Podcasts

On this week's show we've got a cracking interview with ANU Professor and former prime ministerial advisor Hugh White about the charges brought against alleged Chinese military hackers by the US Department of Justice. That one's coming up after the news.

This week's show is brought to you by Tenable Network Security. Jack Daniel of Tenable stops by in this week's sponsor interview to talk about password managers in light of the eBay breach. Is it time we really started encouraging people to use them?

Scott Crane is Arbor Networks product manager for its Pravail line of big data security analytics division.

Scott was a part of the original PacketLoop team -- PacketLoop was an Australian start up that created some pretty impressive big data security analytics technology. It was so impressive that it wound up being acquired by Arbor Networks and is now sold under the Pravail brand.

Somehow the original team managed to convince Arbor to keep the bulk of the R&D on those products based right here in Australia. So you could say we're all pretty big fans of Scott and his team for scoring some runs for the home team. They've got 12 staff in Sydney, and they're growing.

It's been eight months since the deal was struck, so I caught up with Scott to talk about what's new in the field of big data security analytics. And interestingly enough, the Pravail tech wound up being pretty useful lately. Because it performs packet-capture based analysis, the Pravail team could help their clients roll back through their stored packet captures to see if anyone had used the Heartbleed flaw against them. Somewhat reassuringly, the Pravail guys at Arbor did not find any evidence of Heartbleed actually being used in the wild.

In this sponsor cast we're chatting with Dave Merkel, the CTO of FireEye. Dave has been around the infosec traps since the 90s -- long enough to see how things have changed. One of the things that has changed is the acknowledgement by the market that you can't really keep attackers from gaining a foothold on at least *a* device within your environment.

It's the reason we're seeing a lot of gear hit the market that will help you post intrusion. I started off by asking Dave if he'd noticed this shift in thinking in the market.

We're going to close out this year's coverage the way we normally do it: with a recording of the AusCERT speed debate!

I was a debater this year and as you'll hear I had zero time to prepare, so my contributions are pretty lame, but there was a hell of a panel like always. The whole thing was moderated by Adam Spencer.

Most of it makes no sense, some of it is funny, some of it is just stupid. Like it or loathe it, it's almost become an institution at this point so we absolutely have to include it.

So here it is! The speed debate! The closing event from AusCERT 2014, I hope you enjoy it.

I've already podcasted Peter's presentation, but I thought a follow up interview was warranted. To cut a long story short, he does believe some crypto standards have been subverted by the NSA, but says some fears about government crypto-fiddling are misplaced. In general, he says, it's a lot easier for attackers to bypass encryption than it is for them to break it.

Peter knows crypto. He's a professor at Auckland University, has written crypto libraries and even had a hand in writing PGP.

I started off by asking Peter for his thoughts on the controversial dual elliptic curve number generator. Was it really backdoored by the NSA?

On the final day of AusCERT last week delegates were treated to a fascinating talk by Dr. Jason Fox, gamification expert and author of the book The Game Changer.

Jason's expertise is in finding out how to take the motivational aspects of games and apply them to work processes. We all know that sitting your staff down in a dimly lit auditorium to lecture them on spear phishing does precisely nothing to change user behaviour. But what if you made the hunt for spear phishing messages a game?

I sat down with Jason Fox after his presentation and recorded this interview.

This is a sponsor interview with Marc Eisenbarth, Arbor Networks' security architect and the manager of research for its Arbor Security Engineering and Response Team (ASERT).

I spoke to Mark about the massive influx of NTP-based DDoS traffic we've seen this year. Can we expect attackers to move on to other protocols and services like SNMP and Chargen? He thinks so. But it's not until we start seeing SNMP-based DDoS capabilities built into generic malware that we'll really have big problems.

This is a sponsor interview with Kate McInnes of Datacom TSS.

Kate is ex-DSD and currently serves as a principal consultant with Datacom TSS in Perth. She's been doing a bunch of work with a bunch of different organisations on preparing them for the looming G20 summit in Brisbane.

What do the threats look like? Where are they coming from? And what can be done about them?

You're about to hear a recording of Peter Gutmann's speech here which is all about crypto. Well, it's sort of about crypto. With newspapers filled with stories about the NSA subverting crypto standards, Peter asks us whether that really matters. Why would an attacker bother breaking crypto when they can just bypass it?

Peter is well positioned to do this talk. He's a researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland and works on the design and analysis of cryptographic security architectures and security usability.

He helped write PGP, has authored a number of papers and RFC's on security and encryption, and is the author of the open source cryptlib security toolkit. And luckily for us, he's a fairly regular guest on Risky Business.

You're about to hear my interview with Matt Jones, a security consultant who runs a small outfit named Volvent.

He's been working on a very interesting side project for a couple of years now. Essentially it's a social media analyser that identifies sources of high-quality information. Users can tap in a keyword and drill through the conversations on social media that actually matter -- the conversations that influence the influencers. The project was born of Matt's desire to never have to log in to Twitter again.