This edition of the Soap Box podcast is brought to you by Proofpoint.

Today’s guest is Proofpoint’s EVP of Cybersecurity Strategy, Ryan Kalember, and the topic is business email compromise, or BEC.

BEC is a big deal, generating billions of dollars in losses every year across basically all industry verticals and levels of government. Until recently, there haven’t been many technical controls that help to mitigate it.

On this week’s show Patrick and Adam discuss the week’s security news, including:

• Inside the new American “e2ee busting” bill
• Julian Assange hit with (another) superseding indictment
• Trustwave uncovers sneaky Chinese accounting software backdoor
• Much, much more…

This week’s show is brought to you by Okta. They are, of course, the identity and auth giant and one of the few sponsors we actually approached last year for 2020 because, well, they are very good at what they do. This week Marc will be joining us to talk about a privacy-related topic. The discussion is nuanced, but it’s basically about how the public perception of privacy risks has diverged from the reality/ Further, that the COVID-19 crisis and the advent of digital contact tracing apps have actually brought general concerns around digital privacy to the fore.

Three US Senators have put forward a bill that apes the powers of the UK Investigatory Powers Act and Australia’s Assistance and Access Act, while omitting many of the (albeit weak) safeguards that protect that power from being abused.

The Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act of 2020, introduced by Republican Senators Lindsay Graham, Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn, compels device manufacturers and digital service providers to provide access to user data when served with a warrant. It’s the Nike approach: Just do it!

On this week’s show Patrick and Adam discuss the week’s security news, including:

• Australia “under attack” - a wrap
• Microsoft releases more security protections for E5 customers
• US to introduce “anti encryption” bill
• Shady encrypted phone company owned by the cops
• NSA to offer filtered DNS services to defence industry
• MORE

Technical indicators released by the Australian Government reveal that state-backed actors are among the many attackers abusing OAuth apps to gain unauthorised access to cloud accounts. Risky.Biz reckons there is more Microsoft can do to stop it.

Today we’re chatting with Citizen Lab Senior Researcher John Scott-Railton about the work they did investigating the Indian hacker-for-hire firm BellTrox.

For those of you who didn’t catch the news, The Citizen Lab, which operates out of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, dropped a huge report a couple of weeks back that lays Belltrox’s operations bare. As you’ll hear this company attempted to hack tens of thousands of email accounts belonging to everyone from government officials to hedge fund managers and activists.

On this week’s show Patrick and Adam discuss the week’s security news, including:

• Facebook commissioned custom 0day to de-cloak child sex predator
• IP stack bugs to plague IoT, ICS for years
• Sandworm was doxxed by the NSA and hardly anyone noticed
• Congress demands answers on 2015 Juniper NetScreen back door investigation
• Amazon, Microsoft join moratorium on sale of facial recognition to police
• Much, much more

Threat hunters studying the IoCs released in the NSA’s May 2020 advisory on recent Sandworm activity have used them to identify a large amount of infrastructure that looks custom-made to conduct credential phishing attacks against email and social media accounts used in Western countries.

On this week’s show Patrick and Adam discuss the week’s security news, including:

• Full scale of Indian hacker-for-hire firm revealed
• IBM exits facial recognition
• Contact tracing apps flop
• Much, much more

Researchers have exposed gaps in the security and privacy design of OmniBallot - another online voting system used in the United States. It has no privacy policy, and curiously sends user voting preferences to a central server even when a user chooses to print out a completed ballot to return by mail.

There are sound reasons why anxious governments are tasking signals intelligence services to track the progress of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.

The Soap Box podcasts we run here at Risky.Biz are wholly sponsored affairs – everyone you hear in a soap box podcast, paid to be here.

The idea is vendors get to come on to the show and chat about their products, what their stuff does, the thinking behind it, so on and so on.

Today we’re hearing from Justin McCarthy of strongDM.

strongDM is a bit of a niche player – essentially what they do is make a product that provisions secure access to engineers who need to access various back end services.

On this week’s show Patrick and Adam discuss the week’s security news, including:

• Google TAG implicates Indian hacker-for-hire outfits in espionage
• NSA warns of Sandworm Exim exploitation
• Huawei CFO extradition process to continue
• Black lives matter
• F–k police brutality

The NSA warns that Sandworm, one of Russia’s most formidable offensive cyber operations, has been exploiting a known flaw in the Exim mail transfer agent (MTA) in attacks for at least 10 months. Sandworm - part of Russia’s GRU intelligence unit - were fingered for NotPetya and crippling wiper attacks on Ukraine’s power grid. You don’t want these guys up in your business.

When litigants suing Capital One sought a forensic incident response report into its 2019 data breach, the bank played a reliable card: the report was commissioned by its outside law firm, and therefore subject to attorney-client privilege.

In a surprising move, this week a US District Court rejected the bank’s claim to privilege and demanded the document be handed over, in what appears to set an unsettling precedent.

Regular listeners to the podcast would know that for the last year or so, my cohost Adam Boileau and I have been talking a lot about how governments might involve non law enforcement agencies in a response to the big game ransomware epidemic. To discuss that, we’re joined by Bobby Chesney, the co-founder of the Lawfare blog and a very highly respected figure in US national security circles.

The United Kingdom is pulling together a plan to remove Huawei from its mobile networks within the next three years, following the lead of Australia and the United States.

On this week’s show Patrick and Adam discuss the week’s security news, including:

• German intelligence warns of widespread Russian infrastructure hacks
• NGOs urge COVID-19 hack de-escalation
• UK mulls total Huawei ban… we think it’s a done deal
• DHS warning on 5G “moronavirus”
• Wen jailbreak? NOW JAILBREAK
• iOS 14 leaks
• Much, much more…

On this week’s show Patrick and Adam discuss the week’s security news, including:

• easyJet breach linked to Chinese APT
• Israel claims credit for attack against Iranian port
• Chinese-linked crew behind Taiwan energy hax
• Crypto-wars reignite over Pensacola shooter’s phone
• Much, much more

Russia has some competition in the disinformation game. The US administration’s claim that the COVID-19 outbreak was caused by a laboratory accident was based on a report that has now been thoroughly debunked.