Risky Business Podcast

In this podcast you’ll hear an interview I did with Bob Lord, the Chief Security Officer for the Democratic National Committee, the DNC. Bob has previously served as the CISOs for both Yahoo and Twitter, before spending some time in vendorland with Rapid7 as their CISO in residence.

The state-sponsored attack against the DNC is without doubt the most politically consequential data theft event the planet has ever witnessed. It trumped both the Manning/Wikileaks disclosures and “climategate” in terms of impact, and indeed to a large degree the fallout of the DNC hack is still ongoing.

So, I wanted to bring Bob in to talk about his job.

The DNC isn’t a large organisation, in a head office sense. They have about 200 core staff members, but as you’ll hear, a political organisation’s IT setup is pretty atypical. So Bob and I mostly just spoke about how one handles security for an organisation like the DNC.

On this week’s show we’ll be running through the week’s security news, then diving right on in to a sponsor interview with Lauren Pearl of Trail of Bits. She’s joining us to talk about something Trail of Bits have been up to lately: adding features to open source software – and auditing open source software – on behalf of its customers.

I do have a feature interview this week, but it’s a long one so I’ll be breaking that out in to a separate podcast. It’s a nice long chat with Bob Lord, the CSO for the Democratic National Committee. You know, the guy who hid “the server”.

The news we’re covering this week:

• Melbourne teenager hacky-hack hacks Apple
• Facebook nukes Iranian and RU influence ops
• Report: Sealed court order seeks Facebook Messenger E2E intercept
• USG ditches PPD-20 equities process
• A look at “Intrusion Truth” CN operator doxing ring
• Microsoft kills RU phishing domains
• PLUS MOAR

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

In this breakout podcast we chat with Adam Boileau about the talks that caught his attention in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago. The Black Hat PR team were kind enough to credential Adam for the con so he could go and see a few talks with his Risky Business hat on.

I was at Black Hat but spent most of my time running around like a headless chicken. These days Vegas week for me is mostly about locking in the next year’s sponsorships, as well as catching up with friends I hardly ever see. The good news is the sponsorship side is done. We’re almost sold out across the weekly show, Snake Oilers and Soap Box until 2020. The bad news is I didn’t really get to go to any talks.

But that’s ok, because Adam went to both Black Hat and DEF CON and he joined me to talk about the highlights from his point of view. This was his first trip to the Vegas cons since 2005, and agreed with me that the content this year was actually pretty bloody good.

I’ve done my best to assemble links to everything Adam talks about into a list below:

Adam and I have just returned from Black Hat and DEF CON in Las Vegas, so in this week’s show we’re going to have a look at the infosec news we missed over last couple of weeks. We did plan to recap Black Hat in this podcast, but we’ve wound up a bit short on space so I’m busting that out into a separate podcast that I’ll publish on Monday. So this podcast will just be a discussion around news plus a sponsor interview.

The news we’re covering:

• Australia’s new surveillance/”anti-encryption” laws
• Intel SGX vulnerability research
• Taiwan Semiconductor WannaCry woes
• Details on CYBERCOM op against ISIS
• Reddit pwnage
• Bitcoin investor sues AT&T over $23m loss
• FIN7 arrests
• CIA’s loss of scores of China assets may have been hack-related
• Massive ATM cashout and SWIFT attack hits Indian bank
• Much, much more

Bugcrowd CTO Casey Ellis joins us in this week’s sponsor interview to talk about a few things – firstly, how some research presented at Black Hat by the team at Portswigger is a sign that serious research teams are using bounties to cash in on their serious security research. Then we’ll be talking about the Bugcrowd University initiative and a reboot of the disclose.io project.

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

On this week’s show we hear from Greg Shipley. Greg works at an initiative spun up by In-Q-Tel called Cyber Reboot. Its goal is to develop open source tools that can push things forward in security – things the private sector aren’t doing.

He’ll be telling us about some changes his colleagues have made to tcpdump, which, if they ever manage to get the changes adopted, could actually be quite useful to the security community.

This week’s show is brought to you by Duo Security! And Duo’s very own Dave Lewis will be joining us this week to talk about the roadblocks you might face if you’re trying to head down the BeyondCorp road to the deperimiterised nirvana!

Adam Boileau drops in to discuss the week’s news, including:

• COSCO shipping ransomwared into oblivion
• DHS warning on impending ERP attacks
• Charges against SIM-swap cryptocurrency thief
• Google’s “Shielded VMs”
• Google’s launch of its own hardware security tokens
• Master134 malvertising campaign
• New Kronos version
• NetSpectre attacks
• Bluetooth bugs
• Much, much more

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

What you’re about to hear is a long form interview with Zane Lackey, a former pentester turned director of security engineering for Etsy turned co-founder and CSO of Signal Sciences.

Signal Sciences can be broadly, kinda described as “next generation WAF”. If you do have a requirement for a waffy, raspy thing, then you absolutely need to check out Signal Sciences.

They give you visibility in to attacks against your applications, and even auto-blocking a bunch of them without that turning into a cascading horror-show.

Signal Sciences’ product has a really strong emphasis on assisting organisations who are running DevOps shops. And it makes sense, Zane’s key achievement at Etsy was managing the security of that company’s Devops transition.

He’s actually just written an O’Reilly book, Building a Modern Security Program. So, he joined me to talk about his book, what’s in it, about DevSecOps more generally, and about some new stuff Signal Sciences has been working on.

