Podcasts

This week's show is a bit shorter than usual. We've got a discussion of the week's news then a great chat with Brian Contos, the VP and CISO of Blue Coat Systems Advanced Threat Protection Group.

It's this week's sponsor interview and we'll be chatting about whether or not cyber warfare is really asymmetrical. It's the accepted wisdom that it is, but I gotta say, when we look at who's using it -- the US and Israel against Iran and Syria, Russia versus Estonia -- it looks to me like it's something used by the big guys to smash the little guys. Brian disagrees, so it's a nice lively discussion and it's coming up after the news.

In this week's show we talk opsec with international man of mystery The Grugq. In light of revelations the Internet lounge at the G20 summit was essentially an intelligence collection system set up by GCHQ, we thought we'd look at what travelling diplomats and executives can do to protect their data when entering a hostile environment where all infrastructure is assumed to be controlled by your adversary.

There's some great practical advice in that segment, and it's after the news.

In this week's sponsor interview we speak with Jack Daniel, Tenable Network Security's product manager about Microsoft's bug bounty program. $100k for a good exploit! The times, they change.

And we check in with Adam Boileau to discuss the week's news headlines. Show notes can be found here.

In this week's feature interview we chat with author and speaker Richard Thieme about what they used to call the generation gap. NSA leaker Edward Snowden is "Internet generation". Are the ideals espoused by people like Snowden rooted in counter-cultural ideals or are they just generational norms?

Are these ideas around online liberty becoming mainstream? Now that we have so many gen-Ys and millennials actually running the information infrastructure that powers our institutions, could we be on the cusp of serious changes in the way the establishment works? That is an interesting chat.

In this week's sponsor interview we're chatting to John Vecchi, Solera's VP of Product Strategy, all about whether or not we're neglecting mundane threats because we're so focussed on identifying APT.

Adam Boileau joins us for this week's news segment. Show notes, including links to the articles discussed, can be found here.

On this week's show we take a look at PRISM, the NSA's recently exposed massive surveillance program. Leaked PowerPoint slides from NSA describe a surveillance system that allows the agency to effortlessly capture a target's YouTube, Google, Facebook and Skype. This has been reported as these companies allowing the US government access to "back doors" on their systems.

In this week's episode we look at an alternative theory: The NSA is actually capturing information on "persons of interest" in real-time via fibre taps, decrypting it with private keys, then storing it. It's our theory and we're sticking with it. Listen to this week's episode to see if you agree!

Also this week we've got Tenable's chief of security, Marcus Ranum, stopping by in this week's sponsor interview to follow up on his keynote speech at AusCERT. The speech was called Never Fight a Land War in Cyber Space and it's really about the idea that conventional military thinking doesn't apply to the Internet.

I published a recording of his talk and it got a great reaction, but I was left with some questions after I saw it. So I rang him up and asked them! It's actually a really, really interesting interview so make sure you tune in for it.

****EDITOR'S NOTE: During the discussion on PRISM, I referenced 5Tb/s of traffic between "the US, Canada and US". That should have been "The US, Canada and Europe". Sorry about that!

This week's show is a cracker! We've got a great feature interview with journalist and author Parmy Olson about what the future might hold for Anonymous. Is it time for the Anonymous brand to be retired? The media has largely lost interest in its activities -- how could the hacktivism phenomenon bounce back to the same levels of notoriety as it experienced in 2011?

Tune in to find out!

This week's show is brought to you by Senetas, makers of absolutely kick-ass layer 2 encryption equipment.

In this week's sponsor interview we're chatting with Senetas co-founder and CTO Julian Fay about homomorphic encryption. This is where you can actually perform operations on data while it's still encrypted! It's all a bit twisted, but it's fascinating stuff and it's this week's sponsor interview topic.

The following is a recording of Marcus Ranum's AusCERT keynote speech on CYBER WAR. Marcus was doing the circuit a few years ago with a talk titled "Cyber war is bullshit", which I think makes clear his position, but this one is titled Never Fight a Land War in Cyberspace. He basically argues that the application of traditional military thinking to the cyber domain is flawed. He also argues there's a massive money and power grab taking place as the military and the private sector defence base tries to set the agenda so it can profit from it. It's a really worthwhile talk, and delivered with typical MjR flair. Enjoy.

In this sponsor interview with chat with Paul Ducklin of Sophos, and the topic is reflections -- 30 years on -- on the paper Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson. So we're reflecting on reflections on trusting trust.

I started off by asking Paul to recap the paper for people who aren't familiar with it.

You're about to hear Parmy Olson's presentation from AusCERT's 2013 conference. Parmy is a journalist for Forbes, but she's also an author -- she wrote We Are Anonymous, Inside the Hacker world of LulzSec, Anonymous and the Global Cyber Insurgency. She got amazing access to the LulzSec crew and the book is well worth reading.

In this presentation she looks at why these young men got involved in such risky activity. What drove them, and what does the future of Anonymous look like?

Active defence is the new black. It's the issue of 2013. One of the organisations that helped put the issue on to the agenda is CrowdStrike, a business founded by some senior ex technologists from McAfee. CrowdStrike was founded on the premise that simply relying on defensive measures in information security isn't enough -- you need to be able to mess with your adversaries.

One of CrowdStrike's founders was Dmitri Alperovitch. He was at AusCERT and used his speaking slot to basically deliver the thinking behind CrowdStrike's pitch. It's nothing earth shattering, but it's a really well packaged speech that presents a cogent argument for the concept of active defence. So here it is, Dmitri Alperovitch's AusCERT talk titled Offence as the Best Defence.

In this sponsor interview we're chatting with Declan Ingram of Datacom TSS.

Datacom TSS is a Canberra-based, national security firm founded by ex Australian government security specialists. These guys specialise in dealing with highly skilled adversaries... Now, when they founded this business a few years ago, there was awareness in government that highly skilled adversaries were a real challenge... but it's really been 2013 where executives at the boardroom level have sat up and taken note of security issues, particularly the issue of APT.

They've realised it isn't just the Google's of the world who are being attacked by state sponsored adversaries -- Oil companies, broadcasters and insurance companies have been absolutely nailed by teams working for the governments of North Korea and Iran, for example.

Furthermore, Mandiant's APT1 report really put the issue on the map for a lot of people who previously just weren't aware of the issues. It's that whole chicken versus egg thing -- are people becoming aware of it because of the media attention or is the media reporting on it because people are becoming aware?

So how has this affected things for a business like Datacom TSS? Declan Ingram joined me to discuss. I started off by asking him how perceptions of sophisticated threats have changed over the last couple of years.