Risky Business News Podcast

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq look at the idea of global critical infrastructure. One common example is submarine cables, which are globally important but are vulnerable because they are hard to defend. But what about services from tech giants? Are they global critical infrastructure?

This episode is also available on Youtube.

China privately admits to hacking American critical infrastructure, the US Treasury was compromised by password spraying, America will sign a global spyware agreement after all, and a Chinese APT is abusing the Windows Sandbox to hide its malware.

In this Risky Bulletin sponsor interview David Cottingham and Peter Baussman, Airlock Digital’s CEO and CTO, talk to Tom Uren about a new Australian Cyber Security Centre guidance about building defensible networks. The pair cover what they like about the document and where it could be improved.

Trump orders investigation into former CISA director Chris Krebs, the US DOJ disbands its crypto crime team, NSO hires a new lobby team, and researchers raise the alarm on something called “slopsquatting”.

Tom Uren and Patrick Gray discuss Trump’s recent firing of General Timothy Haugh, the head of NSA and Cyber Command. Tom dives into the implications and thinks why this is not good news for the agencies.

They also discuss Europe losing faith in the US intelligence commitments that underpin transatlantic data flows. That would be bad news for US tech companies.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

Hackers leak data from a major Russian bulletproof hosting provider, Australia deregisters 95 companies linked to cyber scams, the US Treasury gets hacked again, and Meta expands “teen accounts” to Facebook and Facebook Messenger.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq look at the idea of ‘false scarcities’ in cyber security. Are bugs and talent rare? Or is our thinking blinkered?

This episode is also available on Youtube.

Trump fires NSA and CyberCom leadership, CISA looks likely to be halved in size, hackers hit Australian pension funds, and NIST gives up on old CVEs in its backlog.

Android looks set to get its own Lockdown Mode, China overhauls cybersecurity and privacy laws, a crypto platform gets hacked for $70 million dollars, and Greece’s intel agency is set to hire more hackers.

Tom Uren and Patrick Gray discuss how North Korean IT worker scam is shifting towards Europe and employing tactics that make it more dangerous.

They also discuss why Signalgate was a massive security failure. We learnt this week that US cabinet members were in multiple Signal groups discussing different topics. Phone hacking is not uncommon, an adversary states will be able to take advantage of the intelligence in these conversations.

This episode is also available on Youtube.