Podcasts

Researchers turn any Bluetooth device into an AirTag tracker, VMware patches three ESXi zero-days, France debates encryption backdoors, and a fifth of the stolen Bybit funds are now untraceable.

In this Risky Business Talks interview we invited Will Thomas to talk about the recent leak of internal chats from the Black Basta ransomware group. Will is a SANS Instructor, co-author of the SANS FOR589 course, and the co-founder of a community research project for CTI analysts called Curated Intelligence. Will walks us through the Black Basta leak and uses the group’s attack on US healthcare provider Ascension to break down how the gang operated.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq take a deep dive into incident response reports from Chinese cybersecurity firms that attribute the hack of one of the country’s top seven defence universities to the US National Security Agency. These reports were collated and translated into English by the security researcher known as Inversecos [https://x.com/inversecos].

This episode is also available on Youtube.

The Trump administration stops treating Russian hackers as a threat, Meta seeks a permanent NSO injunction, new Cellebrite zero-days come to light, and big name Russian cyber criminals get … home detention.

In this Risky Business News sponsor interview, Catalin Cimpanu talks with Toni de la Fuente, founder and CEO of cloud security firm Prowler. Toni talks about his company’s latest effort, the Open Cloud Security Movement, an initiative to get more cloud security vendors to open-source their core projects.

Cellebrite bans Serbia from using its products, Chinese hackers breached the Belgian security service, the Republican National Committee hid a Chinese hack and Microsoft removes malicious extensions from the VSCode Marketplace.

Tom Uren and Patrick Gray talk about the White House apparently considering kicking Canada out of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance to apply pressure on the country. It’s a terrible idea and even thinking about it undermines the strength of the alliance.

They also discuss Sweden’s proposed legislation that would order apps like WhatsApp and Signal to store messages so they could be provided under warrant to authorities. The story is a vignette of the ongoing encryption debate, but we think apps like Signal will leave the country rather than comply.

Finally, they talk about how the illicit cryptocurrency ecosystem is evolving in response to government action such as takedowns and sanctions.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

On this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week’s cybersecurity news:

• North Korea pulls off a 1.5 billion dollar crypto heist
• Apple pulls Advanced Data Protection from the UK
• Black Basta ransomware gang’s internal chats leak
• Russians snoop on Signal with QR codes
• And Myanmar ships thousands of freed scam compound workers to Thailand

Regular guest Lina Lau joins to discuss her work reading Chinese incident response reports on WeChat, and how that has people thinking that … she outed the NSA?

This week’s episode is sponsored by Airlock Digital, and allow-listing tragics Daniel Schell and David Cottingham are along with an amusing tale of using Windows’ own allow-listing software to block EDR from loading.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

Signal threatens to leave Sweden over backdoor request, the EU sanctions a North Korean general linked to two APTs, Australia bans Kaspersky products on government systems and Google will use QR codes for Gmail authentication.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom, Uren and The Grugq examine the fundamental principles of network exploitation as described in Matthew Monte’s ‘Network Attacks and Exploitation: A Framework’ book using recent hacks as case studies.

This episode is also available on Youtube.