Dumitras Chairs Conference Session on Emerging Cyber Threats, Novel Attacks

Published January 28, 2016

Tudor Dumitras, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering with appointments in UMIACS and the Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2), recently chaired a conference session on emerging threats and novel attacks.

The session was held from Jan. 25–27 in San Francisco at a new security conference called Enigma, which was sponsored by the USENIX Association.

As a session chair, Dumitras led several practice sessions with speakers participating in the event.

“They gave their presentations beforehand over Google Hangouts, where we gave them high-level feedback that focused not only on their slides and other content, but also on the process of developing a good presentation,” he says.

Dumitras says the overall message behind the session he chaired was that security is a complex problem that cannot be solved entirely by technical means.

“We must understand the capabilities, motivations and limitations of real-world attackers,” he says. “In particular, we focused on the underground economy, with four talks that discussed different ways of removing the economic incentives behind many of the cyber attacks we see today.”