November TASK: Persona Theory / How RFCs Are Made
Live and in-person at TMU + Live-Streamed on Discord
Date: Wednesday, November 27
Time: 6:00 PM
In-Person Location: Room 208, Daphne Cockwell Complex, 288 Church St
Registration: Not required
Live-Stream: Although TASK is always best in-person, we will steam live again on Discord @ https://discord.gg/aXfY76xgVJ.
Topic: Persona Theory: Infiltration & Deception of Emerging Threat Groups
Speaker: Tammy Harper
Our personas are fabrications and constructions of our inner self that we project outwards. We do this through various means and influences such as race, gender, sex, ability, age, culture, religion, norms, class, and status.
For the “real world” we do all this by expression in our clothing, makeup, hairstyling, our hobbies, our network of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. We leverage all these facets, and we create masks, personas, that we think will best interact with the world around us. The same concepts apply when creating personas for infiltrating online communities.
In this talk we will look at what makes a good persona and what makes a bad persona. Persona’s can vary wildly in quality, many factors contribute to the quality of a persona, for example how tailor is it to the mission, how good is the operational security of the account, how good are you at managing it and leveraging it to establish yourself in a community.
We will also look at understanding what you can construct and where limitations lie. If you know nothing about the community, you are trying to infiltrate you will have a hard time establishing a foothold even more so any significant persistence in the community.
Third, we will look at tools, OpSec, and time zone shifting. We will go over some tools that will help you create, build, and maintain quality personas on the dark web.
Finally, we will look at what is your mission and executing your mission. It is just as important to know how to exit as it is how to infiltrate. For example, do you want to keep your persona in good standing so it can be reused on another mission? Are you going to burn it? Knowing when to retire a persona is a good skill to have.
Tammy Harper is a Senior Threat Intelligence Researcher and Certified Dark Web Investigator at Flare and studied Advanced Cybersecurity at York University in Toronto, Ontario. She is currently an admin and volunteer researcher for the open-source project RansomLook and a contributor to the DeepDarkCTI open-source research project. Since 2022, she’s been volunteering at her local Women in Tech group, helping mentor women in cybersecurity, threat intelligence, and the dark web.
When she isn’t researching communities on the deep and dark web, she listens to techno/ambient music and sips a delicious matcha latte. Her other hobbies include photography, reading, googology (the study of really, really, large numbers), astronomy, and listening to true crime podcasts.
Tammy was featured on the June 2023 Privacy Files Podcast: Dark Web Crimes Episode (available on most podcast streaming platforms), where she discussed cybercrime, major breaches in the news, and how the threat landscape is evolving at an ever-accelerating pace.
Topic: How RFCs Are Made: The Internet Engineering Task Force ("IETF") Explained
Speaker: Paul Wouters
Paul Wouters will explain how new internet standards are made and how anyone can participate in this process at the IETF. While most work happens online, the IETF also meets three times a year. As one of the two Security Area Directors at the IETF, Paul will also give a summary of what happened in the Security Area at IETF 121 in Dublin three weeks ago.
Paul Wouters has been an active IETF contributor since 2008 working primarily as an Internet Protocol security engineer. He is the author of a dozen RFCs, mostly related to DNS, IPsec/IKEv2 and TLS. He has been a Fedora Linux developer since 2003 and worked on DNS and VPN technologies with the Crypto Team at Red Hat for 10 years. He is currently working as Security Architect at Aiven.io, a high availability clustered data and streaming platform service where he is responsible for the security of over 150,000 customer nodes running Linux.
We look forward to see you all there!
The TASK Steering Committee