Raiders Of The Lost Arts

Stefan Hager opens by placing attackers on a spectrum of skill and targeting, then looks back at early internet design, when trust, speed and availability were rarely concerns. He argues that many of those choices persist, and that protocols such as DNS, SNMP, TFTP and NTP remain unauthenticated or unencrypted, which makes them easy to spoof or abuse. His examples include forged log entries sent to a syslog server, cascading time failures from a fake stratum-zero NTP source, and memcached's very large amplification factor for DDoS. The practical advice is to segment networks and limit exposure of these services where possible.

The second half moves from technology to human processes. Hager describes baiting staff with USB sticks that end up in forensics teams, and flooding a legal department with letters about company websites that nobody internally can trace. He recounts a bomb-threat scenario in which targeting a neighbouring building disrupts communications, and says that paying ransomware in Germany can create legal trouble of its own. He draws on quotes from a World War II sabotage manual to show how obstructive meeting habits can stall decisions.

He closes by urging listeners to notice patterns of deliberate obstruction inside their own organisations, even when they look like ordinary office friction, and points to links and references in the slides.