Podcasts

On this week's show we have a chat to Paul Ducklin about what he sees as questionable ethics behind some mobile malware research.

Researchers from Rutgers University and Veracode have written mobile phone malware or trojans; the latter even released the source code to their BlackBerry trojan. But what purpose does this serve, asks Duck. Is there any benefit at all to be had from writing and releasing trojans, even if they are written for academic purposes?

This week's sponsor interview is with Check Point's Fredrik Borjesson, and Adam Boileau is the week's feature guest.

In this edition of the RB2 podcast we're chatting with Declan Ingram from Securus Global about an interesting report that was recently released by analysis house Forrester.

It was commissioned by Microsoft and was intended to assess the data security practices of North American, European, and Australian enterprises by surveying CISOs.

Forrester sought to understand the value of sensitive information contained in enterprise portfolios; the security controls used to protect this information; the drivers of information security programs; and the cost and impact of enterprise data security incidents.

There were some interesting findings. Among them, that security managers use compliance regimes to justify security spending, not security for security's sake.

You can download the report here.

Risky Business 2 is sponsored exclusively by Symantec.

This week we're chatting with the company's vice president of security response, Vincent Weafer.

In this interview, Vincent and I discuss the relative complexity of modern malware. Gone are the days of 214-byte malware that could spread via a single UDP packet. They were good days, but now they're gone and we're dealing with some really diabolically complicated stuff.

But we're still seeing malware that's relatively simple considering its 2010. Gumblar is a good example of that -- it's simple and not particularly sophisticated, but it's been very effective.

So which poses a bigger threat? Simple stuff or complicated stuff?

This week we speak to iDefense analyst Kim Zenz, who's currently based in Moscow. We'll be getting an update on what the bad guys are up to in the former USSR, after all it's usually a good indicator of what they'll get up to in Western countries in the not too distant future.

After that we'll check in with Chris Wysopal, aka Weld Pond. He's the CTO of Veraocde and joins us to talk about the company's first ever state of software security report which is a surprisingly engaging read. That's this week's sponsor interview.

Adam Boileau, as usual, sheds his beardy McUNIXguy perspective on the week's news.

Here is a link to the APNIC stuff Adam and I talk about in the show.

While not the worst kind of data leak, the mistake has left the vendor somewhat red faced and contrite. Following enquiries from Risky.Biz last week the company e-mailed the users affected by the blunder.

"Unfortunately a mistake was made and recipient emails were added to the CC portion of the message, instead of the BCC portion, which caused several emails to be visible," the e-mail read. "Trend Micro takes our customers' privacy very seriously and is taking the necessary steps to prevent this from happening again. Please accept our sincerest apologies."

The accidental exposure of clients' e-mail addresses is reminiscent of rival vendor McAfee's leak of 1400 Australian IT security professionals' details in July last year.

As trivial as this leak may seem, security consultants say the data could be useful to attackers. They could, for example, stage a phishing attack to try to obtain the customers' login details to the hosted service, Trend's InterScan Messaging Hosted Security (IMHS).

"A list like this is of great value to an attacker. They have the direct, correct email address of the user operating the service the attacker is looking to phish," one said.

Maintainer of the Open Source Vulnerability database, Brian Martin, agreed. "Not only can I phish, I can craft an attachment that I know Trend can't scan," he told Risky.Biz.

However, all agree the disclosure won't increase risks faced by the affected organisation in a significant way.

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There's no feature interview in this week's show -- it has an empty middle, just like an Easter egg!

Between me getting bumped out with a cold for a couple of days last week and this being a four day week, I just couldn't pull one together in time. Apologies.

So on this week's show we've got an extra long news segment with Adam Boileau, which is a bunch of fun.

In it we discuss:

• Aurora not all it's cracked up to be
• RIP SCO
• Claims of a Vietnamese government sponsored botnet. (WTF?)
• The march of China's great firewall
• When two networks are better than one
• A $100 kit for sniffing wireless keyboards

PLUS!

• Cisco's latest round of ghastly bugs
• Apple's latest round of ghastly bugs
• Microsoft's latest round of ghastly bugs

We also have an interesting chat with Ron Gula, chief executive of Tenable Network Security, in this week's sponsor interview. The topic is vulnerability scoring and knowing when a vulnerability scan is actually pointless.

