Lansing ISSA Meeting on October 22, 2015 

Please join us for our October chapter meeting. It's a good opportunity to network with a variety of security professionals!

        Topic:          Understanding Motivation Among Specific Hacker Communities

        Presenter:   Thomas J. Holt, Ph.D.

There is a significant body of research focused on mitigating cyberattacks through technical solutions.  Though these studies are critical to decrease the impact of various vulnerabilities and hacks, researchers still pay generally little attention to the affect that motivations play in the frequency, type, and severity of hacker activity.  Economic gain and social status have been identified as critical drivers of computer hacker behavior in the past, but few have considered how nationalism and religious beliefs influence the activities of some hacker communities.  Such attacks are gaining prominence and pose a risk to critical infrastructure and web based resources.  In order to expand our understanding of religious and nationalist cyber-attack, this study will explore the active and emerging hacker community in the Muslim-majority nation of Turkey.  Using multiple qualitative data sets, including interviews with active hackers and posts from multiple web forums, the findings explore the nature of attacks, target selection, the role of peers in facilitating attacks, and justifications through the lens of religious and national pride.  The results can benefit information security professionals, law enforcement, and the intelligence community by providing unique insights on the social dynamics driving hacker activity.

Thomas Holt is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University specializing in cybercrime, policing, and policy. He received his Ph. D. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Missouri-Saint Louis in 2005. He has published extensively on cybercrime and cyberterror with over 35 peer-reviewed articles in outlets such as Crime and Delinquency, Sexual Abuse, the Journal of Criminal Justice, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Deviant Behavior. He has published multiple books on cybercrime and security, and received multiple grants from the National Institute of Justice and the National Science Foundation to examine the social and technical drivers of Russian malware writers, data thieves, and hackers using on-line data. He has also given multiple presentations on computer crime and hacking at academic and professional conferences, as well as hacker conferences across the country including Defcon and HOPE.

Attending this meeting earns you 1 CPE

The meeting doors will be opened at 7:45 AM for sign-in and networking, followed at 8:00 with our speaker's presentation.

                 Please note our fee for attending this meeting:                                                                --Current members of ISSA International:                     n/a                                        --Friends and guests of the Lansing ISSA chapter:      $10                                        --Students interested in I.T. security issues:                   $5

Register Now!