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DEF CON 17 - Mark Ryan Del Moral Talabis - Dangerous Minds The Art of Guerrilla Data Mining

380 views · Published 20 November 2013 · 40:31 · Indexed 14 November 2026

Channel: DEFCONConference · 2013 · Science & Technology

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Dangerous Minds: The Art of Guerrilla Data Mining
Mark Ryan Del Moral Talabis Senior Consultant, Secure-DNA Consulting

It is not a secret that in today's world, information is as valuable or maybe even more valuable that any security tool that we have out there. Information is the key. That is why the US Information Awareness Office's (IAO) motto is "scientia est potential", which means "knowledge is power". The IAO just like the CIA, FBI and others make information their business. Aside from these there are multiple military related projects like TALON,ECHELON, ADVISE, and MATRIX that are concerned with information gathering and analysis.

The goal of the Veritas Project is to model itself in the same general threat intelligence premise as the organization above but primarily based on community sharing approach and using tools, technologies, and techniques that are freely available. Often, concepts that are part of artificial intelligence, data mining, and text mining are thought to be highly complex and difficult. Don't mistake me, these concepts are indeed difficult, but there are tools out there that would facilitate the use of these techniques without having to learn all the concepts and math behind these topics. And as sir Isaac Newton once said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants".

The combination of all the techniques presented in this site is what we call "Guerrilla Data Mining". It's supposed to be fast, easy, and accessible to anyone. The techniques provides more emphasis on practicality than theory. For example, these tools and techniques presented can be used to visualize trends (e.g. security trends over time), summarize large and diverse data sets (forums, blogs, irc), find commonalities (e.g. profiles of computer criminals) gather a high level understanding of a topic (e.g. the US economy, military activities), and automatically categorize different topics to assist research (e.g. malware taxonomy).

Aside from the framework and techniques themselves, the Veritas Project hopes to present a number of current ongoing studies that uses "guerilla data mining". Ultimately, our goal is to provide as much information in how each study was done so other people can generate their own studies and share them through the project. 

Full bio and description available here: 
https://defcon.org/html/defcon-17/dc-17-speakers.html#Talabis

For copies of the slides and additional materials please see the DEF CON 17 Archive here: https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-17-archive.html

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