Risky Business Podcast

This week’s podcast features Patrick and Adam talking about the week’s security news, including:

• Huawei staffer arrested for spying in Poland
• Conviction in DPRK SWIFT hack against Bangladesh central bank
• El Chapo used Flexispy to spy on mistresses and staff
• NSO group on charm offensive
• Iran hijacking DNS entries, conducting PITM with DV certs
• Kaspersky tipped NSA on Hal Martin
• US government certificates expire amid shutdown
• Idiot sentenced to 10 years prison for DDoSing children’s hospital

This week’s show is brought to you by Trail of Bits! Trail of Bits is a security engineering firm and consultancy based in New York. They aren’t a typical pen-testing firm, they build as well as break.

In this week’s sponsor interview JP Smith from Trail of Bits joins us to talk about the work he put in to CSAW. Not the Centre for Sustainable Architecture with Wood, which is a thing, but the Cyber Security Awareness Worldwide CTF.

JP is a sick man. He’s sick. You’ll hear about the mind-bending CTF challenges he put together for CSAW. Remarkably, some teams were actually able to solve his problems, some of which featured complex numbers mapped to a four dimensional unit sphere being used to drive the rotation of a virtual IBM Selectric typewriter golfball in Second Life. As I say, he’s a sick, sick man.

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

In this week’s show Adam Boileau and Patrick Gray discuss the security news of the last few weeks, including:

• German politicians pwnt, suspect arrested
• Possible ransomware attack affects US newspapers
• Mass 2FA bypasses impacting Gmail users in Middle East
• Emergency warning system in Australia popped
• Ethereum Classic double-spend attack a sign of things to come
• EU to fund open source bug bounties
• Attackers steal details of 1,000 North Korean defectors
• Doing the Bloomberg hack for real at 35C3
• El Chapo should have used Signal
• Much, much more…

This week’s show is brought to you by Cylance! BlackBerry announced that it’s acquiring Cylance for $1.4bn (I don’t know if that’s closed yet) which is great news for all the founders and early employees there – some of whom I know reasonably well. So congrats to team Cylance on that!

But we’re not talking about that this week. Instead, Cylance’s very own Scott Scheferman joins us to talk about the MITRE ATT&CK framework and how it’s informing their product dev. There’s some product talk in that interview but there’s also some real meat there so I let it run long. Scott says we’re close to the terrible situation where security companies are going to start using MITRE ATT&CK as a marketing tool, like “Full MITRE ATT&CK coverage!”

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

Soap Box is the podcast series we do here at Risky.Biz where we have detailed discussions with vendors about all sorts of stuff – sometimes it’s about their products, other times it’s about the landscape as they see it, other times it’s about research they’ve done that they want to promote. Soap Box is a wholly sponsored podcast series – just so you know – so everyone you hear on it, paid to be on it.

And this Soap Box edition is brought to you by Respond Software. We’ll be joined by Respond Software’s co-founder and CEO, Mike Armistead to talk about Respond’s tech. Mike has an interesting history in infosec… he actually co-founded Fortify, the software security firm, before winding up at HPE as the VP and General Manager for Arcsight, the poor fella. But he’s free now! Freeeeeee! And he’s co-founded the venture we’re talking about today.

So, what’s the idea behind Respond Software? Well, to break it down into really simple terms the whole idea is to take all the zillions of events your existing security kit flags and distill them down into meaningful alerts. To put this into context, Mike says that during the 30 days in the lead up to the interview we recorded, his customers fed two billion events into their Respond Software gear. Of those two billion events, Respond deemed 7 million of them worthy of escalation, and from there determined 45,000 were malicious, but then… and this is the cool part, this only resulted in 350 incidents raised by the Respond platform. From 2 billion to 350.

So it’s a great idea – tune out the crap and look at meaningful correlations. Automate the decision making around what’s serious and what’s not. You’ve got all this gear, maybe you’ve got something aggregating it, but what’s applying decision logic to it?

Mike sent me a list of software Respond currently supports: all manner of IDSes, AV and EDR suites and then other stuff that gives their software the context it needs to make better decisions, like active directory, Nessus, Qualys, Splunk, QRadar… whatever! The idea is, plug ALL your over-alerting crap into Respond Software’s gear and it’ll do a good enough job of correlating events that you’ll only have to deal with what’s real. Well, that’s the pitch. Mike Armistead joined me to to flesh it out a bit more.

This is the last weekly Risky Business podcast for 2018. We’ll be posting a Soap Box edition early next week then going on break until January 9.

In this week’s show Adam Boileau and Patrick Gray discuss the week’s security news:

• Huawei’s CFO arrested over sanctions violations
• BT in the UK removes Huawei equipment from 4G network
• Australia passes controversial surveillance law
• US House Oversight Committee blasts Equifax in scathing report
• Bloomberg plays word-games on Super Micro story
• MOAR

This week’s show is sponsored by Bugcrowd. In this week’s sponsor interview Bugcrowd’s CTO and founder Casey Ellis tells us why his company is launching “pay for effort” products to run alongside bounty programs.

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

Snake Oilers is the podcast where we get a bunch of vendors together to pitch their stuff – they all pay to participate, just so you know – and today we’re going to hear three pitches from tech companies: one from Forticode, one from Exabeam and one from SentinelOne.

That’s right, we talk to vendors to get their best pitches so you don’t have to!

