Notes from BSides Tampa 13: “Dealing with Shadows” or “A day in the life of a threat actor negotiator”

If you’ve been anywhere near a screen this month, you saw the Canvas breach unfold in real time, where the ransomeware group known as ShinyHunters dropped a “rooting your systems since ’19 ;)” page onto the dashboards of nearly 9,000 schools during finals week. Instructure papered it over with a “scheduled maintenance” message that even the most gullible saw through. A few days later, they ended up paying the ransom in exchange for “shred logs” and a pinky-promise that no customers would be extorted further. So when I sat down in a packed room at BSides Tampa 13 this past Saturday for a talk titled Dealing with Shadows: A Day in the Life of a Threat Actor Negotiator the timing felt less like a conference session and more like a debrief. The speaker was Matt Barnett, CEO and co-founder of SEVN-X, a Pennsylvania-based cybersecurity firm. Matt spends his working hours talking to criminals on the dark web on behalf of clients whose systems have just been encrypted, whose data has just…