Risky Business Podcast

On this week’s show Matt “pwnallthethings” Tait joins the show to walk us through the so-called Meltdown and Spectre bugs. Most of the coverage of the flaws has either been massively hyped or detail-free, and Matt pops by to untangle the whole mess. He does a great job of it, too.

This week’s show is brought to you by Cylance. CTO Rahul Kashyap will be along in the sponsor chair to talk about why so many AV packages were causing Windows boxes to BSOD when Microsoft pushed its Meltdown patch.

Adam Boileau is back in the news hotseat, and boy oh boy do we have a lot to cover. Show notes are below, and you can follow Adam or Patrick on Twitter if that’s your thing.

This is the last show for the year, Risky Business will return on January 10th 2018.

In this week’s feature Stephen Moore joins us. He was formerly the Staff Vice President of Cyber Security Analytics at Anthem, the healthcare company that was spectacularly owned by a Chinese APT crew in 2015.

Instead of us all just saying “lol they got owned, they’re idiots,” I thought it would be a good idea to actually talk to someone who was there. As you’ll hear, Anthem’s team knew they were being targeted by an APT crew, did its best to fend off the attackers, but sadly they lost anyway.

It’s sobering listening.

This week’s sponsor interview is also just great. We’ll check in with Casey Ellis of Bugcrowd. He’ll be along to talk about this whole Uber mess. A lot of the reporting around the so-called Uber data breach seemed to fixate a bit on the fact that the attacker was paid via the HackerOne bug bounty platform. The coverage has conflated extortion with bug bounty programs, much to Casey’s dismay. He’ll be along later to share his views on what the Uber snafu means, as well as to share his thoughts on DJI’s disastrous bug bounty program.

Adam Boileau, as usual, stops by to discuss the week’s security news, and also to wrap up the 2017 season.

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

Today’s Soap Box is brought to you by Bromium.

Bromium makes a security suite that wraps key applications in microvisors. It’s a way to get app-specific, hardware-based virtualisation.

Historically Bromium has wrapped things like browsers and the office suite into these microvisors. Bromium has also found a lot of success in selling to organisations that have to run out-of-date browsers and Java. Wrapping an old browser in Bromium actually does make it safe to use.

Well, now they’ve gone a step further. They’ve launched secure app extensions, which is where they custom-wrap your application, or an application you use, into a microvisor. So if you’re using some awful, old, insecure enterprise app and it’s keeping you awake at night, this might be a solution for you if you can’t rip and replace.

Have a listen!

On this week’s show we’ll be having a look at the latest OWASP top 10. As many of you would know, the new list is out. A couple of items have been dropped and a couple of items have been introduced. But we’re really using this new top 10 as an excuse to have a broader chat about the top 10 and the OWASP mission more generally.

As you’ll hear, everyone seems to agree the list is a good thing, but maybe OWASP needs to sharpen its communication strategy a little to make itself more accessible to the developers it’s trying to help.

We’ll hear from OWASP Bristol chapter leader and Veracode consultant Katy Anton on that, as well as Safestack head honcho Laura Bell and penetration tester and founder of Matchme consulting Pam O’Shea.

This week’s show is brought to you by a first time sponsor, VMRAY. They make malware analysis software that’s very popular with CERTs, but I suspect a lot of listeners out there in IR will also be interested in what they’re doing. The core offering is a cloud malware analyser that isn’t public, so if you don’t want to fire off a sample to VirusTotal and let the bad guys know you’re on to them, VMRAY is a better option.

VMRAY didn’t actually get one of its staff into this week’s sponsor slot, it chose one of its users instead – Koen Van Impe. He pops along to talk through what he uses VMRAY for and to give us a bit of an overview of what it does.

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

We’ll be hearing from three vendors in this edition of Oilers. Dino Dai Zovi will be along first up to talk about his startup, Capsule8, which looks very promising indeed.

After we’ve heard from Dino we’ll be chatting with Chris McNab. He used to run incident response for iSec Partners and later NCC Group, but these days he runs AlphaSOC, a company he founded. They’re a very simply play – they do DNS and IP analytics.

They offer that as a Splunk application or via an API, and you would be amazed how much bad stuff you can kick off your network with something as simple as DNS and IP analytics. Tor exfil, whole families of malware, BitTorrent, all sorts of stuff. Chris will be along soon to talk about that.

Then we’re rounding it out with a conversation with Sylvain Gil, the co-founder of Exabeam.

Exabeam started off in analytics and UEBA, but they’ve taken a bunch of money and they’re spending it on building out their SIEM, which is already pretty popular in certain circles because they don’t license it based on volume. Sylvain pops along later on to talk about how that’s changing SIEM use cases for a bunch of people. For example they can pump their EDR logs into their SIEM without wearing a seven figure SIEM consumption bill. He also walks through how they’ve used open source technologies like Hadoop in their products. It’s an all around chat that one, not so much a pitch, but yeah, I found it really interesting and I hope you will too.

