Risky Business Podcast

We’ve got a great podcast for you this week. Tanya Janca will be talking about some volunteer work she’s been doing with a Canadian government panel on getting security content into children’s school curriculums.

In this week’s sponsor interview we’ll be talking with Ferruh Mavituna of Netsparker.

They launched Netsparker Cloud a while ago so now they have some decent telemetry I wanted to ask Ferruh what he’s found surprising now he’s sitting on a mountain of scan results. The types of bugs being turned up aren’t really a surprise, but the extent to which old software is a problem was actually pretty surprising to him. He knew it was bad, he says, but he didn’t know it’s this bad.

Adam Boileau, as usual, joins the show this week to talk about all the week’s security news:

• More Chinese MSS officers indicted by the US DoJ
• ASD chief speaks publicly on 5G Huawei ban
• China playing funny buggers with BGP
• Russia is still messing with the US during the midterms
• Facebook boots more Iranian influence pages
• New privacy features in Signal
• Plus much, much more!

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

Soap Box is the wholly sponsored podcast series we do where vendors pay to participate. They sometimes want to talk about their products, other times they want to talk about general ecosystem stuff, other times they want to talk about research they’ve done.

And that’s what’s happening today! Olabode Anise is a data scientist at Duo Security. He and his colleague Jordan Wright put together a talk for Black Hat this year all about Twitter bots. It was called Don’t @ me, hunting Twitter bots at scale.

As you’ll hear, finding bots on Twitter at scale isn’t that hard, but doing so with 100% confidence isn’t as easy as you’d think.

You can check out a blog post from Olabode in the show note below.

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

• CYBERCOM doxing Russian operators. No, really.
• Arrest over Russian midterm info-op
• Bloomberg dumpster fire is now a tyre fire
• Equifax insider sentenced for insider trading
• Twitter releases bot dataset
• Saudi insider responsible for 2015 Twitter breach
• Trisis/Triton now linked to Russia
• Kaspersky doxes NSA op
• Risky Business cited by Senate Estimates, AA Bill faces possible delay
• Much, much more!

This week’s show is sponsored by Cylance, and this week’s sponsor interview is with Josh Lemos.

That’s an interesting chat – Cylance has succeeded in applying machine learning to classifying binaries, but what next? Where does it make sense to apply machine learning next, from their point of view? As you’ll hear, a binary classifier is one thing, but applying ML to something like endpoint detection and response or network traffic is actually a lot more complicated.

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

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

• More info on the Facebook token hack
• Facebook boots “Russian Cambridge Analytica” off platform
• Chinese MSS officer extradited to USA after being lured to Belgium
• NotPetya linked to Sandworm crew
• Czech intelligence services kill Hezbollah APT
• Pentagon travel records pwnt
• No, Khashoggi’s Apple Watch didn’t record his death
• Apple takes aim at Australia’s AA Bill
• US voter records for sale in hack forums
• PHP 5 support ends soon, netpocalypse to commence shortly afterward
• The world’s most hilarious libssh bug
• PLUS MOAR

This week’s show is sponsored by Senrio.

Senrio is best known for doing IoT identification, classification, visualisation and anomaly detection, but they’ve now applied the same approach to general IT. Stephen will be along later in the show to talk about what they’ve been able to engineer here. I’ve actually been working with them on this (in a limited capacity) for a few months and it’s very interesting stuff.

So yeah he’s talking about a feature release, then he’ll be releasing some open source tooling that mine your network metadata and spot interactive shells in your environment, which is handy, and then he’s going to preview some free training he’s doing with some other very well respected security people in New York soon.

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

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

• Bloomberg’s shaky, disputed report on hardware back doors
• A look back on other false reports about imaginary incidents published by Bloomberg
• GRU operations doxed by GCHQ
• DOJ charges Russian intelligence officers
• APT crews targeting MSPs
• Google+ API exposure the final straw
• Enterprise TLS interception gear is woefully insecure

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

In this podcast hardware security expert Joe Fitzpatrick, a named source in Bloomberg’s “Big Hack” piece, explains why he felt uncomfortable reading the story when it was published.

He also provided Risky.Biz with emails he sent to Bloomberg, prior to the story’s publication, that said the hardware back-dooring the article described “didn’t make sense”.

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 Trend Micro.

And in this edition we’re speaking with Dustin Childs who works for the Zero Day Initiative. ZDI is the entity responsible for the pwn2own competition. But not just that – they’ve been buying bugs since before it was cool. Everything from enterprise software, to linux bugs.. whatever. You find it, they’ll buy it.

Trend Micro actually owns the ZDI, and there’s a story right there in how that came to pass… but you know what? Trend seems to really be behind the ZDI program.

As you’ll hear, the original idea behind ZDI when it was a TippingPoint thing was so they could write IDS signatures for vulnerabilities that ZDI unearthed. We know today that spinning up sigs for bugs you’re paying for isn’t really a winning strategy for picking up 0day attempts against your computers, so, the question becomes, what do you do with a program like ZDI when you’re Trend Micro?

As it turns out, you do two things with it – there’s the marketing side, but there’s also the constant stream of exploit submissions that come in handy when you’re making endpoint security software.

We’ll also be hearing from Eric Skinner in this podcast – he’s Trend’s VP of Solution Marketing at Trend. Trend is pushing a major release of its endpoint security software and he’s along to spruik that a bit, as well as chiming in on some of the ZDI stuff.

In this podcast I interview Stephen Ridley about Bloomberg’s blockbuster – but so far uncorroborated – story about possible hardware supply chain subversion by the Chinese government.

I also lay out some facts I’ve learned since the story broke.

[CORRECTED] I’ve added a correction to this podcast because the only source I could turn up who would corroborate the Bloomberg piece has retracted their claims.

This is a source who has provided me with good information in the past, I’ve known them for about 15 years and they’re very well plugged in. They showed me photos they said were from a teardown of a supermicro motherboard. These photos showed an unlabelled integrated circuit the source said was likely a hardware back door.

Further, the source said there were other problems with the Supermicro gear, including vulnerable firmware and security functions that just didn’t work properly.

Now the source says the photos were from different equipment, not their teardown of the Supermicro gear, and that they did not find hardware back doors on the Supermicro equipment.

So basically that source’s credibility with me is pretty shot right now, and the best I can do is retract my repetition of the source’s claim that they had verified backdoors in the Supermicro equipment.

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

• Facebook breach impacts 50m accounts
• US courts deny authorities’ attempted FB messenger wiretap
• Uber fined $148m for nondisclosure of 2016 breach
• Fancy Bear-linked UEFI malware appears in wild
• UK Conservative party conference app leaks like sieve
• Twitter bans distribution of “hacked material”
• VPNFilter botnet gets more capabilities
• Duo arrested over $14m cryptocurrency SIM-swap heist
• MOAR

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

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

• Former NSA staffer gets 66 months over incident at heart of Kaspersky scandal
• Zoho has a very bad week
• Telco lobby group raises some legit concerns over Australia’s “anti-encryption” legislation
• Twitter API leaks DMs
• Equifax fined by UK
• Yubikey 5 enables passwordless Windows logins
• Privacy International has an aneurism
• NSS Labs launches antitrust suit against security software makers
• MOAR

This week’s show is brought to you by Rapid7.

Jen Andre is this week’s sponsor guest. She was the founder of Komand, which was a security automation and orchestration company but is now a part of Rapid7 as of about mid way through last year. I spoke to Jen a bit about how she came to start Komand and where the security automation and orchestration discipline is at right now.

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