Alex “Jay” Balan is the Chief Security Researcher and Spokesperson for Bitdefender. His career is focused on Information Security, Innovation and Product Strategy, fields in which he has so far accumulated over 15 years of experience. He drove the vision for Bitdefender’s UNIX-based security solutions before kickstarting an ambitious project that would advance the company’s R&D department and steer a good part of the company’s focus towards technology and innovation.

Next-Gen IoT Botnets #3 – Moar ownage

Traditional IoT botnets operate pretty much like shooting fish in a barrel. With an elephant gun. A service running on a port. A weak password or a lame vulnerability and you’ve got yourself a few hundred thousand zombies. This “space”, however, is getting crowded and botnet masters will start looking for alternatives. This talk will show one of the possible futures – leveraging cloud platforms to mass hack hundreds of thousands of devices. We’ll start with a quick ‘n dirty crash course for those just getting started with IoT hacking, a brief glimpse into the current status of IoT botnets and get down to business with showing our research on a few popular IoT brands with demos for each finding. Worth mentioning that some of the vulnerabilities haven’t been patched at the time of this submission (6 months after our initial report to the vendor) so odds are that we’ll be popping some connect-back shells from cameras behind NAT live, on stage.