Mike Hodges is a senior consultant for the Optiv Attack and Penetration Practice. He has a background in application development and is currently OSCP, Assoc CISSP, and CEH certified. He is currently interested in evasive penetration tactics and techniques and is constantly looking to build new ways to automate attacker evasion.
Hiding in the Clouds – Leveraging Cloud Infrastructure to Evade Detection
Organizational spending on cybersecurity is at an all-time high. From an attacker’s perspective, this means that target networks are becoming increasingly hostile environments to operate in. This has pushed attackers to look for new ways to diminish a defenders ability to identify their activity. The introduction of cloud providers and their associated content delivery networks have provided ample ways to attack and communicate with attack infrastructure while piggy-backing on the cloud provider’s infrastructure and reputation.
Techniques and tactics such as domain fronting for multiple cloud providers, distributed scanning, and leveraging API gateways will be discussed. Also, more nuanced aspects these cloud services will be explored as they sometimes provide many benefits to an attacker’s infrastructure, including encryption. Most importantly, mitigations for these techniques will provided so that defenders can go about better protecting their network.
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Will Gragido is a seasoned security professional with over 20 years’ experience in networking and information security. Will’s extensive background is the result of his service as a United States Marine, a consultant with the world renowned International Network Services, Internet Security Systems (now IBM ISS), McAfee, Damballa, Cassandra Security, RSA NetWitness, Carbon Black, Digital Shadows and now Digital Guardian where he leads the organization’s Advanced Threat Protection Product Line as its Director. Lead author and co-author of three Syngress Press titles
Ksenia Peguero is a Sr. Research Lead within Synopsys Software Integrity Group. She has eight years of experience in application security and five years in software development. Ksenia is a subject matter expert in static analysis and JavaScript frameworks and technologies. Before diving into research, she worked in a variety of software security practices including penetration testing, threat modeling, code review, static analysis tool design, customization, and deployment. Over the years, she performed numerous engagements for clients in financial services, entertainment, telecommunications, energy, and enterprise security industries. Throughout her consulting career, Ksenia has established and evolved secure coding guidance for many different firms, and has delivered numerous software security training sessions. Ksenia speaks regularly at events around the world, such as BSides Security in London, Nullcon in India, RSA in Singapore, and AppSec Europe in Italy. She has also served on review boards of AppSec USA and AppSec EU conferences.

