Giovanni Vigna

Giovanni Vigna

Giovanni Vigna

UC Santa Barbara Professor and LastLine CTO Anurag Agrawal discusses the escalating arms race against evasive malware, highlighting how attackers now exploit sandbox detection via environmental fingerprinting and timing delays similar to the Volkswagen emissions scandal. His DEF CON team "Shellfish" recently secured $750,000 in DARPA funding to tackle these challenges, while LastLine's proprietary full-system emulation technology aims to bypass traditional signature limitations by detecting in-memory loops and stalling mechanisms. Agrawal concludes that because a final mathematical solution is impossible, effective security must continuously increase the cost of evasion for adversaries to force strategic shifts in their infrastructure and monetization models.