accounts on websites of such companies as the Bank of America, NASA, Monster, ABC, Oracle, Cisco, Amazon, and BusinessWeek. Zeus' current botnet is estimated to include millions of compromised computers (around 3.6 million in the United States). As of October 28, 2009 Zeus has sent out over 1.5 million phishing messages on Facebook. On November 3, 2009 a British couple were arrested for allegedly using Zeus to steal personal data. His blog is here: http://xs-sniper.com/blog/ About the Speaker: Billy Rios is currently a security researcher for Google where he studies emerging security threats and technologies. Before Google, Billy was a Security Program Manager at Microsoft where he helped secure several high profile software projects including Internet Explorer. Prior to his roles at Google and Microsoft, Billy was a penetration tester, making his living by outsmarting security teams, bypassing security measures, and demonstrating the business risk of security exposures to executives and organizational decision makers. Before his life as a penetration tester, Billy worked as an Information Assurance Analyst for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). While at DISA, Billy helped protect Department of Defense (DoD) information systems by performing network intrusion detection, vulnerability analysis, incident handling, and formal incident reporting on security related events involving DoD information systems. Before attacking and defending information systems, Billy was an active duty Officer in the United States Marine Corps. As usual, BAHA's website is here: http://baha.bitrot.info/ And we do have a Google calendar for the monthly meetings; it is linked to from that page. -- Effing the ineffable since 1997. | http://www.subspacefield.org/~travis/ My emails do not usually have attachments; it's a digital signature that your mail program doesn't understand. If you are a spammer, please email john@subspacefield.org to get blacklisted.