Risky Business #457 -- Shadow Brokers turn to ZCash, plus special guest John Safran

On this week’s show we’re taking a detour: This week’s feature interview has absolutely nothing to do with infosec. But it is related to the Internet. Sort of. If you squint a little.

This week’s feature guest is John Safran. He’s been gracing television screens here in Australia for nearly 20 years, but John is also a rather brilliant author. I’ve just finished reading John’s new book, Depends what you mean by Extremist, Going Rogue with Australian Deplorables. Honestly, it’s fascinating enough for me to just squeeze it into this show.

Basically John wrote a book about the year and a half he spent hanging out with all sorts of extremists; Left-wing Marxists, anarchists, right wing anti-Islam types and even Islamic State supporters, some of whom are now up on terror-related charges.

I speak to John about the Internet’s influence on extremism, as well as extremism in general. I highly, highly recommend this book. It’s a fascinating look at the contemporary political landscape through the eyes of extremist movements of all flavours, and it’s not a tough read. It’s actually quite funny and it really the most on-point thing I’ve read in a long, long time.

This week’s show is brought to you by Bugcrowd, big thanks to them! And in this week’s sponsor interview we’ll chat with Casey Ellis, Bugcrowd’s founder and CEO. Now that outsourced bug bounties have gone mainstream, we know more what they’re for and how people find them useful. So we speak to Casey about how a lot of orgs are basically just throwing the lower value testing out to bounties to free up their infosec teams to do higher value work. We talk about that and a couple of other points.

Adam Boileau, as always, drops in to discuss the week’s security news!

You can add Patrick, or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing. Show notes are below…