Ron Bowes

Lead Security Researcher

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Ron Bowes Lead Security Researcher, GreyNoise Intelligenc

Ron Bowes is a Lead Security Researcher on the GreyNoise Labs team, which tracks and investigates unusual--typically malicious--internet traffic. His primary role is to understand and track the big vulnerabilities of the day/week/month/year; often, that means parsing vague vendor advisories, diff'ing patches, reconstructing attacks from log files, and--most complex of all--installing and configuring enterprise software. When he's not at work, he runs the BSides San Francisco Capture the Flag contest, is a founder of The Long Con conference in Winnipeg, maintains a personal blog, and continues his question to finish every game in his Steam library.


Talk: Finding signals in the noise: Why write exploits when attackers share them for free?

Talks will be streamed on YouTube and Twitch for free.


Did you know that ransomware groups are actually generous? They're so generous, in fact, that after putting all their time and effort into writing an exploit, they just share it with the internet for free! At GreyNoise, we've made it our mission to detect and categorize all traffic blasted onto the internet, which includes old exploits for old vulnerabilities, new exploits for new vulnerabilities, and everything in between. We'll show you what happens when an experienced exploit developer kicks back and lets others do the hard work - by building and deploying honeypots for emergent threats, we can spend our time analyzing what the baddies are up to, which vulnerabilities are actually being exploited, and who's being naughty. This talk will include real-world exploitation examples, including examples of exploits that would go on to join the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) list. We'll Armed with that information, security teams can use their limited resources much more efficiently by prioritizing the vulnerabilities that are under attack!