SecTalks Gold Coast

Title: Exploring Malware Evolution Through Machine Learning presented by Terrell Jensen.

Abstract:
Traditional malware analysis often focuses on identifying what a sample is and which family it belongs to. This project explores a different question: can we use machine learning to better understand how malware evolves over time?

From Terrell - "WedgeTail is my research project in which I have been investigating malware lineage and evolutionary intelligence by analysing features extracted from binaries, including API behaviour, strings, PE metadata, and opcode sequences. The goal is to explore whether machine learning techniques can identify relationships between samples, map possible lineage, and surface trends across malware ecosystems.

The talk would cover the technical approach behind the project, including feature extraction, embeddings, similarity analysis, and the challenges of applying ML to adversarial software. I’ll also discuss lessons learned, limitations, and where this type of approach could go in the future."

Drinks are provided by our sponsor, Solis, and pizza is provided by Cyber Audit Team. As usual, our venue is sponsored by COHORT.

GC SecTalks maintains a strict Code of Conduct.

Title: Judgement Displacement Risk (JDR) speaker Patrick Rose.

Abstract:
Patrick's research names and develops Judgement Displacement Risk (JDR): a latent governance failure in which organisations progressively optimise around measurable proxies—such as alert-closure rates, response times, compliance indicators, or risk scores—until those measures begin to displace the professional judgement they were intended to support. The distinctive problem is that nothing need malfunction: dashboards can improve while escalation, discretionary authority, and adaptive capacity quietly deteriorate. In its shortest form, “Nothing failed, but something went wrong.”

A Security Operations Centre (SOC) is a valuable setting in which to explore this theory. For example, how automation, performance metrics, triage rules, and escalation practices interact; how genuine operational improvement might be distinguished from suppressed variance or learned non-escalation; and how governance controls can preserve expert judgement without sacrificing efficiency.

A second, complementary application is Quantum Assurance: how organisations govern the transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) while the timing of cryptographically relevant quantum computing (CRQC) remains uncertain and harvest-now-decrypt-later (HNDL) exposure is already a threat. This raises a closely related JDR question: whether formal migration plans and compliance milestones reliably represent the reduction of substantive cryptographic risk.

Drinks are provided by our sponsor, Solis, and pizza is provided by Cyber Audit Team. As usual, our venue is sponsored by COHORT.

GC SecTalks maintains a strict Code of Conduct.