Risky Business Podcast

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

• Ransomware shutters US natural gas plants
• Huawei hit with huge indictment
• Voatz mobile voting app shredded by MIT, dust-up ensues
• The latest from the Vault7 trial
• Reality Winner seeking clemency
• Ring to force all users on to 2FA
• Israeli court rules Facebook must reinstate NSO staff profiles
• USG drops more North Korean samples
• OpenSSH gets Fido/U2F support

This week’s sponsor interview is with Dave Cottingham from Airlock Digital.

They make whitelisting software that’s actually useable. And until I did this interview I didn’t know that their agent actually does host hardening as well, which is pretty cool. Since we last spoke they’ve also popped up in CrowdStrike’s app store thingy, which means a bunch of you Crowdstrike customers will be able to dabble in some whitelisting if you want to.

Dave joins the show to talk about a bunch of stuff, including their experience having Silvio Cesare do a code audit on their agent.

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

Soap Box podcasts are fully sponsored which means everyone you hear on these editions of the show paid to be here. If you’re looking for the regular, weekly Risky Business podcast, just scroll one back in your podcast feed.

But you know what? I wouldn’t recommend it, because this edition of Soap Box is top notch. In it we’re joined by Jake King, a co-founder of Cmd Security.

Cmd makes Linux security software, and I love their approach mostly because, well, it’s simple. It has two main functions – visibility and control – but both of these functions focus on execution. The visibility piece is “which user executed what?” and the control piece is “only let user X execute Y”. The idea here is you can apply an additional layer of control over user actions, but obviously the visibility aspect to this is pretty useful at driving decisions around what sort of limits to put on various accounts.

Jake has fronted this edition of the show with an exclusive offer to Risky Business listeners, which is free use of their software. Obviously you won’t get access to absolutely all its features, but certainly enough of them to be very, very useful. They’re getting to the point where they can do this – throw out most of the functionality and just sell the icing on the cake to companies who want it. You can register for early access to the free trial at cmd.com/risky.

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

• Chinese operators indicted over Equifax breach, more indictments coming
• Alleged backdoor in Huawei lawful intercept features
• Data on 6.4m Israelis exposed by political party app
• Iowa caucus app was a pile of crap, 4chan clogged up caucus night phones
• Corp.com is up for sale. That’s a lotta hashes.
• Much, much more.

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

Corelight’s Richard Bejtlich joins the show this week in the sponsor slot to talk about what the company is doing to try to build the open source community behind Zeek, the tool its products are based on.

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

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

• Iowa app falls over, social and mainstream media chaos ensues
• Twitter acknowledges state-backed API abuse
• CDA 230 under review. Uh oh.
• Toll Group ransomware
• ICS-compatible ransomware spotted in wild
• UN got owned pretty hard
• Is Joshua Schulte The Shadow Brokers? A theory
• Much, much more.

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

Okta’s Simon Thorpe will be along this week to talk about a new trend they’re seeing and obviously encouraging – enterprises ditching Microsoft’s Active Directory. It’s a cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, world these days. and in the year 2020, you might want to actually ask yourself – do you still need to be using AD?

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

In this edition of the Soap Box podcast we’re joined by Zane Lackey, a co-founder of Signal Sciences.

Signal Sciences makes, in essence, a “next generation” Web Application Firewall, or WAF. Signal Sciences is a pretty well-established startup these days with a zillion customers, so he has some real insight into what’s happening out there in webapp land.

In this conversation he has some really interesting things to say: First, there’s a rush to Azure happening right now. It has become the platform of choice for all sorts of organisations.

He also has some really interesting things to say about how to protect web applications from logic flaws. Some simple ideas that should really help lock things down.

Enjoy!

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

• The FTI report on the Bezos incident is a massive let down
• UK lets Huawei into 5G build
• SeaTurtle campaign pinned on Turkey
• Mitsubishi owned through its AV solution
• Ransomware crews owning unpatched Citrix boxes
• Much, much more.

This week’s sponsor guest is Sherrod DeGrippo of Proofpoint. She’s a senior director of threat research there and she’ll be along to talk about the Emotet malware. Despite being spray and pray malware, it’s pretty successful because it operates at such ridiculous scale. Sherrod joins us with details.

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

This podcast is brought to you by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The Foundation funds a lot of interesting people and work in the cybersecurity space and they’re supporting this special podcast series examining topics of interest to cyber policy makers.

In this podcast we’re going to hear from Alexa O’Brien. She’s currently studying a Masters in Applied Intelligence at Georgetown University. She’s also working on an ethical framework for the applied intelligence discipline – collection, analysis and the like – for media practitioners.

Alexa is also a journalist. Her most recent major work is a July 2019 analysis of the US media’s coverage of civilian harm in the war against ISIS, I’ve linked through to that in the show notes below.

Before she worked as an established journalist, Alexa covered Chelsea Manning’s trial at Fort Meade on her blog. Her transcript of the proceedings were a tremendous help to the wider media, and it was this work that briefly pulled her into the Wikileaks “scene”.

It wasn’t a good fit.

Alexa joined me for this freewheeling discussion about intelligence, ethics, moral authority and signs that not everything is as it seems in the Wikileaks universe.

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

• MBS fingered in Bezos dick pic breach
• Glenn Greenwald facing cybercrime charges over Vaza Jato Telegram leaks
• Citrix finally patches 90s-style ADC bugs
• IE 0day doing the rounds, no patch available
• PoCs for 0601 drop
• Much, much more…

This week’s show is sponsored by VMRay, a sandbox-based malware analyser. You throw a sample into it and it spits out all sorts of useful information. Rather than having one of its own staff in this week’s sponsor slot, VMRay has put forward one of its customers instead. Expel is a managed security provider, and it is making heavy use of VMRay to do malware analysis. Tyler Fornes is a Senior Detection and Response Analyst at Expel and he joined me to talk about how they’re using VMRay to actually make life easier.

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

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

• NSA drops a sweet Microsoft crypto bug
• Burisma targeted by GRU. 2016 all over again?
• Citrix users having a bad time
• Intrusion Truth targets APT40
• No more BYOD for US soldiers in Middle East
• Much, much more

We have a new sponsor in this week’s show – ExtraHop Networks. Network monitoring is dead! Long live network monitoring!

Matt Cauthorn is ExtraHop’s VP of cybersecurity engineering and he’ll join us this week to talk about recent moves by cloud providers to offer full virtual network mirror ports out of their infrastructure.

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

*Credit for this week’s headline goes to @appsecbloke.

In this week’s show Patrick Gray and Alex Stamos discuss all the week’s news, including:

• Will Iran cyber all the cybers?
• ToTok chat app alleged to be UAE spy tool
• China makes moves on own OS
• Big game ransomware hits crisis levels
• WSJ carries water for NSO Group
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you Bugcrowd. We’ll be hearing from Bugcrowd’s Casey Ellis in this week’s sponsor interview. He’ll be talking about the US federal government’s decision to force all departments into accepting bug reports – he thinks this is a move that will have a big impact on the wider security ecosystem.

Links to everything are below!