Risky Business #208 -- Time for a cyber knife fight, says Diocyde

Secret squirrel Diocyde joins the show to discuss attribution and Chinese cyber-espionage...
26 Aug 2011 » Risky Business

This week's feature interview is with anonymous infosec blogger Diocyde.

He has access to some fairly sensitive shit, so we can't tell you his name and we've had to disguise his voice.

Diocyde is best known as the author of the Veiled Shadows blog.

On it, he's written volumes about state-sponsored attacks against the United States. He's tracked who he says are Chinese malware writers and basically doxed them on the blog. He's advocated a hot cyber-war against China to stop that country from continuing to siphon off US-developed intellectual property and intelligence and he's written it all under the influence of pure fury.

Chinese attacks against the USA make this guy angry, as does the idea that attribution in the cyber sphere is difficult.

Interest in Diocyde's blog really took off when links to it popped up in e-mail stolen from HBGary Federal. Things got even more interesting when a few of his posts not only disappeared from the blog, but also disappeared from Google's cache.

In particular, one post titled "Busting the APT can wide open" went missing. It contained a large amount of intelligence on Chinese malware writers.

It was a fascinating read, and it's been completely removed from the Internet.

Doicyde joined me to discuss his blog, the missing posts, Chinese cyber espionage and attribution.

This week's sponsor interview is with RSA Product Manager Jeffery Carpenter.

This week we're chatting to Jeff about RSA's vision for the future of two-factor authentication. Are soft tokens becoming more popular? Is that a problem? What role will mobile device features like NFC play in the 2FA equation in the future?

Also this week, Adam Boileau joins us with the week's news headlines.