Jack Cable (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) gives CYS distinguished talk

October is the "Cybersecurity Awareness Month". At TU Delft Cybersecurity group, we hosted Jack Cable from Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who gave a talk on October 3 about his latest work on "Showing the Receipts: Understanding the Modern Ransomware Ecosystem" that appeared in e-Crime 2024.

Ransomware attacks continue to wreak havoc across the globe, with public reports of total ransomware payments topping billions of dollars annually. While the use of cryptocurrency presents an avenue to understand the tactics of ransomware actors, to date published research has been constrained by relatively limited public datasets of ransomware payments. We present novel techniques to identify ransomware payments with low false positives, classifying nearly $700 million in previously-unreported ransomware payments. We publish the largest public dataset of over $900 million in ransomware payments -- several times larger than any existing public dataset. We then leverage this expanded dataset to present an analysis focused on understanding the activities of ransomware groups over time. This provides unique insights into ransomware behavior and a corpus for future study of ransomware cybercriminal activity.

Jack Cable is a Senior Technical Advisor at CISA, where he leads the agency's work on Secure by Design and open source software security. Prior to that, Jack worked as a TechCongress Fellow for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, advising Chairman Gary Peters on cybersecurity policy, including election security and open source software security. He previously worked as a Security Architect at Krebs Stamos Group. Jack also served as an Election Security Technical Advisor at CISA, where he created Crossfeed, a pilot to scan election assets nationwide. Jack is a top bug bounty hacker, having identified over 350 vulnerabilities in hundreds of companies. After placing first in the Hack the Air Force bug bounty challenge, he began working at the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service. Jack holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and has published academic research on election security, ransomware, and cloud security.