Podcasts

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

The Soap Box podcasts we run here at Risky.Biz are wholly sponsored affairs – everyone you hear in a soap box podcast, paid to be here.

The idea is vendors get to come on to the show and chat about their products, what their stuff does, the thinking behind it, so on and so on.

Today we’re hearing from Justin McCarthy of strongDM.

strongDM is a bit of a niche player – essentially what they do is make a product that provisions secure access to engineers who need to access various back end services.

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

• Google TAG implicates Indian hacker-for-hire outfits in espionage
• NSA warns of Sandworm Exim exploitation
• Huawei CFO extradition process to continue
• Black lives matter
• F–k police brutality

The NSA warns that Sandworm, one of Russia’s most formidable offensive cyber operations, has been exploiting a known flaw in the Exim mail transfer agent (MTA) in attacks for at least 10 months. Sandworm - part of Russia’s GRU intelligence unit - were fingered for NotPetya and crippling wiper attacks on Ukraine’s power grid. You don’t want these guys up in your business.

When litigants suing Capital One sought a forensic incident response report into its 2019 data breach, the bank played a reliable card: the report was commissioned by its outside law firm, and therefore subject to attorney-client privilege.

In a surprising move, this week a US District Court rejected the bank’s claim to privilege and demanded the document be handed over, in what appears to set an unsettling precedent.

Regular listeners to the podcast would know that for the last year or so, my cohost Adam Boileau and I have been talking a lot about how governments might involve non law enforcement agencies in a response to the big game ransomware epidemic. To discuss that, we’re joined by Bobby Chesney, the co-founder of the Lawfare blog and a very highly respected figure in US national security circles.

The United Kingdom is pulling together a plan to remove Huawei from its mobile networks within the next three years, following the lead of Australia and the United States.

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

• German intelligence warns of widespread Russian infrastructure hacks
• NGOs urge COVID-19 hack de-escalation
• UK mulls total Huawei ban… we think it’s a done deal
• DHS warning on 5G “moronavirus”
• Wen jailbreak? NOW JAILBREAK
• iOS 14 leaks
• Much, much more…

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

• easyJet breach linked to Chinese APT
• Israel claims credit for attack against Iranian port
• Chinese-linked crew behind Taiwan energy hax
• Crypto-wars reignite over Pensacola shooter’s phone
• Much, much more

Russia has some competition in the disinformation game. The US administration’s claim that the COVID-19 outbreak was caused by a laboratory accident was based on a report that has now been thoroughly debunked.