VB2017 paper: Walking in your enemy’s shadow: when fourth-party collection becomes attribution hell

Of all the possible targets for digital spies, there is one particularly attractive target that doesn’t get a lot of attention: that of other espionage campaigns.

Yet this kind of fourth-party collection really does go on. Earlier this month, at

VB2017

, Costin Raiu and Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade, from

Kaspersky Lab

‘s

GReAT

team,

presented

a well received paper on the subject, in which they looked both at the general subject and at specific examples of fourth-party collection they had come across. And while the researchers made it clear that these examples don’t make attack attribution entirely impossible, they showed that attribution is

very

complicated.

Costin Raiu and Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade presenting their paper at VB2017 in Madrid.

Today, we publish the paper in both

HTML

and

PDF

format. We have also uploaded the video of the presentation to our

YouTube

channel.

If you are interested in attribution of advanced malware attacks and the role security researchers play in it, make sure you also read the papers and/or watch the presentations Juan Andrés gave at the last two VB conferences: on

the transition of malware researchers into intelligence brokers

and, together with his colleague Brian Bartholomew, on

false flags used in targeted attacks

.