Ollmann speaking at the ZISC Workshop

This week I'll be in Zurich speaking at the ETH ZISC workshop on Security in Virtualized Environments and Cloud Computing.

The title of my talk is "Not Every Cloud has a Silver Lining" - and it's meant to be a fun (but insightful) look at the biggest and baddest cloud computing environments currently in existence - the botnets.

If you happen to be in Zurich on Thursday morning, by all means, please drop by for the talk. The workshop runs Thursday to Friday.

Need more details on what I'm covering? Below is the abstract...

What’s the largest cloud computing infrastructure in existence today? I’ll give you a hint. It consists of arguably 20 million hosts distributed over more than 100 countries and your computer may actually already be part of it whether you like it or not. It’s not under any single entities control, it’s sphere of influence is unregulated, and its operators have no qualms about sharing or selling your deepest cyber secrets.

The answer is botnets. They’re the largest cloud computing infrastructure out there and they’re only getting bigger and more invasive. Their criminal operators have had well over a decade to perfect their cloud management capabilities, and there’s a lot to learn from their mastery.

This session will look at the evolution of globe-spanning botnets. How does their command and control hierarchy really work? How are malicious activities coordinated? How are botnets seeded and nurtured? And how do they make their cloud invulnerable to shutdown?