Tor: In the age of big surveillance & Using Machine Learning to Detect Attacks

The meetup had two talks. Roger Dingledine, president and co-founder of the Tor Project, covered Tor and internet privacy in the age of big surveillance. He talked through how Tor works and what security it provides, why its open design matters, and how the censorship arms race compares with the nation-state surveillance one. The talk also covered onion services, which many people know as the dark web.

Roy Firestein, CPO at Cycura, presented on how his team built a machine-learning pipeline on AWS to detect post-exploitation attacks. It had feedback loops and worked from Active Directory and endpoint agent logs. He went through the architecture decisions, deployment automation and tools, and when to use hosted machine-learning tools or run your own.