Risky Business Podcast

On this week’s show we’re going to take a look at the ICO bubble. We’ll hear some excerpts from a chat I had with Coinjar CEO Asher Tan and then Adam and I are going to talk about what the hell is happening with all this crypto madness. We also take a look at the scuttling of the Kenyan election over hacking fears, the latest drama with Kaspersky being caught in the middle of geopolitical intrigue, the FSB’s unconventional BBQ in San Francisco and more.

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

Netsparker makes an automated webapp testing tool, you can kinda dial up the level of automation you want. They have a few nice tricks in their suite, too, like auto proof of concept exploitation of some bug classes so you can actually prove people need to fix stuff while you drink coffee, that’s nice.

In this week’s sponsor interview we’re speaking with Ferruh Mavituna, the founder and CEO of Netsparker, about automated testing at scale. It’s a sponsor interview, but it’s also a pretty generic chat about how you tackle that problem. Basically he says when you’re doing this scanning at scale you really can start with the bad, dumb stuff, because if you’re in an enterprise of any sort of size at all your automated testing is going to spit out a horror-show list.

Links to everything are below.

Oh, and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

This podcast deals with authentication tech – in particular, if you manage a Windows network, you’ll want to listen to this to get an idea of some different approaches to solving some of your authentication challenges.

This isn’t our weekly show, this is something we do four times a year – we get a bunch of vendors together and they explain their tech. Last week I published interviews with Crowdstrike, Replicated and AttackIQ, go check them out if you haven’t already, but I wanted to break out these two companies into their own podcast.

In this edition we’re going to hear from two companies – Remediant and Yubico.

Yubico, of course, makes yubikeys, the hardware authentication device used by companies like Google and Facebook to lock down accounts. I own one, and it wasn’t a freebie, I paid for it. A lot of security people use these USB devices because they work really, really well.

What I didn’t know, because I’m a dumbass, is there’s native support for Yubikeys in Windows. So if you want to add hardware-backed two factor authentication to your Windows accounts, this is one way to do it.

But before we talk to Yubico, we’re going to hear from Remediant.

Remediant is a start up that also makes some interesting Windows auth tech. Now, a lot of Risky Business listeners operate in high security or compliance heavy environments. This will often mean using password vault technology for better privileged account management. Remediant has something they think is better.

Basically they have created a tech that lets you enable and disable privileged accounts on, like a time-lock basis. If you have to do some admin work on a box, you log in to your Remediant server, enable that account for a set period of time, then off you go. Easy. It’s a very light touch way of solving some pretty serious management headaches, and it’s very easy to audit, which will keep our friends in heavily regulated environments very happy.

In this week’s show we recap all the week’s major security news items. St Jude Medical products will be patched in half a million patients, we get the latest with the DreamHost warrant, find out how Hansa marketplace members were de-cloaked by the Dutch cops and more.

In this week’s feature interview we chat with Scott Helme about HTTP Public Key Pinning as an attack vector. If someone manages to hack own your domain registrar, they can now cause all sorts of havoc. First, they redirect people to a box they control, then obtain a free, automated domain validated cert for that box, then flick on the HPKP header and pin every visitor to a certificate and key that they control.

You get your domain back, sure, but then what? Nobody who visited your site while it was under the attacker’s control can visit it. Yay. So Scott will join us this week to talk about HPKP ransom and what we might do about this situation.

This week’s sponsor interview is fascinating. We chat with Homer Strong, director of data science at Cylance, about machine learning explainability and “interrogatability”.

Adam Boileau is on a company retreat this week, so Haroon Meer is filling in. Links to everything are below.

Oh, and you can follow Patrick or Haroon on Twitter if that’s your thing.

This is part one of our latest Snake Oilers podcast, the sponsored podcast that doesn’t suck! I have to say, when I launched this podcast series I had no idea it would actually wind up being genuinely engaging and interesting. All three interviews in this podcast are top notch and I think anyone working in infosec would do well to listen.

The original idea behind these Snake Oilers podcasts was vendors would come on to the show and aggressively pitch their products. But you know what? What they mostly want to do is actually explain what their technology does so people out there in listener land actually know what they do.

I’ve broken this special into two parts. In this part we’ll hear from CrowdStrike, Replicated and AttackIQ. On Monday next week I’ll be posting part two with Remediant and Yubico, the makers of Yubikeys. Those two companies both make authentication technology, which is why I split them out on to their own.

In this part:

• Crowdstrike tell us why they think their EDR and AV solution is the best. A lot of you probably didn’t even know Crowdstrike does AV now… they’ve got a pretty compelling endpoint detection and response plus AV pitch.

• AttackIQ will pitch its software as a way to augment red teaming exercises and help you think of security as a continuous feedback loop

• Replicated talks through its tech. They take SaaS software and turn it into on-prem or private cloud software

On this week’s show we chat with James Kettle of Portswigger Web Security about some adventures he had with reverse proxies and malformed host headers. Using some simple tricks, James was able to do some craaaazy stuff and earn himself about $30k in bounties. He’s turned some of his techniques into tools for Burp Suite, so he’ll be joining us to talk about that.

In this week’s sponsor interview we’re tackling the new European general data protection regulation. With the new regime due to kick in on May 25 next year, there’s a lot of angst out there, and for good reason. The penalties for mishandling info are up to 4% of global turnover, which is a stiff enough penalty to strike fear into the hearts of CEOs everywhere.

Senetas’ is this week’s sponsor. They make layer 2 encryption gear, as well as SureDrop, a GDPR and enterprise friendly dropbox-style service. Senetas Europe’s managing director Graham Wallace joins the show this week to talk about some of the ins and outs of GDPR. Stay tuned for that.

