Threat Actors- Descendants and Strangers

A guest lecture was arranged on 29 August 2021 at 7:00 pm where the speaker ‘Mr. Shyam Sundar Ramaswami’ who is a Senior Research Scientist at RET Cisco talked about “Threat Actors- Descendants and Strangers”. The speaker started the guest lecture by explaining the difference between the descendants and the strangers.
Mr. Shyam mentioned that an attack happens because the people today are connected or exposed. He also discussed the reason for Software and Cyber attacks on PCs. He mentioned that people using outdated PCs such as Windows 7 are more exposed to cyber attacks. He compared this with ‘Organ Harvesting’. He also mentioned a very nice quote “It is important to remember that we all have magic inside us” by J.K Rowling. Through this he tried to explain that human emotions and psychology can sometimes lead to cyber attacks as people tend to share their information when they are in an emotional phase. Mr. Shyam very nicely gave examples and explained the same. He emphasized on people being more careful about the same. He thoroughly explained what exactly malware is and how do people get malware on their system?
He explained the importance of how a single ‘click’ can allow a malware to enter into our system. He warned everyone to be careful before clicking on any link as it can allow an attacker to run malware on our system. He explained many concepts such as Trickbot, Protected document, Guardian, Firewall, Agent Tesla and Reincarnation of Macro 4.0. Mr. Shyam mentioned that malware runs inside a contained environment with no internet connection and he very nicely explained the same using examples. He explained about the concerns of malware running on a system. He explained about the code injection and process injection. In the end he told the audience to be careful about any fake website and to use ‘TALOS’ for verifying the same. Overall the guest lecture was full of different cyber concepts and their insights. It helped the students gain a lot of knowledge from Mr. Shyam Sundar Ramaswami. The guest concluded the session by saying that threat actors are both descendants and strangers.
-Khyati