Podcasts

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

• Ukraine sanctions may lead to Russia going “cyber feral”
• Brian Krebs links Red Cross breach to Iranian actor
• APT10 uses cred stuffing as misdirection
• Report: Global logistics behemoth Expeditors ransomwared
• NFT thefts still hilarious
• Inside the epic KlaySwap hack
• Much, much more

In this week’s sponsor interview Thinkst Canary’s Marco Slaviero talks about some work they’ve done on introducing a “Safety Net” against AWS token enumeration edge cases. That’s a very interesting interview.

There is no weekly news show this week. Instead, we’re running this feature interview with Michael Montoya, the CISO of Equinix. This isn’t a sponsored interview or anything like that, this podcast was prepared with support from the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.

Equinix has 9,000 staff and operates 220 data centres globally. Its annual revenue is in the order of USD$6bn. In September 2020 it was attacked by criminals who deployed the Netwalker ransomware on its corporate network. The attackers demanded a USD$4.5m ransom payment for service restoration and to keep the data they stole from the company private.

This interview has taken a while to organise, but when I first found out Michael was open to the idea of talking through the incident I jumped at it. It’s extremely rare for CISOs to be made available to talk about events like this, but it’s something that should happen more often. We can learn a lot by dissecting these types of incidents publicly. Enjoy!

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

• A spate of ransomware attacks on European energy and transport
• Russian authorities extend cybercrime crackdown
• Irritating influencers arrested for laundering 2016 Bitfinex hack proceeds
• IRS abandons ID.me trial
• Microsoft disables macros by default, disables MSIX protocol handler
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by ExtraHop.

Extrahop’s Ted Driggs is this week’s sponsor guest – he was on the show about a year ago talking about how we should really start thinking about putting together software bills of behaviours as well as bills of material. Ted is back to tell us how that effort is progressing. As you’ll hear, a lot of the behavioural data on software already exists, but it’s being hoarded by different vendors.

These soap box podcasts are wholly sponsored – that means everyone you hear in one of these editions paid to be here. Today’s guest is Andrew Morris, the founder and CEO of Greynoise.

Greynoise is one of those companies that has a brief that sounds simple but is actually quite hard to execute on. They detect malicious mass scanning on the Internet so their customers can plug that data into their SOC to see if the IP they just got an alert on is something targeting them or something targeting the whole internet.

You don’t even need to be a customer to get some use out of Greynoise. If you want to know about an IP you’ve seen an alert for just head over to greynoise.io and drop it into the search box – magic awaits.

Greynoise makes its money by selling API access to its service, basically, and its customers mostly use it for SIEM enrichment. But as you’ll hear, Andrew says the company is looking at moving toward actually blocking this type of mass scanning from hitting customer environments, and is even looking at working with telcos to scrub the most egregious stuff from the internet entirely. His rationale is actually pretty simple – he wants to narrow the aperture through which mass scanning can fit through. He wants to make it harder.

But this interview isn’t just about what Greynoise doing, it’s also about the current state of mass scanning.

On this week’s show Patrick Gray, Tom Uren and Joe Slowik discuss the week’s security news, including:

• Why China’s Olympics app is probably not spyware
• New DDoS record set at 3.47Tbps
• USG goes all in on Zero Trust
• Dmitry Medvedev makes all the right noises on ransomware cooperation
• Iranian APT crew dabbles in ransomware
• German fuel distribution ransomwared
• The latest on NSO
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Google Cloud. Anton Chuvakin, the head of security solution strategy at Google Cloud will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to talk about why SIEM vendors – including Google Cloud – are gobbling up SOAR platforms in acquisitions.

Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick, Tom or Joeon Twitter if that’s your thing.

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

• Belarusian Cyber Partisans ransom train network
• A look at developments in Ukraine
• Merck wins NotPetya insurance lawsuit
• US VC firm in talks to acquire NSO Group
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Trail of Bits, the security engineering firm. Dan Guido joins us this week week to talk about zkdocs, a bunch of documentation Trail of Bits put together to provide guidance on how to implement some of these newfangled concepts – like zero knowledge proofs – that are popular in blockchain and cryptoland.

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

• Russia arrests REvil crew
• Ukraine government hit in messy hacks
• White House hosts open source pow-wow, but is it pointless?
• US cyber reporting law will come back from the dead
• Report: Israeli police targeted activists with NSO but without warrants
• Much, much more

This week’s sponsor interview is with HD Moore, the founder of Rumble. We’re talking through what how he and his team helped customers respond to the log4j drama. They quickly added the capability to scan customer’s environments for log4shell-affected tech. When asset discovery meets rapid vuln response!

In this edition of the soap box we’re chatting with Steve Miller, a senior researcher at Stairwell. Steve has a long history doing this sort of stuff. He worked inside various bits of the US government doing cyber things, and also spent a decent chunk of his career at Mandiant.

His new employer, Stairwell, makes a platform that collects information about all files present in your environment and let’s you do some fancy stuff with that information. You’ll hear a little bit more about what they do in this interview, but we’re not really talking that much about Stairwell in this interview. It’s more about the evolution of threat intel.

As you’ll hear, Steve said the first iteration of the commercial threat intel space was very much born of govvies jumping out and bringing their thinking with them, but the space is evolving. The take away from this interview is that threat intelligence is more something that you do, not something you just blindly consume.

On this week’s show Patrick Gray, Katie Nickels and Joe Slowik discuss the week’s security news, including:

• US Government warns of impending critical infrastructure hacks
• Log4j bug in VMWare gets a workout
• Ex Uber CSO Joe Sullivan facing wire fraud charges
• Signal to push ahead on cryptocurrency payments
• Italian literary nerd busted for running one man APT operation
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Okta. Marc Rogers is the executive director of cybersecurity there and he’s joining us this week to talk about the log4j bug and some adjacent issues. He’s working on a paper with IST about the bug and what it all means, and he’s joining us this week to talk about why the log4j drama was different.

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

• The log4j bug wrap
• The ransomware wrap
• The human rights and surveillance industry wrap
• Research and carnage wrap

This week’s show is brought to you by Airlock Digital. They make allowlisting software that has mostly been used in Windows environments, but as you’re about to hear they’ve now got a very, very nice solution for the bigger Linux distros, and their Mac agent is going to be launched in a few weeks.