My Research Philosophy: Interconnectedness & Attribution
My research is driven by a profound understanding that modern cybersecurity threats are rarely isolated technical incidents. Instead, they are deeply interwoven with global geopolitics, complex digital economies, and the motivations of diverse threat actors. This holistic perspective is crucial for effective defense and for truly comprehending the origins and objectives of cyberattacks.
A critical area of my focus is the intricate, often opaque, interconnection between various types of threat actors, digital economies, and national interests. Digital markets, particularly those on the dark web, serve as vibrant hubs for the exchange of stolen data, exploit kits, and illicit services. These digital economies are not isolated; they frequently link into full-fledged national economies, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes directly.
Directly due to this, geopolitics not only drives adversarial hackers but often creates circumstances where the goals and targets of national agencies align so closely with those of illegal crime groups and independent hackers that it can be considered the equivalent of orders and targets being shared. Even if those goals and targets are never explicitly communicated between the groups, the inherent nature of global economics and geopolitics often creates a system where this alignment is a de facto reality.
This dynamic makes attribution a nightmare for cybersecurity experts. It can be completely obvious that national agencies are guiding or even directly controlling cybercriminals, and the evidence often points strongly in that direction. However, the nature of these actual connections and our ability to point to concrete, legally admissible evidence to prove these facts in lawful settings remains a huge challenge, precisely because of this implicit alignment and the deliberate obfuscation employed by sophisticated actors. My research efforts are dedicated to developing methodologies and tools to navigate this complexity, striving to uncover these hidden linkages and enhance attribution capabilities.
Research Methodologies & Focus Areas
1. OSINT & Digital Economy Mapping
This area focuses on leveraging Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) to map the intricate connections between dark web markets, cryptocurrency flows, and the broader global economic landscape. The goal is to identify patterns and actors involved in the trade of cyber capabilities and stolen data.
- Techniques: Advanced search queries, social media analysis, deep/dark web crawling (e.g., using specialized web scrapers like `xscraper`), cryptocurrency transaction analysis.
- Goals: Identifying key vendors and buyers, tracking the lifecycle of exploits and stolen data, understanding pricing models in illicit markets.
- Challenges: Data veracity, anonymity tools, constantly evolving platforms, legal and ethical boundaries of data collection.
2. Geopolitical Correlation & Threat Actor Profiling
My research involves correlating significant geopolitical events with observed cyberattack campaigns and the activities of specific threat groups. This helps in understanding the strategic motivations behind attacks and potential state sponsorship.
- Techniques: Event timeline analysis, victimology studies, malware family clustering, infrastructure tracking, public and private intelligence report synthesis.
- Goals: Building robust threat actor profiles, predicting potential targets based on geopolitical shifts, identifying common TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) associated with specific state-backed or state-aligned groups.
- Challenges: False flags, attribution laundering, limited access to classified intelligence, the sheer volume of global events.
3. Attribution & Evidentiary Linkage
This critical area focuses on the methodologies required to strengthen attribution claims, particularly when linking seemingly independent cybercriminal activity to state-level objectives. It involves identifying and confirming subtle connections that might not be immediately obvious.
- Techniques: Code similarity analysis, infrastructure overlap detection, operational security (OpSec) failures, linguistic analysis of communications, analysis of targeting patterns.
- Goals: Developing frameworks for probabilistic attribution, identifying "smoking gun" evidence (even if circumstantial), understanding the legal thresholds for attribution in international law.
- Challenges: The inherent difficulty in proving intent, the dynamic nature of threat actor infrastructure, the need for cross-jurisdictional cooperation.