Links to all three profiled vendors are below!

On this week’s show we’re speaking with Susan Hennessey, a Fellow in National Security in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and managing editor of Lawfare. We’re talking to her about cross-border law enforcement in the Internet age.

We hear a lot of people in the infosec community expressing some discomfort with the FBI’s use of Network Investigative Techniques designed to de-cloak Tor users. Susan pops by to explain why the FBI and other law enforcement bodies aren’t worried about the international ramifications of dropping de-cloaking technique on the whole planet.

We also cover off a few of the other issues around how data can be turned over to various governments. It’s a fascinating chat and it’s coming up after the news.

This week’s show is brought to you by Tenable Security. In this week’s sponsor slot we’ll be hearing from Ray Komar, Tenable’s VP of technical alliances. We’re talking to Ray about a partnership Tenable has formed with Siemens. They’re trying to tackle the issue of tracking vulnerabilities in industrial control system equipment, but as you’ll hear, people aren’t actually buying it so much for the vulnerability tracking side, they’re buying it for the visibility side. It turns out dropping a passive scanner on your ICS network is a good way to know what’s actually ON your ICS network.

As always, Adam Boileau pops in to discuss the security news. We cover:

• The Uber hack
• Apple’s comedy “root” bug
• Krebs on possible Shadowbrokers link
• Charges against more Chinese APT operators and Iranian HBO attacker
• More “hack back” legislation action
• Intel ME bug details
• Golden SAML
• MOAR

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 check in with Mara Tam. She’ll be telling us why the idea of a so-called “Digital Geneva Convention” is silly.

Then, after that, Rich Smith of Duo Security will be in the sponsor chair.

You may have heard about some recent research Duo Labs did into Apple EFI patches basically not working/sticking. Rich walks us through that research, why Duo did it, how they did it, and what it can tell us. It might be Mac research but the real worry, as you’ll hear, is around Wintel firmware.

Adam Boileau pops by for this week’s news discussion. We’ll be covering:

• Facebook’s plan to combat “non-consensual intimate imagery”
• Wikileaks Vault8 leaks
• Assange sending a “guessed” password to Donald Trump Jnr
• NYTimes reports on the Shadowbears
• Cracking FaceID with a rubber mask
• MOAR

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

There’s no feature interview in this week’s edition, just a slightly longer news session with Adam Boileau, then it’s straight into this week’s sponsor interview.

Adam and I will be speaking about:

• Charges against Russian officials involved in the DNC hack
• Confirmation of Russian involvement in Ukraine artillery targeting app
• Attribution claims in Bad Rabbit campaign
• “Hack Back” bill is picking up steam
• 1 million installations of counterfeit WhatsApp clone
• A properly awful Tor browser bug
• The cryptocurrency comedies/tragedies of the week
• MOAR

Marco Slaviero is this week’s sponsor guest. He’ll be along with a radical marketing approach: He’ll be telling us what Canaries can’t do! But you know what? It’s a useful thought exercise. He’ll also update us on the latest stuff they’re doing in the cloud. They’ve got some new VMWare virtual canaries too.

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

In this edition of Snake Oilers we’re taking a look at two Australian companies and their solutions: Kasada and Haventec.

Kasada’s product is a simple one – it’s bot prevention using proof of work and a couple of other things, and Haventech’s solution is a bit more out there.

They’ve got a couple of products. One uses device fingerprinting plus a secret for authentication, but they’ve actually come up with something else that’ll be really interesting to people in the payment card processing space.

Basically they’ve come up with a way to split credit card info into a few pieces so it can be stored in a distributed way. Part of the info with the user, part with the merchant and part with the processor. It’s a better approach than tokenisation, and will drastically reduce the liability and costs that comes with storing huge amounts of card data on the processor side. Oh, and they’ve solved the chargeback problem on that one too.

Links to the companies profiled can be found below. I hope you enjoy the show!

On this week’s show we’re chatting with Zeynep Tufekci about how machine learning accelerates the dissemination of crazy s–t, basically. Zeynep’s September TED talk titled “We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads” is a must watch and has been doing the rounds on infosec Twitter over the last couple of weeks. She joins us this week to talk through what we might be able to do about the tendency of online platforms to send people down pretty warped rabbit holes. That’s a fascinating chat.

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

Senetas is a Melbourne-based company that develops and manufactures layer 2 encryption gear. They also operate the SureDrop secure file sharing platform and are working on a bunch of cloud crypto tech as well. Julian Fay is CTO over at Senetas and he’s along this week to talk us through the bugs Matthew Green and his colleagues found in a bunch of FIPS-certified gear from Fortinet. It’s a really, really illuminating chat. I love it when Julian’s in the sponsor chair because I always learn a lot.

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