Risky Business News Podcast

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.

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.

North Korean hackers steal one and a half billion dollars from Bybit, Apple disables iCloud backup encryption in the UK, stream-jacking hits the e-sports world and Palau faces its third ransomware attack in six years.

In this Risky Business News sponsor interview, Catalin Cimpanu talks with Aaron Attarzadeh, Enterprise Security Engineer at Nucleus. Aaron goes into new concepts for the vulnerability management scene, such as asset correlation and asset linking.

The BlackBasta ransomware group implodes, Russian military hackers target Signal with QR codes, Microsoft patches a Power Pages zero-day, and Meta sues a man who hacked accounts and extorted users.

In this podcast Tom Uren and Patrick Gray talk about the idea of launching a retaliatory campaign to hack Chinese telcos in response to Salt Typhoon’s targeting of US ones. US Senator Mark Warner floated the idea as a way to persuade the Chinese government to pull back Salt Typhoon, but we think that kind of campaign has merit regardless.

They also discuss how Samoa’s CERT calling out APT40 is a big deal. It’s striking to see a small country of 200,000 people calling out Chinese hacking.

VC giant Insight Partners gets social engineered; OpenSSH patches an attacker-in-the-middle bug; Ecuador’s parliament hit by cyberattacks; …and a Monero zero-day awaits a patch.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about the United State’s Vulnerabilities Equities Program, which balances the need for intelligence collection with the need to protect the public. The government recently revealed that in 2023 it released 39 vulnerabilities, but what does this really tell us?

This episode is also available on Youtube.