Christiaan Beek
Christiaan Beek, lead scientist & sr. principal engineer is part of Mcafee’s Office of the CTO leading strategic threat intelligence research within Mcafee. He coordinates and leads passionately the research in advanced attacks, plays a key-role in cyberattack take-down operations and participates in the NoMoreRansom project. In previous roles, Beek was Director of Threat Intelligence in McAfee Labs and Director of Incident Response and Forensics at Foundstone, McAfee’s forensic services arm. At Foundstone, he led a team of forensic specialists in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa during major breaches. Beek develops threat intelligence strategy, designs threat intelligence systems, performs malware and forensic analysis, pentesting and coaches security teams around the globe. He is a passionate cybercrime specialist who has developed training courses, workshops, and presentations. He speaks regularly at conferences, including BlackHat, RSA, BlueHat and Botconf. Besides conferences, he is also frequently teaching at universities, Police Academies and public schools to recruit, mentor and train the next generation of cyber-security specialists. Beek contributed to the best-selling security book "Hacking Exposed." and has two patents pending. Twitter: @ChristiaanBeek
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COVID-19 Threat Update – now includes Blood for Sale
Although the use of global events as a vehicle to drive digital crime is hardly surprising, the current outbreak of COVID-19 has revealed a multitude of vectors, including one in particular that is somewhat out of the ordinary. In a sea of offers for face masks, a recent posting on ...
CSI: Evidence Indicators for Targeted Ransomware Attacks – Part II
In our first article we discussed the growing pattern of targeted ransomware attacks where the first infection stage is often an info-stealer kind of malware used to gain credentials/access to determine if the target would be valuable for a ransomware attack. In this second part we will pick up where ...
CSI: Evidence Indicators for Targeted Ransomware Attacks – Part I
For many years now I have been working and teaching in the field of digital forensics, malware analysis and threat intelligence. During one of the classes we always talk about Lockard’s exchange principle: “with contact between two items, there will be an exchange”. If we translate that to the digital ...
Iran Cyber Threat Update
Recent political tensions in the Middle East region have led to significant speculation of increased cyber-related activities. McAfee is on a heightened state of alert to monitor the evolving threats and rapidly implement coverage across all McAfee products as intelligence becomes available. Known campaigns associated with the threat actors from ...
McAfee ATR Analyzes Sodinokibi aka REvil Ransomware-as-a-Service – Crescendo
Episode 4: Crescendo This is the final installment of the McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) analysis of Sodinokibi and its connections to GandGrab, the most prolific Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) Campaign of 2018 and mid 2019. In this final episode of our series we will zoom in on the operations, techniques and ...
McAfee ATR Analyzes Sodinokibi aka REvil Ransomware-as-a-Service – Follow The Money
Episode 3: Follow the Money This is the third installment of the McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) analysis of Sodinokibi and its connections to GandCrab, the most prolific Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) Campaign of 2018 and mid 2019. The Talking Heads once sang “We’re on a road to nowhere.” This expresses how ...
MITRE ATT&CK™ APT3 Assessment
Making a case for the importance for real-time reporting is a simple exercise when considering almost every major campaign. Take the case of Shamoon, where analysis into the Disttrack wiper revealed a date in the future when destruction would happen. Similarly, cases where actors use different techniques in their attacks reveal that once mapped out, a ...
McAfee ATR Analyzes Sodinokibi aka REvil Ransomware-as-a-Service – The All-Stars
Episode 2: The All-Stars Analyzing Affiliate Structures in Ransomware-as-a-Service Campaigns This is the second installment of the McAfee Advanced Threat Research (ATR) analysis of Sodinokibi and its connections to GandGrab, the most prolific Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) Campaign of 2018 and mid-2019. GandCrab announced its retirement at the end of May. Since ...
RDP Stands for “Really DO Patch!” – Understanding the Wormable RDP Vulnerability CVE-2019-0708
During Microsoft’s May Patch Tuesday cycle, a security advisory was released for a vulnerability in the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). What was unique in this particular patch cycle was that Microsoft produced a fix for Windows XP and several other operating systems, which have not been supported for security updates ...
Ryuk Ransomware Attack: Rush to Attribution Misses the Point
Senior analyst Ryan Sherstobitoff contributed to this report. During the past week, an outbreak of Ryuk ransomware that impeded newspaper printing services in the United States has garnered a lot of attention. To determine who was behind the attack many have cited past research that compares code from Ryuk with ...
