Podcasts

On this week's show we take a look at Australia's CERT wars. The Australian government has more or less declared AusCERT dead. It says its new group, CERT Australia, which is run out of the Attorney General's Department, will act as the sole point of contact for organisations in Australia when seeking CERT services or coordination.

AusCERT doesn't see it that way. Its general manager, Graham Ingram, fronts this week's program to claim it's business as usual for the member-funded NGO. We also have a chat with our secret squirrel, an anonymous source close to the war.

Mark Dowd is this week's news guest, filling in for Adam Boileau this week. Adam's off presenting at Syscan in Singapore, but he'll be back on deck next week.

In this week's sponsor interview we speak with Check Point's Engineering Services Manager Aviv Abramovich about using logging as a deterrent to data theft.

In this week's feature interview we chat with Adrian Lamo. Best known as the "homeless hacker," Lamo is in the news again over his decision to inform on US Army Specialist Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker of the so-called "Collateral Murder" video published by Wikileaks in April.

Manning is now in detention in Kuwait. We ask Lamo why he turned him in.

Also this week, Veracode co-founder and chief scientist Christien Rioux joins the show to talk about some fresh approaches to information security and cloud computing in our sponsor interview. Sounds boring. Isn't.

Adam Boileau, of course, joins us to discuss the week's news.

On this week's show we take a look at reports that Google is set to banish Microsoft Windows from its operating system over security concerns.

The tech giant says running Windows is just too risky. Google was, after all, famously owned in the Aurora incident through holes in Internet Explorer 6.

But our guest this week, Neohapsis CTO Greg Shipley, says getting owned by a hole in a nine year old browser is probably a sign that your desktop management is the problem, not the platform you've chosen.

Also this week, Marcus Ranum joins us to talk about what he describes ad the non-existent meme that is "Cyberwar". That's this week's sponsor interview.

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

RB2 is brought to you exclusively by Symantec.

Mobile security is all the rage these days, so when Research In Motion (RIM) VP of security Scott Totzke came to Australia a few weeks ago, we made sure we got an interview.

RIM is the company that makes the Blackberry. While it doesn't have as many cool points as the iPhone, the Blackberry has become the mobile workhorse of the modern enterprise. US President Barack Obama famously insisted on keeping his Blackberry when he came to office, so obviously anything Scott has to say about mobile security deserves to be heard.

I spoke to him by phone a couple of weeks ago.

Our feature guest this week Azimuth Security's Mark Dowd.

Mark is widely regarded as one of the best vulnerability researchers in the industry. He's published remote flaws in software like Sendmail and SSH, he's even created new classes of bugs. Remember that cross platform Flash bug a while ago? That was him, too.

So it's no surprise that when Google wanted someone to look over the security architecture of its Chrome browser, they turned to Mark. He went over Chrome with a fine tooth comb, uncovering some bugs as he went. But as you'll hear, Mark says the basic architecture of Chrome's sandbox is solid.

In this week's sponsor interview with speak with Eugene Kaspersky about the future of security on mobile devices. Kaspersky believes that mobile devices in the future will be much more complicated than they are now, and that will mean the current model of application verification won't last. People will always go to the more open platforms, he says.

Adam Boileau, as always, joins us for a discussion of the week's news headlines.

The following is a longer, uncut version of a story that appeared on the front pages of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald yesterday.

Facebook's woeful relationship with law enforcement bodies is hampering police investigations and putting lives at risk, the Australian Federal Police says.

AFP assistant commissioner and head of high tech crime operations Neil Gaughan will fly to Washington DC today for a high level meeting convened by the US Department of Justice in which senior law enforcement officials from around the world will discuss their concerns with the social networking website.

Both state and federal police have told The Age the company has been unwilling to provide police with the intelligence they need for investigations. They want Facebook to appoint a dedicated law enforcement liaison in Australia who can match user accounts suspected of criminal activity to physical Internet addresses, for example.

''This [current] situation could lead to loss of life, there's no doubt about that at all,'' Mr. Gaughan told The Age. ''It's just a matter of time.''

However Facebook doused expectations of such a hire in a statement issued to The Age. ''Facebook does not put [law enforcement] people in every country where Facebook has users; it's just not the way companies scale,'' the statement said.

A senior investigator with a state police service said Facebook was prepared to assist officers when someone's life was in danger, but otherwise ''they give you the bird,'' he said.

''They only comply to subpoenas issued by a US court,'' said the investigator, who did not wish to be identified.

