so again you would be asking me what exactly is a dead drop so i don’t know how many of you folks must have heard about this term it’s a cold war era terminology that we have used actually so in dead drops what used to happen was uh a person who would be you know conducting espionage in a certain country acting on behalf of a spy agency belonging to another country like for instance cia and kgb and you know they the spies used to come and drop a valuable materials and it used to be picked up by uh you know a team from another agency but essentially the espionage spy would be transferring data through these dead drops so like for instance uh you must have heard of by alder james in the us so they used to come and he used to drop these packets i believe in parks and places and then the kg person would come and pick up that particular dump and sort of move on and it would be you know moved out as diplomatic uh sort of uh luggage and it wouldn’t be subject to any scrutiny etc etc but essentially the dead drop is where the spy would actually dump this particular you know a lot of information and somebody will pick it up so what is dead drop in today’s day and age or rather how did we come up with this terminology so what essentially dead drop in cyberspace is that it refers to when an incident or a situation where an employee of an organization actually dumps certain valuable data on places like dartmouth and other forums uh essentially inviting hackers to attack their organization right it’s a disgruntled employees or vendors or somebody who has access to a certain privileged information which they share in a illegal way in a way in an unauthorized manner and you know the idea is to get these hackers to sort of use that information to target this particular uh company or you know entity it could be so it again is a different form of insider threat but it is evolving at such rates that you know it has become a category by its own that is why we want to or rather we are tracking it in as a separate sort of a tactic uh from the hackers and so you can see what kind of data is it that we commonly encounter in in these dead drops right so there are fake files uh there are genuine stolen files uh without embedded malware sometimes you know hackers would take this data they would embed some malware and then they’ll dab it back there so that you know somebody would pick it up and uh you know they will pass on the infection they will be infecting their own machines or the mechanism to launch or this particular malware dated files very old information again it gets transferred you know once it’s dumped on these forums it keeps moving uh at various phases file information these are data provided for an offer of sale later yeah this is another thing we have seen where you know about roughly one to five percent of the data is actually shared as a sample and they say that hey come back to us for more uh you know this is for you to send your bitcoins to if you uh want to get your hands on or more of this particular information that is not the others in unclassified forms and the big chunk so again this as as you’ve noticed that no we discussed so many points to today primarily we have also looked at how the innovation is happening at the hackers end but unfortunately we are not really gearing up and sort of you know innovating at the level that hackers are so that’s putting an evolutionary pressure so to say on us to also start uh sort of matching steps with these hackers and sort of walk at least match space to some extent with these hackers so that you know we can prevent these cyber attacks