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This is a joint emergency webcast from the teams of Black Hills Information Security, Wild West Hackin’ Fest, and Active Countermeasures, presented by John Strand.

There have been a couple of very scary ransomware stories in the news over the past few weeks. We figured it would be a good idea to throw a quick emergency webcast together to cover some of these new developments and hit on some very real and very easy things to mitigate against some of these attacks.

We say “some” because these attacks are evolving. Traditionally, there are two classes of ransomware, but we are seeing a third start to develop which is harder to deal with.

But not impossible.

Yes, we will be talking about deception and attribution. Yes, we will be talking about beacon analysis. Because they are kind of our things.

But, we will also discuss some new open-source technologies. And… something you can just turn on.

The point is these attacks are rapidly evolving. The attack on Colonial shows just a glimpse of how bad these attacks are going to get.

Also, we are seeing how we cannot view Operation Technology (OT) as a completely different security creature. Everything is interconnected. We need to start treating security more holistically and stop saying things like, “we just want to focus on the OT/SCADA/PCI/HIPAA enclave.”

Slides for this webcast can be found here: https://www.blackhillsinfosec.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SLIDES_LetsTalkAboutRansomware.pdf