Police services have also demanded Facebook's law enforcement guidelines document be brought into line with Australian law and legal terminology. Mr Gaughan said that in one case Facebook had ignored an Australian warrant because it was issued by a judicial officer rather than a court as its current guidelines require.

''Information was not provided and it slowed down our ability to... obtain a search warrant for a premises,'' Mr. Gaughan said. ''In this instance we still got the result but much slower than should have been the case.''

Facebook has recently faced criticism over the vandalism of tribute pages set up to honour the victims of crime. Pages dedicated to slain teenagers Elliot Fletcher, Michele Morrissey and murdered child Trinity Bates among others were defaced.

On Monday night Senator Stephen Conroy lambasted the site over its ''complete disregard'' for its members privacy during a senate estimates hearing, and the company is facing intense media scrutiny following the death of Sydney teenager Nona Belomesoff two weeks ago, who met her alleged killer, a man posing as a wildlife carer, via Facebook.

The trial of Melbourne man Ron Felicite, who killed his wife over her involvement with a man she met via the social networking site, has also made headlines and the company is weathering a grassroots backlash over controversial changes to its privacy policy.

''It's not only Australia where we're having these issues with Facebook,'' Mr. Gaughan says. ''I know it's a significant problem in the UK... what I'm hearing from my US and Canadian counterparts is this is also issue for them.''

Senior law enforcement representatives from the UK, USA and Canada will also attend the meeting in Washington on Thursday, which will be chaired by the US Department of Justice National Coordinator for Child Protection and Interdiction Ms. Francey Hakes.

Facebook's rival social networking site MySpace did have a dedicated law enforcement liaison in Australia, Mr. David Batch. He was made redundant last year following the site's decline in market share.

Mr. Batch, a former AFP agent, said he had worked closely with police. ''The only service I could provide was an intelligence service... but that was enough to keep law enforcement on side and happy,'' he says.

''Nine times out of 10, intelligence would be enough to get [investigations] over the line.''

Police can use such intelligence to locate suspected offenders and then to apply for search warrants to gain access to the suspect's computer, for example. But such intelligence cannot be used as evidence in a trial -- only evidence collected via the Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Act of 1987 can be used in court.

Under the complicated mutual assistance regime police requests for correctly formatted, admissible evidence are funnelled between the Attorneys General in each country.

Mr. Batch says a typical request via the mutual assistance act typically takes 6-18 months to be returned.

In a written statement Facebook said it works closely with the Attorney General's Department and the AFP to make ''our law enforcement requests as efficient and helpful as possible''. The company said it dedicated ''significant resource to Australian law enforcement relationship building and information processing''.

In this presentation you'll hear Tor project leader Roger Dingledine talking all about Tor. Who uses it? Why? What's it good for?

For those who don't know what it is, Tor is a free-software anonymizing network that helps people around the world use the Internet in safety, the official blurb says.

Tor's 1600 volunteer relays carry traffic for several hundred thousand users including ordinary citizens who want protection from identity theft and prying corporations, corporations who want to look at a competitor's website in private, and soldiers and aid workers in the Middle East who need to contact their home servers without fear of physical harm.

So if you're based in Iran or China and don't want the government being able to identify your source IP, it's a pretty handy tool.

But governments are cottoning on to Tor and making efforts to block their citizens from using the Tor network. Roger discusses the changes the Tor project has made to combat these government restrictions. It's a good talk and I hope you enjoy it!

In this presentation, Cisco's Vice President and Chief Security Officer John Stewart tries to pin down where we're going to be in 2012. More devices doing more things! Malware embedded in video streams! All sorts of funky stuff!

In this podcast you'll hear an interview I did with ZScaler's Michael Sutton. In it he expresses frustration that criminals are able to so easily manipulate Google's search results for trending topics.

Sutton claims that malicious pages linked to trending topics are rising through Google's rankings almost immediately. In other words, the bad guys have gotten good at SEO.

But if Sutton and his colleagues can identify these pages from outside Google, why can't Google detect them? It's not exactly short on resources or cash.

In the following interview, Microsoft's Steve Adegbite joins me for this interview about the potential for a nanny state operating system.

With all this rogue AV stuff floating about, the Microsofties are encountering a few fairly significant dilemmas on how to deal with this stuff. Should the OS only accept certain, known brands of AV? Well, then they're acting as a gateway and telling people what they can and can't run. Can't do that. What about a warning system like they did with device drivers? Well, that wasn't much good in the end because people just ignored the warnings.

So what can Microsoft do about this rogue AV problem?