Hakan Tanriverdi

From Vulkan to Ryazan – Investigative Reporting from the Frontlines of Infosec

During the last couple of years, I have reported on several large-scale digital espionage and sabotage campaigns, from hacking groups that were later called out by the Department of Justice to companies targeting critical infrastructure in Germany and across Western Europe. In both cases, mistakes in how the attackers set up their infrastructure enabled our team to follow their tracks, in some cases right back to their employers. The resulting stories revealed the intersection where covert cyberoperations and overt organizational structures meet. This talk will lay out the types of information we work with, how we follow and fact-check opaque leads, and turn them into portraits of the previously unknown actors pulling the strings in cyberspace.

Hakan Tanriverdi works as a reporter covering cybersecurity. He is mainly focusing on hacking groups and trying to find out who they are working for, on a name- and employer-basis. His investigations tend to be on the more technical side and are assisted by scripts, scrapers and querying databases.