Slippery Slope of Doom: What Could Possibly Go Wrong with Our Instrumented World?

Colonel Gregory Conti is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the United States Military Academy, West Point, and director of the academy’s Cyber Research Center. He has served as a senior advisor in the U.S. Cyber Command Commander’s Action Group (CAG) as officer in charge of a deployed U.S. Cyber Command expeditionary cyber support element, and as a co-developer of the U.S. Cyber Command’s joint advanced cyber warfare course.

An active researcher in the area of cybersecurity and privacy, Conti has authored numerous articles and spoken at many professional and hacker conferences including Black Hat and Defcon, and the NATO Conference on Cyber Conflict. He is the author of two books including Googling Security, which discusses user data collection by Google and the ‘data leakage’ that occurs as we interact with various websites in the course of our daily lives. Conti will be speaking about security vulnerabilities and privacy issues in an increasingly instrumented world.

About this Lecture

An eye-opening and comprehensive view of our increasingly instrumented world, from inside our bodies, to tech on our bodies, in our homes, vehicles, and communities. Adversaries ranging from lone malicious hackers to nation-states to trusted insiders will exploit ever-present vulnerabilities and ultimately those we seek to defend. When analyzing the threat we should not ignore companies whose business model of free products and services result in compelling honeypots that harvest personal and organizational information to the maximum extent the market will bear. Are we doomed? Perhaps not. Conti’s talk will explore this emerging threat environment, present possible solutions, and argue that we should always look askance at new technologies—by understanding their true capabilities for misuse and not just what marketing literature or a friendly corporate mascot proclaims.

 

Featured Book

Helpful Links

Could Googling Take Down a President?
Talk at Defcon on how information goes from query to blackmail
Article
01 January 2008

The Cost of Free Web Tools
Article on what we pay in exchange for access to free services
June 2007

Privacy and Security
Paper arguing that privacy and security need not be mutually exclusive
June 2014

Surveillance Countermeasures
A taxonomy with examples that have been successfully employed
June 2013