LABScon 23: From Vulkan to Ryazan | Investigative Reporting from the Frontlines of InfoSec

During the last couple of years, Hakan Tanriverdi of Paper Trail Media has reported on several large-scale digital espionage and sabotage campaigns, from hacking groups that were later called out by the U.S. Department of Justice to companies targeting critical infrastructure in Germany and across Western Europe. In both cases, mistakes in how the attackers set up their infrastructure enabled Tanriverdi’s team to follow their tracks, in some cases right back to their employers. The resulting stories revealed the intersection where covert cyber operations and overt organizational structures meet.

This talk lays out the types of information this team works with, how they follow and fact-check opaque leads, and turn them into portraits of the previously unknown actors pulling the strings in cyberspace.