Podcasts

On this week’s show we’re going to chat with Katie Moussouris about her testimony before a Senate Subcommittee last week. She fronted a session on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data Security titled, “Data Security and Bug Bounty Programs: Lessons Learned from the Uber Breach and Security Researchers. We’ll hear from her on how all that went and what she hopes the US government learned from the committee panel.

Also this week we’ll be hearing from Mark Maunder of Wordfence, that’s this week’s sponsor interview. Wordfence sells a Wordpress security plugin. There have been some interesting developments in the Wordpress world over the last week that are definitely worth covering. Wordpress actually pushed an update to core that actually disables future auto updates. Yikes.

We’ll find out how long that update was out, what percentage of the Wordpress ecosystem swallowed it, and we’ll also talk about about a couple of dysfunctional things happening in the Wordpress ecosystem.

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

On this week’s show we’re chatting with Travis McPeak at Netflix about a tool they’ve developed called RepoKid. It automatically strips unused AWS permissions, which I’m guessing a lot of you will find quite useful.

We’ll also chat with Dan Kuykendall in this week’s sponsor interview. Dan works for Rapid7, and they’ve been doing some interesting stuff with their agents, basically tweaking them to give better visibility of application security issues and exploitation attempts. T

hat conversation is really about how security firms these days are using the agent footprint they have to just do whatever they can.

Adam Boileau, as always, pops in to discuss the week’s news. We cover the:

• AutoSploit arm waving
• Lauri Love beating extradition
• Nik Cubrilovic’s arrest
• MOAR

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

On this week’s show we’re checking in with Kelly Shortridge and the topic is zombies. Not the botnet kind, the heavily-VC-backed kind.

A recent report from the Reuters news agency highlighted the amount of VC pouring into the so-called “cyber” industry vs the amount of money actually coming out of it in the form of profitable exits isn’t matching up. The industry is filling up with so-called zombie companies – they’ll never exit, but they’re not going to completely die, either.

As it turns out, Kelly recently did a presentation on precisely this topic, so in this week’s feature we get her take on why this is happening and what’s likely to change. The tl;dr is something will have to give in the next couple of years, and it’s going to be ugly.

In this week’s sponsor interview we check in with Jordan Wright of Duo Security. Jordan has done some research into phishing kits. While phishing isn’t the sexiest topic, the team at Duo has actually done some pretty comprehensive research here – they looked at thousands of kits and pulled out some interesting stats.

We’ll talk to him about that, and also about the likelihood that U2F hardware will soon be baked into consumer devices. That’s really going to change things in years to come.

Adam Boileau, as always, pops in to discuss the week’s news. We cover the:

• Strava heatmap
• Dutch infiltration of Cozy Bear
• Possible nationalisation of the US 5G network on security grounds
• Microsoft disabling Intel Spectre patches
• Google’s Chronicle announcement
• US$400m Cyptocurrency ownage
• MOAR

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

On this week’s show we’ll be taking a look at the freshly re-authorised section 702 of the FISA act. As you’ll soon hear, the updated section now allows the FBI to search data captured under 702 programs for evidence against US citizens in a bunch of circumstances, including, drum roll please, during investigations with a cyber security tilt.

The co-founder of the Lawfare blog, law professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Texas Ausin, Bobby Chesney, will be along in this week’s feature to talk about all of that!

In this week’s feature interview we’re joined by Haroon Meer of Thinkst Canary. Haroon will be along to talk about the effectiveness of various honey tokens. Thinkst has been playing around with this stuff for a couple of years now, and Haroon will be joining us to talk about how they’ll will wind up being used in an enterprise context. How do you get detection canaries to scale? That’s coming up later.

Adam Boileau, as always, pops in to discuss the week’s news. It’s been a relatively calm week, but we’ve got some interesting news about botched Spectre patches and a discussion around a sensational report about Kaspersky Lab published by Buzzfeed in conjunction with Russian outlet Meduza.

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

On this week’s show we chat with Collin Anderson about Iranian internet censorship, as well as how sanctions on Iran led Google to block app engine access within Iran.

That’s a problem for Signal users there, because when the primary Signal servers are blocked, the software falls back to a domain-fronting approach that uses… drum roll please.. Google App Engine.

That’s a pretty wide ranging discussion of ‘net censorship in Iran and ‘net censorship generally and that’s coming up after the news.

This week’s show is brought to you by Bugcrowd, big thanks to them for that. In this week’s sponsor interview we’ll chat with Bugcrowd trust and security engineer Keith Hoodlet about some work they’ve been doing on producing detailed remediation information for their clients.

Adam Boileau is also along, as always, to discuss the week’s security news. The show notes/links are below, and you can follow Adam or Patrick on Twitter if that’s your thing.

