Podcasts

This week's show was cut together from Johannesburg, South Africa!

In it we discuss Google's latest bug bounty initiative -- they're not just offering cash for bugs in software products, these days they're also offering cash for bugs in their online properties. Got an auth bypass for Gmail? Ka-ching!

This week's show is brought to you by Astaro. Jack Daniel of Astaro joins us to talk about restricting certain content types from SOEs. Do we really need Flash in our operating environments anymore? Can we just drop it and gain some security?

Adam Boileau drops in, as always, to discuss the week's news headlines.

This week's show is a bit shorter than usual. We'll check in with Adam Boileau to discuss the week's news headlines and catch up with Tenable Network Security CEO Ron Gula in this week's sponsor interview.

Between those two we cover the Playstation Network hack, the kidnapping of Ivan Kaspersky, Microsoft's decision to coordinate the disclosure of vulnerabilities in non-MS products and much, much more!

On this week's show we're taking a look at Verizon Business Security Solutions' annual Data Breach Investigation Report. We'll be joined by both Bryan Sartin for a global perspective on the report, and by his Australian counterpart Mark Goudie, who'll give us a local perspective.

You can have a squiz at the report here.

This week's show is brought to you by NetWitness, and in this week's sponsor interview we're chatting with Shawn Carpenter about just how hip post-compromise detection is becoming.

Adam Boileau, as usual, stops by for the week's news headlines.

This is something I haven't seen picked up much by the tech press writ large: Invisible Things Lab, headed by Joanna Rutkowska, has released a new Linux distro called Qubes.

UPDATE: Qubes has been around in alpha form for a bit, but this is the first beta release...

It uses hypervisor partitioning to give you that warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with operating in a virtualised environment. Heise Online has a nice little writeup here and you can find the beta here.

This is a really interesting release. If this OS turns out to be workable I suspect major software developers will take a bit of notice. I've been prattling on about the need for desktop operating systems to make use of virtualisation for greater security for yonks. Now we get to see what that looks like.

If you've had a play with it, let me know what you think.

This week's show is a doozie!

We're joined by Brian Snow to discuss risk-based security. Brian, who was the technical director of information assurance for the NSA in the US, recently contributed to a security review of US Department of Energy Nuclear Weapons Facilities. (You can download the unclassified version of the report here for free with registration.)

The review sought to understand if Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) methodologies could be used to improve the cost effectiveness of the DoE's security.

The review found that PRA is, in fact, not suited to managing risk in malicious environments. It's great for modelling likely failures of power supplies in data centres, but not so good at modelling attack scenarios.

Basically it boils down to the fact that it's impossible to assign a likelihood to an unknown attack.

So how on earth did risk-based security become the "standard" way of doing things in the enterprise? What use is a risk register if high-impact, low-likelihood adverse events can't be reliably quantified?

Brian joins us to discuss. It's a corker interview.

Adam Boileau joins the show for this week's news. He seems especially keen to sing CA's praises this week. Metstorm <3's CA. He even has CA pyjamas. I've seen them.

Risky Business has been judged Australia's Best Technology Audio Program for a second year in a row.

The Lizzies, Australia's awards for technology journalism, are run by media services company MediaConnect, with each gong judged by a panel of three technology journalists.

Risky.Biz edged out entries from Sydney-based radio station 2GB, CNet/ZDNet and others.

Big thanks to the listeners, sponsors, guests and everyone who's helped out since the podcast launched back in early 2007.

Episode 190 of the Risky Business podcast is brought to you by our good buddies at Astaro.

Astaro's Jack Daniel joins us in this week's sponsor interview to talk about the evolution of firewalls. We try to predict what they're going to look like, five or ten years out. No surprises for guessing convergence is going to be a big thing.

In this week's feature interview we chat with Kowsik Guruswamy of muDynamics about a project his company kicked off called pcapr.net

It's an online archive of packet captures/traces with 60 million packets archived and 5200 members contributing. It's a great project and I'm surprised more people in the infosec community haven't heard of it.

As always, Adam Boileau stops in for a check of the week's news.

This week's show is brought to you by NetWitness.

The minting of some dodgy SSL certificates has the whole security world in a bit of a tizz, but this week's feature guest thinks much of the resulting media coverage is missing the point. Why are browsers designed to make Boolean trust decisions? Why do they completely trust CA issued certs?

Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland joins me to discuss.

Adam Boileau pops in for the week's news, as always.

On this week's show we're mostly focussing on news! It's been a massive week in news -- we've had AT&T users' Facebook data being re-routed through China, we've had more speculation on the RSA hack, Comodo has been busted dishing out trusted SSL certificates for gmail.com to a box in Iran, there's a stack of SCADA 0day being dropped, there's people going to prison, giant rats eating entire data centres.... ok, well I made the last bit up, but the rest of it, if you can believe it, is true!

So we'll chat with Adam Boileau about a lot of that stuff in the regular news segment, and we'll be joined by Declan Ingram to discuss the Comodo SSL breach and the SCADA news.

In this week's sponsor interview we're chatting with Tenable Network Security's evangelist Paul Asadorian. Well, Paul and his buddy Larry Pesce. Paul and Larry host the PaulDotCom security weekly podcast, and they popped by to discuss the issue of APTs and risk-based security. It's a great chat, and it's coming up later.

This week's show is sponsored by Tenable Network Security.

It's episode 187, the homicide edition, and RSA conveniently falls victim to a drive by. Thanks guys!

This week's show is a ripper. We've got two feature guests -- Kimberly Zenz of iDefense and Paul Ducklin of Sophos.

We talk about everything from recent disinformation and social media manipulation campaigns in the Middle East and Belarus, the breach of RSA by parties unknown wielding those mysterious "APTs". Allegedly.

Duck and I also have a chat about Privacy International proclamation that Skype is a threat to the security and privacy of activists and dissidents. We don't know what they've been smoking over there at Privacy International, but I bet you it's some good stuff -- the criticisms levelled against Skype are, largely, baseless. Allegedly.

Adam Boileau joins us, as always, to discuss the week's news headlines.