Information Anarchy: A Survival Guide for the Misinformation Age - SANS CTI Summit 2018

We are surrounded by information – data on every topic, from any angle, in every shape and size. All of this data should provide us with more understanding and insight than ever before. But there is just one problem. The information isn’t always accurate. We are living in the misinformation age. How can threat intelligence analysts survive in an age of information anarchy? We need information to form the basis of our analysis, but how can we pick out the truth from the overwhelming piles of data and ensure that our analysis is sound? This talk will discuss how we got to the state we are in, and how to identify accurate information versus intentional misinformation and misinformation born of confusion. Finally, we’ll look at some steps we as a community can take to eliminate unintentional misinformation and get to ground truth sooner, including ways to calculate mean time to accurate information on Twitter and how to identify IOC-outliers that require more scrutiny. Speaker Bio: Rebekah Brown (@PDXbek), Threat Intelligence Lead, Rapid7; Summit Advisor, SANS Institute Rebekah Brown is a former National Security Agency network warfare analyst, U.S. Cyber Command training and exercise lead, and Marine Corps crypto-linguist. She has helped develop threat intelligence programs at the federal, state, and local levels as well as in the private sector at a Fortune 500 company. Rebekah currently leads threat intelligence at Rapid7. She has an associate degree in Mandarin, a B.A. in International Relations, and is wrapping up a M.A in homeland security with a cybersecurity focus.