Risky Business #290 -- A chat with Howard Schmidt

Obama's former top infosec advisor joins Risky Business for a chinwag...
24 Jul 2013 » Risky Business

This week's show features a fantastic, extended interview with Howard Schmidt, the former White House cyber security co-ordinator and special Assistant to the US President.

We spend about 35 minutes talking about what information security looks like from a high-level policy perspective. It's a long interview but there are some gems in there. We talk about some of the initiatives Howard kicked off at the White House, about the critical infrastructure legislation ping-pong game the executive branch played with congress, about Edward Snowden's leaks, and what it was like to work for Barack Obama.

This week's show is brought to you by a new sponsor -- Context Information Security. ContextIS is a global consultancy and managed service provider and its Australian general manager Scott Ceely joins us this week to talk about watering hole attacks. More specifically he's talking to us about a watering hole attack that managed to hose a few high value targets with some pretty basic exploitation techniques. The Crouching Tiger watering hole attack, a case study, if you will.

Adam Boileau, as usual, joins us to talk about the week's news headlines. Show notes here.