Ben April
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Ben April

Chief Technology Officer

Ben April is the Chief Technology Officer at Farsight Security, Inc. Prior to joining Farsight Security, Mr. April spent eight years at Trend Micro, where he became the Americas regional manager of the forward-looking threat research team. He has presented to security conferences on five continents, covering topics like Bitcoin, NFC, operational security and infrastructure security. Mr. April has built research systems for collecting and aggregating data, from Whois and the Bitcoin block-chain to the global routing table. His current crusade is to eliminate the technical and policy barriers that impede data-sharing among white-hat security researchers. Mr. April is also a volunteer sysadmin and coder for some trusted-community security projects.

Selected Executive Presentations

Hack No!

December 18, 2019

Locking Down the Last Mile: DoT & DoH

Anomali Detect 2019

September 29-October 2, 2019 National Harbor, Maryland

Gaining Tactical Intelligence using DNS

BSides MSP

September 26-28, 2019 Minneapolis, MN

Keynote: Reflections on Subjective Reputation

Anomali Detect ‘18

To Catch a Scammer: Exposing a Scammer's Digital Web with Passive DNS

South Africa Threat Day

The DNS High Ground

BSides Boston

NFC: I Don't Think It Means What You Think It Means

KIWICON 8

Passive DNS: Forensics and Analysis

Webinar

One Bad Indicator Leads to Another

Webinar

DNS Mapping for Better Context on Threats

Selected Writings
DarkReading

New Domains: A Wide-Open Playing Field for Cybercrime

Infoblox Security Blog

DNS Putting the “D” in Defense Against Cyberattacks

Farsight Blog

All I Want for Christmas is a New TLD

Farsight Blog

5 Tips for Threat Hunting with DNSDB

TrendMicro Security Intelligence Blog

Flattening Bitcoin: What is Transaction Malleability?

Selected Executive Interviews
Cyberscoop

Ongoing state-sponsored DNS hijacking campaign has compromised 40 entities

In this piece that highlights how the hackers behind this new DNS hijacking campaign have concealed their operation by using “certificate impersonation," Mr. April underscores why traditional security methods are no longer effective: “The industry advice from the late 90’s suggesting end-users ‘look for the padlock’ won’t cut it,” said Ben April, CTO of the threat intelligence vendor Farsight Security. “There are plenty of sites using [domain validation] because they only want to prevent eavesdropping, that works fine.”

McClatchy News Service

Florida websites peddle far-right news but owner, and motives, remain hidden

Interviewed for a story about the cloaked identify of the owner(s) running a group of “hyper-partisan” websites: “It’s not an easy thing to determine who is behind a website,” said Ben April, director of research at Farsight Security, a San Mateo, California, company with tools that specialize in tracing the history and connections of websites — or domains — on the internet.

VMBlog

Farsight Security 2019 Predictions: Technology Trends to Watch

In this interview, Mr. April highlights four top trends for 2019, including an increased focus on privacy: ”New products and proposals promising to fix specific privacy problems will continue to appear. Some will actually move the needle on one or more aspects of privacy and may miss entirely or make things worse for other aspects.“

Farsight

Farsight 5 Questions Interview

Among the many topics Mr. April discusses in this wide-ranging interview: why diversity is important to an organization’s security team: “We need to field diverse defense teams to protect our assets from adversaries who don't follow the rules that we follow, be they legal, business or social rules. If everyone followed a clear set of rules, the landscape in this space would be drastically different.”

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