As usual, Adam Boileau also joins the show to talk about the week’s security news. Links to everything are below.

Oh, and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

On this week’s show we chat with Charlie Miller all about the security of autonomous vehicles. As you’ll hear, he says autonomous vehicle security all comes down to some security fundamentals that are, in fact, being taken seriously by carmakers.

We’ve got an absolutely fantastic sponsor interview for you this week. This week’s show is brought to you by Senrio. They make an IoT network monitoring solution that’s actually really good. Stephen Ridley is the founder and head honcho at Senrio. He’s a very well known researcher and he joins us this week to talk about a few things.

First up he recaps the gSOAP library bugs the Senrio team found. They were a big deal in July, but as you’ll hear, people kinda missed the point. The affected gSOAP library is absolutely everywhere, including in, ahem, browsers. So yeaaaaah. There’s that.

Then we move on to the more sponsor-y part of the sponsor interview, talking about Senrio’s experience running the IoT hacking village at DEFCON. It was a great time for them, throwing their product at the most hostile IoT network the world has ever seen. To round out the Stephen Ridley omnibus experience we’ll also hear about a few training courses he’s offering on Android hacking and software exploitation via hardware exploitation.

Adam Boileau joins the show to talk about the week’s security news, links to everything are below.

Oh, and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

On this week’s show we’ll be chatting with Kelly Shortridge, formerly a detection manager at BAE, all about her Black Hat talk. It’s all about why most of what you hear about applying game theory to detection strategies is total bullshit.

This week’s show is brought to you by Signal Sciences!

Signal Sciences makes a killer product focussed on web application and web server security. It’s really popular with the dev ops crowd, which is interesting, because most security products in devops focus on the dev, whereas Signal Sciences focusses more on the ops component.

This week we speak to Signal Sciences co-founder Zane Lackey about this burgeoning market for security tooling geared towards non-security people. It’s actually a really interesting conversation. Non security groups at large organisations are having to become security self sufficient and it really is a game changer. More on that with Zane Lackey in this week’s sponsor interview.

Adam Boileau is this week’s news guest.

See links to show notes below, and follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing!

This week’s feature interview is with Facebook CSO and Black Hat 2017 keynote speaker Alex Stamos. We’ll be digging a little deeper on some of the points he hit on in his talk in Las Vegas this year. I’ve linked through to a video of his keynote in this week’s show notes (below), and I’d really recommend you watch it. It was just very, very good.

This week’s show is brought to you by Thinkst Canary. They’re best known for their little Canary honeypots, you put them on your network and they’ll alert you to all sorts of lateral movement. Thinkst’s Founder and chief brain Haroon Meer will be along later on to talk about cloud security.

He’ll be echoing some of the points made in our interview a few week’s back with Daniel Grzelak from Atlassian, as well as looking at how you can start to put together a somewhat coherent strategy for detecting when your cloud services get popped.

Adam Boileau is this week’s news guest.

See links to show notes below, and follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing!

In this week’s feature interview I speak with the Australian Prime Minister’s cyber security advisor Alastair MacGibbon about what it is that the Australian government is pushing for in terms of industry cooperation around surveillance.

There’s been a lot of hype on this one. “Al Mac” joins the show to work through some of it, and honestly, Australia’s push at the moment is the sort of thing I think you can expect to see more of around the world, so this is an interview of global relevance.

Some of that conversation hinges on a blog post I wrote on the weekend. If you want to, you can read that here.

This week’s show is brought to you by Remediant!

Remediant makes a product that’s designed to make lateral movement through a network much harder. Essentially it’s a way to restrict all privileged accounts on your infrastructure until you actually need it. So instead of being able to just log in to your production environment, you can actually set it up so you can enable the privilege you need to a set period of time.

It’s a different approach to privilege management than things like password vaults, so if you work in an authentication group you’re going to want to hear what they have to say. Remediant CEO Tim Keeler is this week’s sponsor guest.

Adam Boileau is this week’s news guest. We talk about all the continuing notPetya drama at Maersk and FedEx/TNT, the Alphabay latest and more.

See links to show notes below, and follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing!

This month’s Soap Box podcast is brought to you by AttackIQ, a company that makes attack simulation software.

This is a wholly sponsored podcast that won’t bore you to tears.

There are countless CISOs who listen to this podcast who’ve shovelled an awful lot of money at their organisation’s security controls. Whether that’s endpoint/AV or fancy network kit that’s supposed to detect exfil, the sad truth is most organisations have no way to know if their expensive kit is actually doing what it’s supposed to.

Until, of course, they get breached. Then there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So the idea behind attack simulation is pretty simple. You load a lightweight agent on to your corporate systems, the agent then runs scriptable attack scenarios that can simulate attacker behaviour.

These attack scripts might get some endpoints to start nmapping internal systems. They might start changing some registry keys or stimulate a bunch of disk activity that looks like an encryption/ransomware process. They might start sending off a bunch of dummy data via a DNS exfil technique. Did your endpoint solution catch the funny registry stuff? Did your network controls catch the simulated exfil?

Now imagine you have 1,000 pre-coded attack simulations with all sorts of different combinations and permutations of attacker behaviours. How many of them do you actually need to run through before you can spot the weak points in your defences?

Attack simulation is a great way to test and validate your security controls, and you can do it continuously.

AttackIQ’s cofounder and CEO Stephan Chenette joined me to talk about attack simulation and what it’s good for.