Thursday 25 September 11:00 - 11:30, Red room
Itay Cohen (Palo Alto Networks Unit 42) & Omer Benjakob (Haaretz)
Cyber-influence as a unified threat has emerged as a key lesson from Israel and Iran's confrontations since October 7th 2023 and the war in Ukraine. Cyber espionage attacks converged with disinformation not just for online influence, but also for recruiting real-life agents, deploying them in the real world to sow chaos and, at times, even physically target officials based on data harvested online.
As a journalist and a threat intelligence researcher, we have experienced firsthand how cyber and influence meshed and matured into real-world violence, receiving a death threat in the form of a package following the expose of a wide-reaching cyber-enhanced disinformation campaign. Together we examine the offensive cyber-influence spectrum that has emerged during the war: from disinformation amplifying claims of widespread cyber attacks or hyping non-existent capabilities, to campaigns targeting Israelis' emotional reality and penetrating and disrupting their physical reality.
Our talk demonstrates how threat actors bridge the digital and physical domains, leveraging TTPs typically associated with APTs to orchestrate real-world actions. Combining investigative journalism, traditional threat intelligence methods, and exclusive access to unsealed indictments, we've correlated activities from online campaigns to tangible security threats, and uncovered the link between online personas and offline operatives.
We show how seemingly benign digital campaigns evolve into significant threats, as evidenced by Iranian operations that blurred the lines between espionage and trolling, directing local operatives to start fires and stir violence. Likewise, we examine how Russia's GRU integrates cyber-enabled disinformation and cyber attacks with on-the-ground sabotage and targeted violence, underscoring the wider landscape of hybrid threats. This investigative framework bridges digital and physical threats, offering actionable threat intelligence insights for tackling hybrid adversaries.
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Itay Cohen Itay Cohen is a senior principal security researcher at Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42. Itay has vast experience in malware reverse engineering, threat intelligence, and other security-related topics. He is the author of a security blog focused on making advanced security topics accessible for free. Itay is a maintainer of the open-source reverse engineering frameworks Rizin and Cutter. He is a social and political activist, with a focus on animal rights. Itay was selected to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2023, and recognized for his threat research work and activism.
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Omer Benjakob Omer Benjakob is an investigative journalist for Haaretz (Israel) focusing on national security and technology. He covers disinformation, cyber and surveillance and has participated in a number of international investigations, among them Project Pegasus, into misuse of NSO's spyware, and Team Jorge/Story Killers, a groundbreaking undercover investigation into the disinformation and election interference-as-as-service market. His "Flight of the Predator" investigation (together with Lighthouse Media and Greece's Inside Story) into the sale of spyware to a militia in Sudan was shortlisted for the EU's European Press Prize for investigative journalism (2023). He is also a researcher and his writing on Wikipedia has been published in Wired UK, the Columbia Journalism Review, and MIT Press, as well as academic journals. Born in New York and raised in Tel Aviv, he lives in Jaffa with his wife and teaches in a local college in Israel. He hosts a number of podcasts and is a public speaker. |
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