Risky Business Podcast

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

• The latest on the Exchange tyre fire
• Lawmakers in the USA have had enough of Microsoft’s ridiculous licensing tiers
• White House mulls software security rating system
• Joseph Cox’s SMS adventures
• Things didn’t quite work out for APT6920 Arson Cats
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by VMRay. They asked us to interview one of their customers in this week’s sponsor segment so Brad Marr, the CISO of Life Fitness, pops in to walk through his VMRay use case.

This podcast was made possible thanks to the support of the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. They’ve provided us with grant funding so we can do feature podcasts that will be of interest to people working in policy roles. The idea is educate people working in policy about issues that they’re in a position to do something about.

In this interview we spoke with Kim Grauer, the head of research at Chainalysis.

Chainalysis makes software that cryptocurrency exchanges, regulators, law enforcement and intelligence services use to get insight into what’s happening in terms of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies moving around. You would have heard us talk about their reports in the news segment of Risky Biz a few times because they have a habit of publishing really interesting insights into things like the ransomware economy.

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

• All the Exchange boxes on the planet have pretty much been owned lol
• See above
• Someone’s hacking Russian crime forums
• The Accellion scandal keeps on truckin’
• Dependency confusion attacks are going berserk in the wild
• Gab got owned. Again.
• John McAfee is in all sorts of trouble
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Nucleus Security. Its director of APAC operations, Gil Azaria, joins us in this week’s sponsor interview to talk about how he became a Nucleus customer before he joined the vendor as its APAC guy.

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

• Chinese APT crew goes berserk with Exchange 0day
• Russia hacks Ukraine and USA, India hacks China, China hacks India
• The NYTimes got something big wrong again (shock horror)
• CANVAS exploit pack leaks, including their sweet, sweet Spectre exploit
• Atlantic Council report into offensive capability vendors/contractors
• Your vCentre gear it probably already on fire: find out why!
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Yubico, the makers of the Yubikey.

This is a sponsored podcast featuring ExtraHop’s co-founder and CTO Jesse Rothstein. ExtraHop is a Network Detection and Response (NDR) vendor that started out offering network health and monitoring tools before being pulled into the security space by its own customers.

Jesse joined host Patrick Gray to talk about the SolarWinds compromise from a Network Detection and Response vendor’s perspective, about cloud security and monitoring, some of ExtraHop’s backstory and more. Enjoy!

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

• USA floats new sanctions against Russia
• TikTok, WeChat get stay of execution
• Dependency confusion is ugh
• US indicts Lazarus crypto-thieves
• France ties Sandworm crew to Centreon intrusion
• MORE

This week’s show is brought to you by Thinkst Canary. Thinkst’s founder Haroon Meer is this week’s sponsor guest and he joins us to have a very Haroon-style conversation. We talk about how security controls and detections often fall over when things happen that take place outside of our assumptions: trojaned software updates, attackers hiding in unconventional places like monitors, things like that. That’s a great conversation.

Recent attacks by SVR against US targets have mostly been written up under the moniker of the “SolarWinds campaign”. In our view, that’s inaccurate. The defining characteristic of this campaign wasn’t the SolarWinds supply chain stuff, it was the abuse of Microsoft cloud services.

My understanding of how contemporary cloud services work isn’t actually as good as it should be. And that got me thinking – if my understanding isn’t that great, then there’s probably a lot of other people out there who don’t quite grok this stuff, particularly on the policy side. So, I set out to prepare a primer on Microsoft cloud security.

Our guest in this podcast is Dirk-Jan Mollema. He works at Fox-IT in the Netherlands and is one of their core researchers on Azure AD and Active Directory Security. What you’re about to listen to, essentially, is me picking his brain so I can wrap my own head around this stuff. The hope is that some of you will learn along with me!

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

• The latest on the attempted Florida water poisoning incident
• How to abuse Google Sync services for great victory
• Why Signal’s TLS proxies for Iranians are probably a bad idea
• OG username brokers targeted by social media legal army
• Much, much more

This week’s sponsor interview is with Dan Guido of Trail of Bits. They’ve released an enterprise version of their iVerify tool. It’s a security tool for iOS (an Android version is in beta) that lets organisations monitor things like patch levels and passcode compliance without actually requiring the installation of MDM profiles. It’s an enterprise mobile security tool for orgs that don’t need or want full MDM.

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

• Emotet is… gone?
• Accellion FTAs were owned everywhere, not just in ANZ
• US courts air-gap sensitive filings in wake of Holiday Bear attacks
• iOS 14 brings iMessage security improvements
• Much, much more

Proofpoint’s Sherrod DeGrippo is this week’s sponsor guest. She joins the show to talk about Emotet’s demise, Trickbot’s survival, BEC, ransomware and more.

These Soap Box editions of the show are wholly sponsored, which means everyone you hear in one of these editions, paid to be here.

This edition of the show is brought to you by Material Security. Basically what they do is lock up your cloud-based email. They use Google and Microsoft’s APIs to redact sensitive information from your mail spool – or even redact entire messages from your spool, like, say, anything over a month old – and then kick you up to an auth challenge when you want to access that mail.

It’s a product that recognises that email isn’t just a vector – often it’s an attacker’s target.