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

• Why the White House’s cybersecurity strategy is actually quite good
• The LastPass breach was probably DPRK
• UEFI bootkits are going downmarket, and this is bad
• GitHub will scan repos for secrets
• A look at some interesting DJI drone research
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Airlock Digital. Two of Airlock’s founders – Daniel Schell and David Cottingham – are this week’s sponsor guests.

* NOTE: We now think LastPass was likely not DPRK. It’s complicated and we’ll explain why we think we got this wrong in next week’s show

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq look at how cyber operations have been used in the war in Ukraine. They examine what we know given the “fog of cyber war” and what “cyber warfare” might look like in future.

A short podcast updating listeners on the security news of the last few days, as prepared by Catalin Cimpanu and read by Kaitlyn Sawrey.

You can find the newsletter version of this podcast click here.

A short podcast updating listeners on the security news of the last few days, as prepared by Catalin Cimpanu and read by Kaitlyn Sawrey.

You can find the newsletter version of this podcast click here.

In this podcast Patrick Gray talks to Tom Uren about Signal’s vow to pull out of the UK if the proposed Online Safety Bill requires it to weaken its encryption.

Tom and Patrick agree that end-to-end encryption isn’t at stake, but Signal could well be asked what steps it is taking to mitigate child exploitation and terrorist content. Patrick thinks there are useful steps Signal could take that would be helpful, but both Tom and Pat find it hard to imagine that Signal will actually make these choices.

They also discuss the US government floating the idea of shifting legal liability to technology manufacturers when they make terribly insecure products. Tom thinks this is an attractive idea, but the government would be better off doing much more to encourage transparency first.

A short podcast updating listeners on the security news of the last few days, as prepared by Catalin Cimpanu and read by Kaitlyn Sawrey.

You can find the newsletter version of this podcast click here.

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

• A look at LastPass’s intrusion post mortem
• A very stable genius decided to ransomware the US Marshals Service
• Why Signal’s complaints about UK’s Online Safety Act are bad faith
• Much, much more…

This week’s show is brought to you by Tines, the no-code automation platform. Its co-founder and CEO Eoin Hinchy joins the show in the sponsor slot, and you can check out a Tines demo we recorded with Eoin on YouTube.

Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Mastodon if that’s your thing.

A short podcast updating listeners on the security news of the last few days, as prepared by Catalin Cimpanu and read by Claire Aird.

You can find the newsletter version of this podcast click here.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq look at reports that try and distil a country’s cyber power into a single number so that they can be ranked and compared. Do these reports say anything useful and have any value?

A short podcast updating listeners on the security news of the last few days, as prepared by Catalin Cimpanu and read by Claire Aird.

You can find the newsletter version of this podcast click here.

In this interview the director of the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) sits down with Risky Business podcast host Patrick Gray to talk about:

• What CCI actually does
• The CIA’s role in cyber intel and operations
• What lessons have been learned from Russia’s cyber campaigns targeting Ukraine
• Why a cyber conflict with China will be very, very different
• His views on the ransomware threat
• Much, much more

In this podcast Patrick Gray talks to Tom Uren about investigations into the disinformation industry. One election interference for hire company, known as “Team Jorge”, provides a huge variety of dirty tricks services, but we think its claims of massive influence are overblown. Despite that, however, these companies are still corrosive for democracy and a scourge worth tackling. Patrick thinks they’re the “new internet villain” and will replace NSO as a target of hate.

They also discuss Google’s new report that covers Russian cyber operations in its invasion of Ukraine. On the whole a good report, but both Tom and Pat think some of it is problematic.

Finally, they talk about Patrick’s interview with the head of the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence. It’s great to have intelligence officials explain how they see the cyber threat landscape and get their take on war in Ukraine and what that means for cyber operations in future conflicts.

A short podcast updating listeners on the security news of the last few days, as prepared by Catalin Cimpanu and read by Claire Aird.

You can find the newsletter version of this podcast click here.

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

• Why Twitter had to kill SMS 2FA
• A look at Meta’s new verification service
• How a ransomware attack disrupted the semiconductor supply chain
• Why Anonymous Sudan is probably a Russian info op
• Microsoft mixes up public and private keys in Azure B2C (for real)
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Proofpoint. Its Executive Vice President of Cybersecurity Strategy Ryan Kalember joins the show in the sponsor slot.

Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Mastodon if that’s your thing.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq look at the differences and similarities between signals intelligence and cyber operations. Why did Five Eyes Sigint organisations end up ‘owning’ cyber operations and does that make sense, or should there be a separate cyber intelligence organisation?

A short podcast updating listeners on the security news of the last few days, as prepared by Catalin Cimpanu and read by Claire Aird.

You can find the newsletter version of this podcast click here.

A short podcast updating listeners on the security news of the last few days, as prepared by Catalin Cimpanu and read by Patrick Gray, who’s filling in for Claire Aird.

You can find the newsletter version of this podcast click here.

In this interview we’re chatting with the founder of Greynoise Intelligence, Andrew Morris.

Greynoise operates a global network of sensors that collect data on things like mass scanning, exploitation and reconnaissance. The idea is if your SOC gets an alert from a particular IP you can see if it’s associated with mass scanning or exploitation, or if it’s something that’s just targeting you.

And as you’ll hear, there are other use cases also, but we’re talking about a few things with Andrew today. He talks about being able to selectively port forward attacks targeting his sensor network to a data centre running the services being targeted, about the ESXiArgs ransomware attack and more.

Enjoy!

In this podcast Patrick Gray talks to Tom Uren about North Korea’s foray into state-sponsored ransomware targeting healthcare organisations. There’s reasons to be concerned — North Korea has pulled off some sophisticated hacks and the responses that maybe “work” against cybercriminals might not work at all against the DPRK. Tom thinks that the international community can do a lot more around sanctions that will help.

They also look at President Biden’s talk about privacy at his recent State of the Union speech. Does this mean that the US will finally get meaningful federal privacy and data security legislation? We hope so.

Finally, Tom and Patrick revisit the Chinese spy balloon saga. Even though a single balloon is not a huge threat, an uncontested balloon surveillance program would be and the US is responding strongly. It’s sanctioned six Chinese firms and the US is looking for balloons and finding them. Three more have been shot down since last week, but it looks like they are all just errant balloons rather than more surveillance craft.

A short podcast updating listeners on the security news of the last few days, as prepared by Catalin Cimpanu and read by Claire Aird.

You can find the newsletter version of this podcast click here.