Date: Wednesday, February 20, 2019 | Time: 5:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Location: Miami Airport Hilton, 5101 Blue Lagoon Drive, Miami, FL 33126
Moderator: Guillermo Benitez, SFBI President, Vice President of Financial Services for United Data Technologies, Inc. (UDT)
Panelists: Robert Villanueva, Executive Vice President Cyber Threat Intelligence Division of Q6 Cyber
(Miami, FL)- On Wednesday, February 20, 2019, South Florida Banking Institute hosted a panel focused on cyber crime, fraud, and how to combat the “Dark Web”. As financial institutions are no stranger to these types of threats, attendees were prepared to indulge in information on how to leverage the Deep/Dark Web to collect highly targeted and actionable threat intelligence. SFBI President, Guillermo Benitez invited Robert Villanueva to the stage to lead the informative conversation. Having dedicated 25 years to the United States Secret Service, Villanueva has continued to learn the ins and outs of transnational cyber crimes, access device fraud, network intrusions, and identity theft data breaches affecting the private sector. Having served during his tenure in both investigative and undercover capacities around the world, Villanueva led the creation of the U.S. Secret Service’s Cyber Intelligence Section, as well as spearheaded the U.S. Secret Service’s Miami Electronic Crimes Task Force. Currently serving as Executive Vice President of the Cyber Threat Intelligence Division of Q6 Cyber, Robert Villanueva was most definitely prepared to address threats and inform on prevention tactics in order to monitor and leverage the “criminal underground”.
Villanueva brought to attention that “information security breaches have become the 3rd certainty of life”. Threats have been present in the past, current time, and will exist into the future. With antivirus companies struggling to keep up hackers, this equates to endless ways of breached, most commonly with malware and spamware. Some examples are the POS (Point of Sale) malware that steals payment card data, and keyloggers that record information that gets sent to servers overseas. Once in hacker’s hands, victim’s information gets sold and bought online most frequently with crypocurrency- such as BitCoin. Villanueva informed attendees that hackers are financially driven, organized, and sophisticated criminals, forming groups that are advertised on the dark web for recruitment purposes. Hackers not only sell malware kits, but are geographically diverse, and are disguised as anonymous individuals with a distressing purpose.
But how can we stop the bad guys?
Robert Villanueva’s proven experience in cyber crime governmental affairs guided the close-out on how anyone can take preventative measures against threats:
- Awareness and training
- Proactive intelligence
- Building a comprehensive toolset
- Responding quickly to incidents
- Maintaining policies and controls
- Using 2-Factor authentication on accounts and devices
- Conducting due diligence, change your passwords every 90 days or less
- Refraining from logging into your accounts (especially banking) from non-personal computers
- Browsing emails with caution, do not click on suspicious links
- Keeping your antivirus up to date
The panel was concluded with a Q&A from Robert Villanueva and the audience.
