Podcasts

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss the opportunities in phishing and why it is both easy and difficult.

Mike Burgess is the director general of ASIO. But the thing about Mike is he’s actually a cybersecurity guy. He joined ASD, Australia’s NSA, back in 1995 when it was still the Defence Signals Directorate. He was there for 18 years before he bounced out to the private sector for a while to work as the CISO for Australia’s largest telco, Telstra. In 2017 he returned to ASD to run it, and in 2019 he was appointed director general of ASIO.

Back in April, Burgess made a series of comments on the topic of encrypted messaging during a Press Club speech in Canberra. Our right to privacy, he said, is not absolute, and he implied that if certain providers didn’t start helping Australian authorities out a little more, he’d use some of the provisions in Australia’s Assistance and Access bill to force them to provide access to certain content.

So I reached out to organise this interview to get some more detail from him about exactly what sort of cooperation he’s seeking and why.

A short podcast updating listeners on the security news of the last few days, as prepared by Catalin Cimpanu and read by Kaitlyn Sawrey

You can find the newsletter version of this podcast here.

In this Risky Business News sponsor interview, Catalin Cimpanu talks with Haroon Meer, Founder and CEO at Thinkst, about the company’s evolution over the past 15 years, its focus on hacker-like internal culture, and the UK NCSC’s new deception network.

A short podcast updating listeners on the security news of the last few days, as prepared by Catalin Cimpanu and read by Kaitlyn Sawrey.

You can find the newsletter version of this podcast here.

In this podcast Tom Uren and Patrick Gray discuss an Australian government effort to bridge the gap between online and real identity across the whole economy. It addresses a real need, but Tom doesn’t think it will go smoothly.

They also discuss ongoing Chinese cyber espionage focussed on Russian targets. They may have a ‘no limits’ friendship, but spying between allies is remarkably common.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

On this week’s show, Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week’s security news including:

• Microsoft did a good thing! Soon all Azure admins will require MFA
• The three billion row National Public Data breach mess, courtesy Florida Man
• US govt confirms that it was Iran that hacked the Trump campaign
• Is TP-Link the next Huawei, or just not very good at computers?
• Major Chinese RFID card maker has hardcoded backdoors
• And much, much more.

This week’s episode is sponsored by Specter Ops, makers of Bloodhound Enterprise. VP of Products Justin Kohler joins to talk about how they’ve joined their on-prem AD and cloud Entra attack path graphs, so you can map out that juicy, real-world attack surface.

A short podcast updating listeners on the security news of the last few days, as prepared by Catalin Cimpanu and read by Kaitlyn Sawrey.

You can find the newsletter version of this podcast here.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq examine how the cybersecurity industry is very strange when compared to other professional fields such as doctors and accountants.

In this conversation Risky Business host Patrick Gray speaks with SentinelOne’s Chris Krebs and Alex Stamos about what sort of cyber enabled interference we can expect in the 2024 US presidential race.

Alex was the CISO at Facebook during the 2016 election, and Chris Krebs was responsible for US election security as the director of CISA in 2020.

Watch the video version of this episode on Youtube.