Risky Business Podcast

Adam Boileau is along this week to discuss the week’s security news. We cover:

• US mayors agree: no more paying off ransomware crews
• BitPoint exchange loses $32m in cryptocurrency
• FinSpy is back, big time
• Chinese AV companies won’t flag government malware
• US security companies free to help political campaigns with discounted services, products
• Facebook to pay $5bn privacy fine with money from its spare pants
• Much, much more

Assetnote’s Shubham Shah also joins the news segment to dish on the Zoom RCE bug he and his team found back in March.

This week’s sponsor is Kasada, an Australian company that runs a bot filtering service. Kasada is a relatively new company but they’re kicking some pretty serious goals here in Australia and are now pushing into other markets like the USA. But instead of supplying us with one of their people, they suggested we interview one of their customers - REA Group CSO and head of platform Craig Templeton.

REA Group runs realestate.com.au, Australia’s biggest real estate listings website. They had all sorts of trouble with content scrapers, bots causing service interruptions, cred stuffing, you name it. In the end they went with Kasada to solve their bot problems and Craig pops by this week to talk about the issues they were having and to sing Kasada’s praises. Getting a reference customer to speak publicly is a Herculean task, so full credit to Kasada for making this one happen. If you operate a website that pushes a lot of traffic you’ll want to hear that interview.

Adam Boileau is along this week to discuss the week’s security news. We cover:

• Zoom’s week from hell
• BA, Marriott face massive GDPR fines
• Seth Rich conspiracy originated from Russia’s SVR
• Coast Guard warns of ship hax
• Cybercommand issues warning on DDE exploitation
• PGP ecosystem having a rough time
• Much, much more!

This week’s show is brought to you by our lovely friends at Signal Sciences. I guess you’d call them a next generation WAF. Signal Sciences co-founder and CTO Zane Lackey will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to plug their new cloud-based WAF product, and also to have a chat about a trend he’s seeing at non-security conferences – more high quality security content.

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

As regular listeners know, this isn’t the weekly Risky Biz news and current affairs show, if you want that, scroll back in the podcast feed to the previous podcast. This is a Soap Box edition, a solely sponsored podcast series we do here at Risky Biz where vendors pay us to come on to the show to talk about, well, whatever they want, really.

We’ve heard Duo Security talking about WebAuthn, we’ve got one with Proofpoint coming up that’s about insights they’ve gleaned from filtering such ridiculous amounts of email.

But in this edition, Garret Grajek from BlackBerry Cylance will be along to talk about its new product, Cylance Persona. This latest product is kinda out of the box, it’s a machine learning classifier that you install on the endpoint that learns what the typical user behaviour looks like. Once the observed user behaviour starts diverging from what’s expected, it can perform actions – like kicking up for 2fa, locking the user out, whatever you want, really.

It’s a novel approach to dealing with compromised endpoints. Two factor authentication is great, but if your endpoints are hosed that doesn’t really count for much. And that’s really what this new gear is about.

Adam Boileau is along this week to discuss the week’s security news. We cover:

• NYTimes reports USA is getting all up in Russia’s grids
• Kremlin not happy
• CYBERCOM targets Iranian rocket control and APT crews
• TRITON attackers target US grid
• Turla completes hostile takeover of Oilrig
• Reuters publishes huge feature on Cloudhopper/APT10
• China pwns global telcos, targets key subscribers
• FVEY owns Yandex
• Tourists entering Xinjiang now have mobile malware installed at border
• Florida city governments having a bad time
• Much, much more!

This week’s edition of Risky Business is brought to you by Senetas. They make layer 2 encryption tech, but they’ve also got a content disarm and reconstruction play now, Votiro, as well as their safe file sharing platform SureDrop. But we’re sticking with encryption in this week’s sponsor interview. Senetas CTO Julian Fay will be along a bit later to talk about his trip to the International Crypto Module Conference. He’ll fill us in on what the agenda was there – lots of talk about quantum resistant crypto and also some talk about streamlining various certification regimes.

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

This is the first edition of a new series of podcasts we’re doing here at Risky.Biz that will focus on cyber policy issues. The Hewlett Foundation approached us a while back to see if we’d be interested in doing this series we jumped at the opportunity.

The Foundation funds a lot of interesting people and work in the cybersecurity space. So the idea is pretty simple: we can talk to some of Hewlett’s grant recipients or experts in its network about pressing policy issues and turn those conversations into podcasts. The whole idea is to get some policy perspectives out there among the Risky Business audience, which, funnily enough, includes a lot of policy people.

Our first cab off the rank is this interview with Jim Baker. He joined the Department of Justice in 1990 and rose through the ranks to become the FBI general counsel in January 2014, a position he held until December 2017. So of course he was running all things legal for the FBI during the Apple-FBI dispute over a locked iPhone 5C recovered from the gunman responsible for the San Bernardino shooting.

Baker was the US Government’s point man on all things encryption, taking stances that outraged technologists and reinvigorated a policy debate that had – at least to a degree – stagnated for years. These days, Jim Baker serves as Director of the R Street think tank’s National Security and Cybersecurity Program.