On this week’s show Matt “pwnallthethings” Tait joins the show to walk us through the so-called Meltdown and Spectre bugs. Most of the coverage of the flaws has either been massively hyped or detail-free, and Matt pops by to untangle the whole mess. He does a great job of it, too.

This week’s show is brought to you by Cylance. CTO Rahul Kashyap will be along in the sponsor chair to talk about why so many AV packages were causing Windows boxes to BSOD when Microsoft pushed its Meltdown patch.

Adam Boileau is back in the news hotseat, and boy oh boy do we have a lot to cover. Show notes are below, and you can follow Adam or Patrick on Twitter if that’s your thing.

This is the last show for the year, Risky Business will return on January 10th 2018.

In this week’s feature Stephen Moore joins us. He was formerly the Staff Vice President of Cyber Security Analytics at Anthem, the healthcare company that was spectacularly owned by a Chinese APT crew in 2015.

Instead of us all just saying “lol they got owned, they’re idiots,” I thought it would be a good idea to actually talk to someone who was there. As you’ll hear, Anthem’s team knew they were being targeted by an APT crew, did its best to fend off the attackers, but sadly they lost anyway.

It’s sobering listening.

This week’s sponsor interview is also just great. We’ll check in with Casey Ellis of Bugcrowd. He’ll be along to talk about this whole Uber mess. A lot of the reporting around the so-called Uber data breach seemed to fixate a bit on the fact that the attacker was paid via the HackerOne bug bounty platform. The coverage has conflated extortion with bug bounty programs, much to Casey’s dismay. He’ll be along later to share his views on what the Uber snafu means, as well as to share his thoughts on DJI’s disastrous bug bounty program.

Adam Boileau, as usual, stops by to discuss the week’s security news, and also to wrap up the 2017 season.

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

Today’s Soap Box is brought to you by Bromium.

Bromium makes a security suite that wraps key applications in microvisors. It’s a way to get app-specific, hardware-based virtualisation.

Historically Bromium has wrapped things like browsers and the office suite into these microvisors. Bromium has also found a lot of success in selling to organisations that have to run out-of-date browsers and Java. Wrapping an old browser in Bromium actually does make it safe to use.

Well, now they’ve gone a step further. They’ve launched secure app extensions, which is where they custom-wrap your application, or an application you use, into a microvisor. So if you’re using some awful, old, insecure enterprise app and it’s keeping you awake at night, this might be a solution for you if you can’t rip and replace.

Have a listen!

On this week’s show we’ll be having a look at the latest OWASP top 10. As many of you would know, the new list is out. A couple of items have been dropped and a couple of items have been introduced. But we’re really using this new top 10 as an excuse to have a broader chat about the top 10 and the OWASP mission more generally.

As you’ll hear, everyone seems to agree the list is a good thing, but maybe OWASP needs to sharpen its communication strategy a little to make itself more accessible to the developers it’s trying to help.

We’ll hear from OWASP Bristol chapter leader and Veracode consultant Katy Anton on that, as well as Safestack head honcho Laura Bell and penetration tester and founder of Matchme consulting Pam O’Shea.

This week’s show is brought to you by a first time sponsor, VMRAY. They make malware analysis software that’s very popular with CERTs, but I suspect a lot of listeners out there in IR will also be interested in what they’re doing. The core offering is a cloud malware analyser that isn’t public, so if you don’t want to fire off a sample to VirusTotal and let the bad guys know you’re on to them, VMRAY is a better option.

VMRAY didn’t actually get one of its staff into this week’s sponsor slot, it chose one of its users instead – Koen Van Impe. He pops along to talk through what he uses VMRAY for and to give us a bit of an overview of what it does.

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

We’ll be hearing from three vendors in this edition of Oilers. Dino Dai Zovi will be along first up to talk about his startup, Capsule8, which looks very promising indeed.

After we’ve heard from Dino we’ll be chatting with Chris McNab. He used to run incident response for iSec Partners and later NCC Group, but these days he runs AlphaSOC, a company he founded. They’re a very simply play – they do DNS and IP analytics.

They offer that as a Splunk application or via an API, and you would be amazed how much bad stuff you can kick off your network with something as simple as DNS and IP analytics. Tor exfil, whole families of malware, BitTorrent, all sorts of stuff. Chris will be along soon to talk about that.

Then we’re rounding it out with a conversation with Sylvain Gil, the co-founder of Exabeam.

Exabeam started off in analytics and UEBA, but they’ve taken a bunch of money and they’re spending it on building out their SIEM, which is already pretty popular in certain circles because they don’t license it based on volume. Sylvain pops along later on to talk about how that’s changing SIEM use cases for a bunch of people. For example they can pump their EDR logs into their SIEM without wearing a seven figure SIEM consumption bill. He also walks through how they’ve used open source technologies like Hadoop in their products. It’s an all around chat that one, not so much a pitch, but yeah, I found it really interesting and I hope you will too.

Links to all three profiled vendors are below!