Risky Business Podcast

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

• USA and friends send a sternly worded letter
• NSO group in the news, but parts of the coverage don’t add up
• Google TAG drops another great post
• We unveil the details of the earth shattering Kaseya 0day cyberweapon
• MORE

This week’s show is brought to you by Signal Sciences, which is now a part of Fastly. Instead of booking an interview with one of their staff, they suggested we interview one of their customers – so this week’s sponsor guest is J J Agha, the CISO of Compass, the American real estate website.

He’ll be joining us to talk about his general approach, and yes, Signal Sciences is a part of that, but he’ll speak to automation and orchestration and a bunch of other stuff too.

In this podcast we chat with Rob Joyce, the NSA’s Director of Cybersecurity.

As many listeners would know Rob has a pretty interesting resume, having served as a special advisor on cybersecurity to US president Donald Trump, and, before that, leading Tailored Access Operations for NSA. More recently he served as the NSA liaison to Britain’s GCHQ, but he returned to the USA this year to take up his new post as the head of NSA’s defence-oriented Cybersecurity Directorate.

And here’s the thing: Rob is a senior bureaucrat who is genuinely passionate about technology. His con talks are fantastic. He did one on how to make TAO’s life hard in 2016 that was really a blockbuster technical talk, and he’s even done a talk about how to engineer wildly over-the-top Christmas light displays.

I’m telling you this to let you know that, well, Rob is a real, actual security geek. He’s the hacker-bureaucrat, if you will.

Anyway, he generously made himself available to do this interview with us and we covered a bunch of stuff: The terrible state of enterprise security, cloud service providers being dumb with their defaults, the role of the intelligence community in combating ransomware and more. But we started off with some nuts and bolts discussion about what NSA’s cybersecurity directorate actually does. Enjoy!

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

• REvil takes a vacation
• Kaseya finally patches VSA
• Morgan Stanley data exposed by third party Accellion hack
• CISA issues emergency directive on MS print spooler bug
• Patrick and Adam dream up ways for the US government to pressure vendors
• MORE

This week’s show is brought to you by Senetas. They’ve traditionally made layer 2 encryption gear but, as you’ll hear, they’re moving with the times! Senetas CTO Julian Fay joins us this week to talk through a bunch of stuff – what they’ve been working on, a really interesting project they had to abandon because of COVID and the latest news on the move to quantum-resistant crypto.

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

• Our take on the REvil attack against Kaseya customers
• Microsoft’s print spooler bug is a real worry
• Reports the RNC breached by Russia’s SVR
• NSA snaps GRU brute forcing efforts
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Material Security, a very interesting startup that has a completely different take on what email security actually is. Material’s co-founder Ryan Noon will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to talk about the cool stuff they’re doing on the analytics side.

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

• Microsoft reluctantly and belatedly discloses breach
• Chinese APT suspected of Air India breach
• JBS paid $11m even though they successfully restored systems
• cl0p money launderer arrests
• Ransomware news roundup
• The latest research and MORE

This week’s show is brought to you by Greynoise. Its founder and CEO, Andrew Morris, joins us this week to talk through some of the work he’s been doing to extend Greynoise’s use cases. It’s a great chat, that one.

Aaaaand we’re back on deck! We’re kicking things off this week with this interview with Joep Gommers, the CEO and founder of EclecticIQ. And FYI, in case you didn’t know, these Soap Box podcasts are wholly sponsored.

If your job involves handling threat intel, then I think you’ll really enjoy this conversation. It touches on a bunch of stuff. The first part of this is talking through what EclecticIQ actually offers, currently, then we talk more broadly about operationalising threat intelligence, and finally we talk about EclecticIQ’s new stuff – which include introducing XDR tooling.

As regular listeners know, the soap box podcasts we publish here at Risky.Biz are wholly sponsored. That means everyone you hear in one of these podcasts, paid to be here.

And this edition of Soap Box has become an annual thing – it’s our once-yearly catch up with Jerrod Chong, the chief solutions officer of Yubico, makers of the Yubikey and YubiHSM.

Yubikey is an infosec darling, really, because they’re in the unique position of having a product that’s popular with security professionals like CISOs while also being popular with security-conscious consumers. Businesses get value out of Yubikeys, but so do normal people, thanks to key support being baked into services like Facebook and Google.

As you’re about to hear, there’s a whole new category of use about to open up – Bank of America is launching FIDO2 U2F support for its customers. That’s a big deal – the more FIDO2 keys we get out there the better.

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

• US Government claws back Colonial ransom bitcoin. We don’t think the FBI acted alone.
• Meet an0m, the cute little app for planning crimes that drinks milkshakes.
• Ransomware stuff, duh.
• Trickbot developer arrested in Florida
• Supreme court upends CFAA “exceed authorised access” element
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Datadog. Michael Yamnitsky will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to talk about cloud security posture management. DataDog is launching a product in that space, so we’ll be hearing about the types of issues CSPM products can help to unearth.

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

• Ransomware attack threatens Australian and US beef supply
• Talos dubs Russian ransomware crews “privateers”
• NYTimes writes another bad story
• More Fortinet pwnage
• Belgian government rolls Hafnium IR and finds, well, something else
• Google unveils new rowhammer techniques
• Much, much more

Haroon Meer of Thinkst Canary is this week’s sponsor guest. Thinkst is spinning up a labs division, but they’ll be doing something different to the same-old bug hunting. That’s a quality conversation.

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

• The latest news on the health system ransomware crisis in Ireland
• TSA to force pipeline operators to disclose attacks they probably aren’t detecting anyway
• Colonial paying ransom angers US congresspeople who really haven’t thought this through
• Iran targets Israeli systems with new wipers
• Israel targets Hamas systems with guided munitions that go bang
• Much, much more

This week’s sponsor guest is Ryan Kalember, EVP of Cybersecurity Strategy at Proofpoint. He joins us to talk about how compromised o365 accounts are powering all sorts of threat actors right now – from ransomware operators to BEC crews and APT units, everyone loves a popped mailbox.