This week we chat with Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan of Australia's Federal Police about trends in fraud.

We'll also have a bit of a chat about all things Gumblar with Vitaly Kamlyuk of Kaspersky Lab in Japan in this week's sponsor interview. Vitaly's been having a bunch of fun with the creators of Gumblar. In fact, it seems the guys behind the system have gotten so sick of Vitaly and his buddies profiling the Gumblar systems from their Japanese offices that they've blackholed the entire country of Japan to slow him down.

It's a bumper news session this week -- Albert Gonzalez has been sentenced for his TJX hack, spooks have been busted man-in-the-middling SSL connections, someone's released DNS tunnelling shellcode for Metasploit (yummy), etc and so on, so forth etc.

Link to DNS tunnelling shellcode stuff here.

Link to the IE8 exploit paper mentioned by Adam is here.

This week we've got Brian Snow on the show again. Brian had a 34 year career with the NSA in the States -- when he retired just a few years ago he was the technical director of Information Assurance there.

He's joining the show this week to talk about PKI, and specifically, why PKI hasn't taken off like we all thought it would. Brian actually has a pretty decent explanation for why things like federated identity never took off in the early to mid naughties like we all thought it would.

That's after the news.

Also this week we chat with Matt Moynahan, Veracode's chief executive. We're talking to Matt about the testing of applications sold via things like Apple's app store and Google's equivalent. That's our sponsor interview.

Adam Boileau, as usual, is this week's news guest.

Sourcefire partners in the Asia Pacific region have been bombarded with abusive e-mails purporting to come from Ammar Hindi, the company's APAC and Japan managing director.

Hindi isn't sending the mail. The company suspects the messages are the work of a disgruntled ex-employee based in Singapore. "We have strong suspicions who it is, but haven't been able to establish it definitively," a source close to the matter told Risky.Biz. "It was our hope that they'd lose interest and move on, but after every period of quiet, another wave goes off."

The e-mails appear designed to cause embarrassment to Hindi. "Mother f--ker! Wake up your idea and be more productive with more f--king sales order of Sourcefire in the next 30days so that Sourcefire can have a f--king good Q1 2010 under my charge," says of the e-mails, sent from a Gmail account set up in Hindi's name.

"Wake up your f--king idea and focus on f--king Sourcefire sales only or else you are not my f--king good partner for APAC," reads another.

One partner interviewed by Risky.Biz says the e-mails are a particularly bad look for an information security software company. "Because its Sourcefire... it is worse in that they should be more responsible in protecting information," he says. "But at the same time, its only email addresses to partners which are probably available to most staffers. Any disgruntled employee could have easily taken some or all of this info prior to walking into an exit interview or to resign."

The partner expressed surprise that Sourcefire hasn't reached out to those affected to explain the situation. For its part, sources within Sourcefire say they don't want to respond as it may encourage the alleged offender.

All of the e-mails target Hindi, according to the source, and the company is making slow progress in pinning down the alleged offender. "The [legal] tools that are available to us are relatively blunt," the source says.

Impersonation is a form of fraud in many jurisdictions, the source says, but in others the behaviour is harder to pigeonhole into a specific offence.

"John Doe" court actions have been filed against the sender of the e-mails in various jurisdictions, the source says, and the company is working hard to prove the identity of the miscreant. "We'll keep plugging away until we can develop a record and hand it over to the police," the source says.

Until that happens, it seems Sourcefire partners will have to cope with the occasional, expletive-laden, poorly-written rant.

Follow Patrick Gray on Twitter here.

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On this week's show we're having an extended chat with our good mate Greg Shipley.

Greg's best known as the CTO of Chicago-based information security consultancy Neohapsis, and he'll be joining us to talk about what was on the agenda at the RSA conference. Apparently it's cloud, cloud, cloud... but what does that actually mean, mean, mean? Greg will be along soon to discuss, he's always good.

There will be no sponsor interview this week -- the team at Check Point are snowed under at the moment so we just didn't get an interview organised, but that's cool, because it leaves more time for me and Greg to talk about stuff.

Adam Boileau joins us for the news this week.