On this week’s show Patrick Gray, Katie Nickels and Joe Slowik discuss the week’s security news, including:

• US Government warns of impending critical infrastructure hacks
• Log4j bug in VMWare gets a workout
• Ex Uber CSO Joe Sullivan facing wire fraud charges
• Signal to push ahead on cryptocurrency payments
• Italian literary nerd busted for running one man APT operation
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Okta. Marc Rogers is the executive director of cybersecurity there and he’s joining us this week to talk about the log4j bug and some adjacent issues. He’s working on a paper with IST about the bug and what it all means, and he’s joining us this week to talk about why the log4j drama was different.

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

• The log4j bug wrap
• The ransomware wrap
• The human rights and surveillance industry wrap
• Research and carnage wrap

This week’s show is brought to you by Airlock Digital. They make allowlisting software that has mostly been used in Windows environments, but as you’re about to hear they’ve now got a very, very nice solution for the bigger Linux distros, and their Mac agent is going to be launched in a few weeks.

This isn’t the normal weekly news episode of the show, if you’re looking for the regular weekly Risky Business podcast, scroll one back in your podcast feed. This is a Soap Box edition, a wholly sponsored podcast brought to you in this instance by Thinkst Canary.

For those who don’t know, Thinkst makes hardware and virtual honeypots you can put on your network or into your cloud environments – they’ll start chirping if an attacker interacts with them. They’re a low cost and extremely effective detection tool. But you might not know that Thinkst also operates canarytokens.org where you can go set up a bunch of honeytokens for free. Hundreds of thousands of people are using canarytokens.org, but Thinkst doesn’t charge anything for it, it’s free to use. They’ll even give you a docker container of the whole thing so you can run it yourself.

Our guest today is Thinkst’s founder and infosec legend Haroon Meer. He spent a chunk of his career at the South African security consultancy SensePost before founding Thinkst Applied Research and eventually launching Canary.Tools. In this interview we talk about what the industry is getting wrong, supply chain security, effective detections and more. But I started off by asking him why Thinkst hasn’t tried to monetise canarytokens.org given how many people use it.

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

• NSO Group tools found on US embassy staff phones in Uganda
• Mitto is up to shady bidnez
• Ubiquiti “whistleblower” charged over hack
• Hounds everywhere
• Planned Parenthood breached
• Much, much more

This week’s sponsor interview is with Andrew Morris of Greynoise.

Greynoise has a bunch of sensors out there on the Internets, so they can tell you when and IP that’s hitting you is also hitting everyone else. If you work in a SOC, you know this is very useful. Greynoise has just signed a $30m deal with the US Department of Defense. As Andrew will explain in just a moment, this means if you work in a DoD agency it’s now very easy for you to get a subscription. In this interview I also talk to Andrew about his adventures chasing down one of the people spamming Internet attached receipt printers with the antiwork manifesto from Reddit.

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

• Israel slashes number of countries it will export cyber tools to
• Interpol takes down 1,000 Internet fraudsters
• Ransomware crews lying low?
• When the tabloids do cyber the results are sometimes awesome
• Much, much more…

This week’s sponsor interview is with Ryan Kalember of Proofpoint. He’s the EVP of Cybersecurity Strategy there and he’s joining me this week to talk about how investment activity in cybersecurity is basically leaving everyone who isn’t a mega enterprise behind.

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

• Apple sues NSO Group and it’s all a bit weird
• Israel charges defence minister’s house cleaner with Iranian hacker collusion (really)
• USA charges two Iranians over “Proud Boy” emails
• Cyber insurers nope out of comprehensive coverage
• Prodaft shells Conti, drops report like it’s a Normal Thing
• Much, much more

This week’s show is sponsored by VMRay. We’ll be chatting with one of VMRay’s customers in this week’s sponsor interview. Jim Byrge works on the CSIRT team at Valvoline, and he’ll be along to talk about how they replaced their ageing, in-house developed SOAR platform with commercial tools. It was still harder than it should be in 2021, but they got there in the end.

In this edition of the Risky Biz Soap Box podcast we chat with Sean Leach, the Chief Product Architect at Fastly, about the history and current status of the DDoS ecosystem. Despite never really making money for criminals, DDoS attacks are still a problem.

CDNs have soaked up a lot of the problem, so DDoS crews are getting creative. Do you know where you’re vulnerable?

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

• Watering hole attacks are getting much better
• How Israel’s government used NSO to strengthen its diplomatic ties
• Randori sat on some PAN 0day. This is fine.
• Facebook outs state-backed ops
• FBi has unfortunate incident with its mail boxes
• Much, much more

This week’s sponsor interview is with HD Moore. He’s the founder of Rumble, the network asset discovery scanner, and he’s joining us to talk about some new tricks he’s added to the product, like integrations with cloud service APIs and external discovery products like Censys.

In this edition of the Soap Box podcast we’re chatting with Jake King. Jake is a co-founder of Cmd Security, a Linux Security startup that was recently acquired by Elastic.

Cmd’s technology basically started out as a control and visibility tool for Linux systems that could restrict user actions. But over time, the product evolved to be more detection and response oriented.

In this interview we talk to Jake about why Cmd wound up where it is, product wise, and what customers can expect now his company has been swept up by Elastic as a part of its broader push into XDR, or Extended Detection and Response.

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

• US sanctions NSO, Candiru, COSEINC and Positive Technologies
• We wrap up the action in ransomware
• Why exploit tournaments are boring in America and exciting in China
• More malicious npm packages in the wild
• Pentagon updates CMMC to 2.0
• Much, much more

We’ll hear from Corelight’s CISO Bernard Brantley in this week’s sponsor interview. We’re talking about how attackers think in graphs and defenders think in lists.. Microsoft’s John Lambert wrote a post about that back in 2015, and Bernard joins the show this week to talk about why it’s just as relevant as ever. Stick around for that one.

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

• Someone took down Iranian fuel stations
• Papua New Guinea ransomware attack is pretty grim stuff
• Russia’s SVR still going berserk in cloudtown
• China Telecom America gets the boot
• Much, much more

We’ll be hearing from Senetas CEO Andrew Wilson in this week’s sponsor interview. He’s joining us to talk about how the global semiconductor shortage is making him a very, very sad panda.

This feature podcast was made possible by the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. The foundation has given us grant funding to produce this podcast series, which is designed to educate policymakers in cybersecurity so they can make better decisions.

In this edition you’ll hear an interview I recorded with Mark Dowd.

Mark is a world-renowned security researcher who, some years ago, co-founded a company called Azimuth Security. As you’ll hear, the original plan was to provide security research and consulting services to vendors. But, pretty quickly, Azimuth became a serious player in offensive security, selling exploits and other tools to government agencies in the Five Eyes countries.

We recorded this interview touching on the history of Azimuth, what the public gets wrong when talking about 0day and surveillance, and were this whole thing could go – especially considering writing memory corruption exploits is getting so much harder.

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

• UK, Netherlands and Australia promise offensive response to big ticket ransomware
• Wave of major cyber regulation and legislation in USA
• Iran up in yer O365s, Russians in yer gmails
• Submarine spy guy would have been fine, if he didn’t make one very big mistake
• Much, much more

Jonathan Reiber is this week’s sponsor guest. He’s senior director of cybersecurity at AttackIQ and he’s joining us to talk through the US Government’s executive order on Zero Trust. Jonathan says it is actually born of a realisation the US government needs to do something differently, that the old approaches aren’t working.

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

• Group-IB CEO arrested in Russia for treason
• Lawsuit alleges ransomware contributed to hospitalised baby’s death
• Nakasone outs self as hound release advocate
• Syniverse owned, but we don’t know how badly
• Why Google keyword warrants are awesome
• Much, much more…

Nucleus co-founder Scott Kuffer is this week’s sponsor guest and the topic is actually a bit hilarious. They’ve found a killer use case that customers are clamouring for: Being able to map vulnerabilities to org groups within your enterprise so you can see who’s slacking off when it comes to patching.

In this edition of the Snake Oilers we’ll hear pitches from three vendors:

• Stairwell! A new startup from Chronicle Security co-founder Mike Wiacek
• Red Canary explains what modern managed detection and response looks like
• Pierre Betouin from Datadog talks about the challenges around bringing together DevOps and Security while providing full-stack security

Links to everything we talked about are in the show notes.

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

• The amazing Yahoo! News story on the former CIA director’s awesome brainwaves
• Hostage diplomacy pays off for Huawei CFO
• NSA releases great guidance on VPN security
• Microsoft has actually hired a cybersecurity executive
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Material Security. Material’s co-founder Ryan Noon will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to talk about smarter ways to do email retention and destruction. They have a product that interfaces with your mail provider’s API – whether you’re on Google Workspace or O365 – to do things like archive and redact email, and they’re finding their customers are using these features to actually implement retention email strategies.

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

• BlackMatter is back in the USA’s critical supply chain
• The FBI and friends apparently got up in REvil’s business
• The Azure OMI thing is totally the disaster we were expecting
• Much, much more

Brett Winterford is this week’s sponsor guest. These days Brett is a senior director of cybersecurity strategy at Okta, but the reason you might recognise his name is because he took a year off working for vendors to be our newsletter author – he was the founding editor of the Seriously Risky Business newsletter.

He’ll be along to talk about legacy auth and why vendors should have deprecation policies.

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

• Apple 0day has everyone freaking out
• So much more 0day in the wild
• American Project Raven staffers settle with DoJ
• Two absolutely bonkers Azure security problems
• SEC tells corporate America to spill on breaches
• Much, much more

In this week’s sponsor interview Gigamon’s security product manager Fayyaz Rajpari will be along to talk about some of the work they’ve been doing to integrate their NDR product with Crowdstrike.

Snake Oilers: Get Signal Sciences in your CDN, automate canary generation and cloud your SIEM! Three solid pitches in this edition…

In this edition of the Snake Oilers we’ll hear pitches from three vendors:

• Brian Joe from Fastly talks about its integration of the Signal Sciences WAF into its CDN
• Ben Whitham and Dan Holman talk about HoneyTrace, a canary creation and monitoring automation play
• Anton Chuvakin from Google Cloud talks about cloud native SIEMs

Links to everything we talked about are in the show notes.

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

• Apple backs down on CSAM measures
• FTC shuts down spouseware company
• REvil is back!
• Confluence boxes are getting owned a lot
• Trickbot crew member arrested in South Korea
• The Juniper/NSA backdoor story just keeps on truckin’

This week’s show is brought to you by Thinkst Canary. Thinkst’s Jacob Torrey is this week’s sponsor guest. He pops by to tell us about the relaunch of Thinkstscapes, a fantastic quarterly publication that analyses security research.

(Editor’s note: Dmitri Alperovitch is a guest in this podcast and wishes to express his gratitude to Matthew Green of Johns Hopkins University for helping guide him on the Juniper story.)