Risky Business #492 -- Thomas Rid on sloppy active measures

Sorry this week’s show is late – I found myself taking an unexpected and unavoidable trip. But I’m back on deck and we’ve got a great show for you this week.

This week we hear from Thomas Rid, Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. We’re having a conversation inspired by the latest spectacular Russian intelligence blunder: a Russian SIGINT operator exposing their GRU headquarters’ IP address because they forgot to fire up their VPN when logging in to their Guccifer 2.0 persona accounts. Oops.

It’s hilarious stuff, but it’s brought out the conspiracy types who are saying hey, as if they’d make this mistake. Something’s fishy! Well, as you’ll hear, these types of agencies make similar mistakes on a pretty routine basis. Thomas joins us to talk about that, and also about how mistakes like this don’t really matter in the broad scheme of things. They’re a bit of a distraction.

This week’s show is brought to you by Bugcrowd, the managed bug bounty company. Bugcrowd’s founder and CTO Casey Ellis will be dropping by to talk about a few things. They’ve raised a stack of cash since we last spoke and they plan to spend it on a bunch of stuff – they’re working on doing more efficient triage and they’re also looking at creating better legal agreements between their customers and their researchers. That’s all interesting stuff, and it’s coming up later.

The show notes/links are below, and you can follow Adam or Patrick on Twitter if that’s your thing.