Cristina Vatamanu

Cristina Vatamanu

Senior Team Lead - Cyber Threat Intelligence Lab

Bitdefender

company overview

Bitdefender is a cybersecurity leader delivering best-in-class threat prevention, detection, and response solutions worldwide. Guardian over millions of consumer, business, and government environments, Bitdefender is the industry’s trusted expert* for eliminating threats, protecting privacy and data, and enabling cyber resiliency. With deep investments in research and development, Bitdefender Labs discovers 400 new threats each minute and validates 30 billion threat queries daily. The company has pioneered breakthrough innovations in antimalware, IoT security, behavioral analytics, and artificial intelligence and its technology is licensed by more than 150 of the world’s most recognized technology brands. Founded in 2001, Bitdefender has customers in 170 countries with offices around the world. For more information, visit https://www.bitdefender.com. *Bitdefender has ranked #1 in 54% of all tests by AV-Comparatives 2018-2021 for real-world protection, performance, malware protection & advanced threat protection.

Biography

Cristina Vatamanu is Senior Team Lead in the Cyber Threat Intelligence Lab at Bitdefender. She has more than 10 years of forensic work, being involved in malware analysis, cybercrime investigations and research projects for antimalware tools optimization.

Cristina leads one of the cybercrime investigation team in Romania with highly skilled researchers and threat analysts. This team handles sensitive cases of targeted attacks, working side-by-side with law enforcement agencies for gathering evidences against cyber-criminal groups.

She graduated Computer Sciences and she has a PHD degree in machine learning used in hybrid models dedicated in detecting malicious programs.

Speech Topic & Synopses
Long-running Military Cyber-Espionage Operation

NAIKON is a threat actor that has been active for more than a decade. Likely tied with China, the group focuses on high profile targets.

The uncovered operation targeted military organizations in the South Asia region, managing to stay under the radar for almost two years, gathering intelligence for cyber-espionage purposes.

The investigation revealed a wide set of tools used in this operation dedicated to particular steps in the kill-chain, but also a new backdoor used by the NAIKON threat actors, dubbed Nebulae.