This interview focusses on the so-called encryption wars. The FBI and other law enforcement/intelligence agencies want better access to encrypted material, while technologists say that’s impossible to accomplish without introducing unacceptable risks into the technology ecosystem. Baker shares his view on the topic.

The Australian government law enforcement and intelligence agencies guide to the Assistance and Access Act, which is mentioned in the introduction to the podcast, can be found here. (Ironically enough, served over http!)

PLEASE NOTE: Jim Baker joined our meeting via a phone call, so the audio quality here isn’t up to our usual standards. Sorry about that!

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

• CBP loses photo and license plate database
• Some Android phones shipped with backdoor
• Info on Google’s cloud outage
• USG ramps up “defend forward”
• Trump and Mnuchin can’t get their stories straight on Huawei
• The latest from Baltimore, more on that RDP bug
• TalkTalk hacker sentenced
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Remediant! Remediant CEO Tim Keeler will be along this week to have a chinwag. We’ll talk about how simple security tech is really en vogue these days and how that’s a good thing.

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

On this week’s show Patrick and Adam talk through all the week’s security news, including:

• NYTimes story on EternalBlue and Baltimore is bunk
• An RDP worm is feeling kind of inevitable
• Iran is still getting Shadowbrokersed
• Intercept has a great feature on SID Today dumps
• Australian Federal Police crack down on national security journalism
• Phantom Secure CEO gets nine years and loses $80m
• Silk Road 2.0 admin must be an amazing snitch
• Another Bitcoin tumbler bites the dust
• Much, much more

This week’s sponsor interview is with Marco Slaviero of Thinkst Canary.

Marco is joining us this week to talk about how he thinks web application-based deception techniques are kind of a waste of time right now. We talk about how deception approaches work best in privileged domains, then we talk about how security teams do better when they have a dedicated ops developer.

Adam Boileau couldn’t make it this week, but that’s ok because we’ve got former Facebook CSO and current Stanford adjunct professor Alex Stamos filling in for him in today’s show. He’ll be talking through all the week’s security news, including:

• NYTimes report blames Baltimore ransomware attack on leaked NSA exploit
• Assange to face espionage charges, extradition fight looming
• SanboxEscaper just keeps dropping those 0days
• Fury over Facebook’s response to doctored Pelosi video
• Much, much more

This week’s sponsor interview with David Warburton of F5 Networks. You know F5 as a blinky-light box manufacturer. Load balancers, SSL termination, that sort of stuff. Not exactly a growth industry at the moment, so they’re pivoting.

They’ve dropped $670m on NGINX – f5 now owns the NGINX company – and they’re making all sorts of moves in the appsec space. That interview is mostly about F5’s business, but I found it interesting because what do you do when you’re an $8bn company that makes data-centre equipment and that industry starts going into decline?

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

This is not the regular Risky Business weekly show, the Soap Box series of podcasts that run on Risky.Biz are wholly sponsored. Everyone you hear in Soap Box paid to be here.

With that disclaimer out of the way, this is actually a really interesting conversation. Carsten Willems is the co-founder and CEO of VMRay, a company that makes… well.. what do you call it? Is it an incident response tool? Is it a detection tool? Or is it just a good hypervisor-based sandbox that you can use to do both of those things?

I’m going to say it’s the third – VMRay is a company that makes a great hyper-visor sandbox and has applied that technology to both response and detection.

In an ideal world you’d have a team of malware reversers on staff pulling apart every single binary that looks shady. But this isn’t a perfect world, so that’s never going to happen. So the original use case that Carsten and his team set out to solve was around automating malware reversing. They build a hyper-visor based sandbox that’s very hard to bypass, you can run your standard build on it, throw binaries and documents at it and see what blows up. That’s really the primary use case here.

But there is a second use case, which is detection. VMRay can give you a pretty decent risk score on samples, and they’ve entered into a few OEM arrangements with vendors to provide that extra level of detection.

I’d never met Carsten Willems before we prepared this podcast, but it’s safe to say we hit it off. This podcast basically turned into Carsten telling his story, the story of where VMRay came from and where he wants it to go. Enjoy!

On this week’s show Patrick and Adam talk through all the week’s security news, including:

• New executive order paved way for Huawei ban
• Google pulls service from Huawei
• No wait, that’s not right, it’s for new handsets
• The ban’s now reversed to allow them to continue the support that they didn’t have to discontinue?
• I’m so confused
• ¯_(ツ)_/¯
• Israeli broadcaster fingers Hamas over Eurovision coverage hack
• New moves to regulate offensive cyber services
• Salesforce has a bad time
• Instagram influencers have a bad time (Hah!)
• OGUsers pwned
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by CMD Security. They make security software for Linux that does two things – firstly it gives you visibility into what’s happening on your Linux workloads, which actions are being performed by which accounts, that sort of thing. The second thing it does is allow you to lock down accounts by action, rather than by traditional privilege. They’re funded by Google Ventures, among others, and although they’re a relatively small and new company I think they’re going to do really well.

Jake was just at a MITRE conference in Brussels that was all about the Attack Matrix. He’s joining me this week to have a bit of talk about his experience at that event, then we’ll be talking through some of the issues he’s seeing out there in Linux cloud workload land. Jake’s a great communicator and a very smart guy and that interview is a lot of fun.

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