Since the infamous Silk Road takedown by the FBI in 2013, the Darkweb economy has been exponentially increasing in both user base and revenue year-over-year. The need for essoteric knowledge in order to engage in transactions via this hadow Internet has subsided greatly, allowing average computer users access to the vast underground of illicit economies. 2016 in particular has seen turbulent growth and high-profile media coverage, puttng it in the forefront of everybody's minds. In this talk, we'll present the cold hard truth behind the various commodities being bought and sold via this pseudo-anonymous marketplace, with a depth and insight The Media is simply not able to provide. Topics covered will include: money laundering via cryptocurrency, Hacking as a Service, hitmen for hire, human trafficking, and much, much more!
Johnny Xmas ( @J0hnnyXm4s ) is a penetration tester for the Chicago-based Security Assessment Firm "RedLegg." He's been speaking Internationally on the topics of Information Security, Career Advancement and Social Engineering for nearly 15 years, both in and very far outside of the Information Security community. His infamous mixture of humor, raw sincerity and honest love of people often leads to lighthearted, but at their cores, serious discussions revolving around our innate desires to get in our own way.
Benjamin Brown currently works on darknet research, threat intelligence, incident response, and adversarial resilience at Akamai Technologies. He has experience in the non-profit, academic, and corporate worlds as well as degrees in both Anthropology and International Studies. Research interests include darknet and deepweb ethnographic studies, novel and side-channel attack vectors, radio systems, the psychology and anthropology of information security, metacognitive techniques for intelligence analysis, threat actor profiling, and thinking about security as an ecology of complex systems.