We didn’t have space to run a feature in this week’s show, mostly because we had three weeks of news to catch up on because of my holiday. Adam Boileau is away on a company retreat this week, so Haroon Meer is this week’s news guest.

We talk about:

• The Russia indictment
• Chrome now marks http sites as “not secure”
• Julian Assange is close to being turfed out of his London digs
• Microsoft’s midterm meddling misfire
• Singapore loses 1.5m health records
• Some cool research from Talos and Cyberark
• Azimuth Security acquired by L3
• The npm supply-chain attack
• Chrome site isolation
• And much more!

This week’s sponsor is ICEBRG. And ICEBRG just announced today that it’s been acquired by Gigamon, which is pretty big news for them. So we’ll spend a couple of minutes talking about that with ICEBRG’s Jason Rebholz. Then we’ll be talking to Justin Warner about a pretty cool Flash 0day they found hiding in a Microsoft Office document. That was some pretty cool work, and the attackers in that case did some pretty novel things in terms of keeping their payload away from prying eyes. Obviously they didn’t do a good enough job or we wouldn’t be talking about it, but there are some new techniques there, fun stuff.

*****NOTE: At one point I get Jason Rebholz’s name wrong. I call him Justin Rebholz by accident. Apologies for the error, Jason!

There’s no weekly show this week, I’m on a beach somewhere tropical right now and I prepared this one so we’d have something to run while I’m away. The Soap Box is one of our wholly sponsored podcasts here at Risky Biz HQ – vendors pay to come on to talk about what’s on their mind.

And this week we’ve got Cylance’s very own Chris Sestito joining us. He heads threat research for Cylance, the AV company.

Cylance is a relatively new company – they’ve been around about six years now – and regular listeners would have heard me credit them for almost singlehandedly shaking up the AV industry.

They built a machine learning model for detecting malware that was effective enough to actually challenge the incumbents, who until then, had a stranglehold on the market. Cylance’s fortunes rose further when it played an instrumental part in detecting and cleaning up malware used against the US office of personnel management, or OPM.

That was a big moment, because from there it seemed like all of a sudden EVERYONE was a machine learning company. I’m sure a lot of people listening to this podcast are so sick to death of hearing pitches from vendors about machine learning.

But the thing is, Cylance was built on machine learning and they are still 100%, 24-carat true believers. Chris Sestito joined me to talk about driving machine learning model development with threat research, dodgy machine learning marketing and more.

Snake Oilers is a wholly sponsored podcast series we a few times a year here at Risky Biz HQ. The idea is we get a bunch of vendors together and they pitch their tech in a straightforward way. Less “stops advanced cyber threats” and more “here’s what our stuff does and how it works”.

You’re hearing this instead of a weekly show because I am currently on a beach somewhere tropical.

We’ve got two vendors in this edition of ‘Oilers: next-gen SIEM platform company Exabeam and email filtering giant Proofpoint.

Our sponsor guest from Proofpoint is Ryan Kalember. Ryan is the SVP of cybersecurity strategy at Proofpoint, and regular listeners would have heard him pop up here and there on other Risky Business podcasts.

Ryan knows an awful lot about email security and he’s joining us this week to talk about a few things. A big selling point he wants to hit home this week is that Proofpoint offers its clients dedicated IPs for their outbound mail servers. That means you won’t be blocked when someone else using the same IP for outbound mail starts sending spam. Believe it or not this is a thing that happens to users on other mail filtering platforms. From there Ryan spells out Proofpoint’s approach to combating credential phishing. Aaaaand we talk about other stuff too. We started off by talking about how some organisations are getting blocked because their filtering provider is sharing IPs between clients.

Exabeam also drops in to talk about what a next gen SIEM actually is. From day one Exabeam was a startup that meant business. As you’ll hear, they started off as a SIEM-helper, and they’ve gradually built out their product from there. Now they’re going after the established SIEM market – think Splunk, Arcsight, those types of products. Despite only being five years old, Exabeam has quickly established itself as a real player in the SIEM market.

And why not? They make a compelling argument that the most popular SIEM products have gone stale. Anu Yamanan is the VP of products at Exabeam and she’s here to explain the general pitch behind all next generation SIEM gear. The idea is to go beyond the event log and build a timeline of events that actually has context around it. SOC analysts, SIEM specialists and CSOs will be interested to hear what she has to say here.

On this week’s show we’re chatting with a PR pro who specialises in information security. Melanie Ensign currently works at Uber, but she also served as a security PR for Facebook and before that, AT&T. She drops in this week to talk about how you can work with the PR professionals in your organisation to help tell your security story to the wider world. She also has some great tips for infosec professionals who might be a bit nervous about dealing with journalists.

In this week’s sponsor interview we’re joined by Julian Fay, the CTO of Senetas.

Senetas has a long history of making layer 2 network encryptors, but they are branching out in all sorts of ways these days. One thing they’re doing now is working on approaches to network encryption that play nicely with software-defined WAN. The days of hauling all your network traffic back to a single choke point are numbered – Julian thinks in the near future you’ll have some sort of CPE device that actually implements different types of encryption on different types of traffic crossing your border. So, Senetas has actually built that gear and we’ll be hearing about why.

Adam Boileau joins the show to talk about the week’s security news:

• Some very cool LTE research
• Equifax manager charged with insider trading
• Ticketmaster’s bad week
• The US DoD’s very own app store
• Weird, maybe, possibly-but-probably-not OPM-related fraud
• MOAR Rowhammer stuff affecting ‘droid handsets

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