Balancing the Pwn Trade Deficit

Architecture and Background

Val Smith, Colin Ames & Anthony Lai - Balancing the Pwn Trade Deficit One of the presenters is a native Chinese language speaker and heavily involved in the Chinese security community and so brings unique insights to this presentation. The other presenters have been analyzing APT style threats for many years and bring this experience to bare on a problem that has received a lot of recent attention, but little technical depth. Viewers should walk away with a greatly increased understanding of the Chinese hacking community as well as some ideas for better defense, and collaboration.

Vulnerability Analysis

Valsmith has been involved in the computer security community and industry for over ten years. He currently works as a professional security researcher on a variety of problems in the security community. He specializes in penetration testing (over 40,000 machines assessed), reverse engineering and malware research.

Exploitation and Demonstrations

He has worked on the Metasploit Project development team as well as other vulnerability development efforts. Most recently Val Smith founded Attack Research[6] which is devoted to deep understanding of the mechanics of computer attack. Previously Val Smith founded a public, open source malware research project.

Remediation and Defensive Strategies

Colin Ames is a security researcher with Attack Research LLC where he consults for both the private and public sectors. He's currently focused on Pen testing, Exploit Development, Reverse Engineering, and Malware Analysis. Anthony Lai For Anthony's technical and working experience, he likes reverse engineering, exploitation, malware analysis and penetration test as well as studying the attack, he has started BLACKHAT and DEFCON experience from 2007, Anthony starts and organized research group on reverse engineering , malware analysis and forensic in Hong Kong, connecting various security researchers and team in the globe; Anthony is one of those quite concerning about security issues and impact on our Chinese fellows in China, he believes as he comes from Hong Kong, it would be "advantageous" for him to discuss about it openly, he has presented reverse engineering dissection over Green Dam, which is a content filtering software, in Hong Kong, which is widely reported by International and China media. For copies of the slides and additional materials please see the DEF CON 18 Archive here: