Podcasts

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

• Inside the new American “e2ee busting” bill
• Julian Assange hit with (another) superseding indictment
• Trustwave uncovers sneaky Chinese accounting software backdoor
• Much, much more…

This week’s show is brought to you by Okta. They are, of course, the identity and auth giant and one of the few sponsors we actually approached last year for 2020 because, well, they are very good at what they do. This week Marc will be joining us to talk about a privacy-related topic. The discussion is nuanced, but it’s basically about how the public perception of privacy risks has diverged from the reality/ Further, that the COVID-19 crisis and the advent of digital contact tracing apps have actually brought general concerns around digital privacy to the fore.

Three US Senators have put forward a bill that apes the powers of the UK Investigatory Powers Act and Australia’s Assistance and Access Act, while omitting many of the (albeit weak) safeguards that protect that power from being abused.

The Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act of 2020, introduced by Republican Senators Lindsay Graham, Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn, compels device manufacturers and digital service providers to provide access to user data when served with a warrant. It’s the Nike approach: Just do it!

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

• Australia “under attack” - a wrap
• Microsoft releases more security protections for E5 customers
• US to introduce “anti encryption” bill
• Shady encrypted phone company owned by the cops
• NSA to offer filtered DNS services to defence industry
• MORE

Technical indicators released by the Australian Government reveal that state-backed actors are among the many attackers abusing OAuth apps to gain unauthorised access to cloud accounts. Risky.Biz reckons there is more Microsoft can do to stop it.

Today we’re chatting with Citizen Lab Senior Researcher John Scott-Railton about the work they did investigating the Indian hacker-for-hire firm BellTrox.

For those of you who didn’t catch the news, The Citizen Lab, which operates out of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, dropped a huge report a couple of weeks back that lays Belltrox’s operations bare. As you’ll hear this company attempted to hack tens of thousands of email accounts belonging to everyone from government officials to hedge fund managers and activists.

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

• Facebook commissioned custom 0day to de-cloak child sex predator
• IP stack bugs to plague IoT, ICS for years
• Sandworm was doxxed by the NSA and hardly anyone noticed
• Congress demands answers on 2015 Juniper NetScreen back door investigation
• Amazon, Microsoft join moratorium on sale of facial recognition to police
• Much, much more

Threat hunters studying the IoCs released in the NSA’s May 2020 advisory on recent Sandworm activity have used them to identify a large amount of infrastructure that looks custom-made to conduct credential phishing attacks against email and social media accounts used in Western countries.

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

• Full scale of Indian hacker-for-hire firm revealed
• IBM exits facial recognition
• Contact tracing apps flop
• Much, much more

Researchers have exposed gaps in the security and privacy design of OmniBallot - another online voting system used in the United States. It has no privacy policy, and curiously sends user voting preferences to a central server even when a user chooses to print out a completed ballot to return by mail.

There are sound reasons why anxious governments are tasking signals intelligence services to track the progress of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.