Forticode joins us to pitch its Cipherise platform – applied PKI wrapped into a slick mobile platform that helps large organisations authenticate their users, and helps their users authenticate them.

Exabeam will be talking about how they’re doing more device analytics in their SIEM platform and SentinelOne will be talking about how they differentiate themselves in the highly competitive EDR space.

Links to all of these companies are below.

This week’s show features Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discussing the week’s security news, including:

• The Marriott, Quora, Dell and Sky Brazil data breaches
• Kashoggi associate to sue NSO Group
• Australia’s AA Bill set to pass
• NZ give Huawei the boot
• AutoCAD malware targets key verticals
• Republicans’ 2018 campaign hacked
• Czech government blames Russia for intrusions into key systems
• Horror-show bug in Kubernetes

This week’s show is brought to you by Duo Security, big thanks to Duo for that! In this week’s sponsor interview we’ll be chatting with Duo Security’s very own Dave Lewis about some Beyond Corp stuff. Beyond Corp is the enterprise computing model of the future and Dave will be along after this week’s news to talk about some of its finer points.

Links to everything that we discussed are below. (That’s why there are extras.) You can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

This is the first part of our final Snake Oilers edition for 2018.

Snake OIlers, for people don’t know it, is the podcast where vendors pay to come on to the show to promote their wares. This series actually turned out to be way more popular than we expected. People quite like listening to security companies actually explaining what they do in clear terms.

We have six vendors participating in this last round of Snake Oilers for the year – we’ve split the podcast into two podcasts containing three vendor pitches each, and in this part you’ll be hearing pitches from Rapid7, WhiteSource and Chronicle.

• Dan Kuykendall of Rapid7 talks InsightAppSec, its DAST solution.
• David Habusha of WhiteSource talks software composition analysis
• Brandon Levene of Chronicle on VirusTotal Enterprise

Part two is up next week!

We’ve got a slightly different edition of the show this week – Alex Stamos is filling in for Adam Boileau this week in the news slot.

Most of you know him as Facebook’s recently departed chief security officer. Alex also served as the CSO at Yahoo for a time, but his security career stretches back a long way. He co-founded iSEC Partners back in 2004, and before that he did some time with @Stake.

The @Stake mafia is everywhere.

These days Alex is an adjunct professor at Stanford University. He joined me to talk about the week’s security news, as well as to have a chat about the Edward Snowden disclosures, five years on.

This week’s show is brought to you by Thinkst Canary, big thanks to them for that. And instead of one of their staff being on the show this week in the sponsor chair, they asked me to interview this week’s sponsor guest, their customer, Mike Ruth, a security engineer with Cruise Automation.

Mike did a presentation at a conference called QCon recently all about automating the deployment of canary tokens at scale using some nifty CI/CD tricks. He’ll be joining us after the news to tell us all about that.

Items discussed in this week’s news:

• NSO Group busted to selling to Saudi Arabia
• NSO malware targets Mexican journalists
• Edward Snowden claims NSO connection in Khashoggi case
• Australia’s AA Bill latest
• npm supply-chain attack targets Bitcoiners
• Guardian reports Manafort met Assange, denials, lawsuits flying already
• UK parliament seizes Facebook documents
• Uber fined over 2016 breach coverup
• UK cops decline to charge bug reporter
• USPS finally fixes data exposure after Krebs intervention
• Rowhammer attack bypasses ECC protections
• Bloomberg is investigating its own reporting on Supermicro
• Magecart is everywhere
• Google, Mozilla plan browser access to file systems

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

The Soap Box podcast series is a wholly sponsored podcast series we do here at Risky.Biz – vendors pay to participate. This Soap Box edition is brought to you by AttackIQ.

AttackIQ is a five-year-old company that makes an attack simulation platform. The idea is you agitate a network with suspicious traffic and activities, then measure what the response looks like on the other side. As you’ll hear, Stephan argues this is a better way to test your controls than trying to do it after an incident has been and gone.

Mostly people are using it to verify the effectiveness of their security controls. They already have endpoint security software, IDS, various monitoring bits and pieces, but quite often this stuff just isn’t tuned right. So, you throw some attack traffic and behaviour at your systems and see what bubbles up

One piece of work that has been absolutely vital to AttackIQ’s success is the MITRE ATT&CK Matrix. Like AttackIQ, the ATT&CK Matrix has been around for five years.

Stephan Chenette is AttackIQ’s CTO and he joined me to talk all about how they’re trying to use the ATT&CK Matrix to drive their whole outlook, and, conversely, how they’re spending time talking to MITRE about where the whole thing is going.

This edition of the show features Adam Boileau and Patrick Gray discussing the week’s security news:

• Cozy Bear is back, Fancy Bear has new tooling
• Russian government wants DNC lawsuit thrown out
• Cyber Command submitting samples to VirusTotal
• Google BGP shenanigans
• Australian/China Telecom BGP shenanigans
• All the recent Facebook drama
• More speculative execution bugs
• Julian Assange likely to be charged
• Vault7 leaker facing new charges
• Phineas Fisher investigation abandoned
• Bitcoin/Tether link probed by DoJ, btc in free-fall
• MUCH MOAR

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

Sherrod DeGrippo, Proofpoint’s director of threat research and detection is this week’s sponsor guest. Surprisingly, she tells us that ransomware via email is a dead duck.

Links to everything that we discussed are below. (That’s why there are extras.) You can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.