Risky Business Podcast

This Soap Box edition is all about desktop microvirtualisation! Bromium has been around for about six years now, and they make an endpoint security package that is really, really different to other solutions in the market. The whole thing hinges on what they call a Microvisor, which amounts to hardware-enabled isolation on your desktop.

Bromium’s software is basically a way to virtualise user tasks, whether that’s working on a Word document or browsing an exploit-riddled lyrics website with Java and Flash enabled, the idea is if an exploit gets dropped on you it gets trapped in a micro-VM.

Personally, I’m a big fan of Bromium’s stuff. one of the things that kind of hindered the adoption of this tech in its early days is it relies on CPU features that were basically new six years ago, so not everyone could run it. There was also a bit of a UX hit. But there’s good news! Hardware refresh cycles have taken their course, and now running Bromium’s software is viable in almost all enterprises.

Where this goes from being interesting to downright compelling is if you’re an enterprise forced to run vulnerable software. I’m thinking specifically of old browsers running things like Java. In many organisations, running out-of-date crapware is a business requirement.

Well, running Bromium on those endpoints will basically solve that problem. Sure, nothing is magic, but by the time you’ve finished listening to this conversation with Bromium co-founder and President Ian Pratt, I think you’ll definitely want to take a look at the tech. You should take a look at the tech, because it’s borderline impossible to solve that problem any other way.

I hope you enjoy it!

On this week’s show we’re looking at an issue that kicked up last week when creepware scumbags Flexispy announced they were moving their bug bounty program to HackerOne. VICE journalist Joseph Cox asked HackerOne CEO Marten Mickos if he’d be happy to host their program, and his answer is as follows:

“Any company that operates legally within its jurisdiction, treats our hackers with respect and takes vulnerability disclosure seriously is generally welcome to run their program on the HackerOne platform. Improving the integrity of all connected software is to the benefit of the digital society.”

A lot of people, myself included, didn’t react so well to that line of thinking. HackerOne CTO Alex Rice suggested he come on the show to talk about the company’s stance. As you’ll hear, Alex is pushing a much softer line than his CEO, but still says this is complicated. Stay tuned for that, at times, excruciating interview.

This week’s sponsor interview is with Signal Sciences CSO and co-founder Zane Lackey. Zane was the head of security at Etsy, but he moved on to found Signal Sciences, a company that is making webapp security software that by all reports is pretty damn good.

He joins us in the sponsor slot this week to talk about Devops, WAFs and a whole bunch of other fun stuff.

Adam Boileau, as usual, drops by to discuss the week’s news.

Links to items discussed in this week’s show have moved – they’re now included in this post, below.

Oh, and do add Patrick, or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

Risky Business #452 – Are Wikileaks charges a threat to press freedom? Brookings fellow and former NSA attorney Susan Hennessey joins the show…

Over the last week or so there’s been mounting speculation that the US government is getting serious about preparing charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The question is, could these charges threaten press freedom?

Joining us to discuss that this week is Lawfare’s managing editor Susan Hennessey.

This week’s show is brought to you by Senetas. Senetas makes layer two encryption equipment, but today they’re joining us to talk about some work it’s doing with ADVA Optical Networks in marrying its tech with some SDN stuff done at the telco level.

Links to items discussed in this week’s show have moved – they’re now included in this post, below.

Oh, and do add Patrick, or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

NOTE: We had to re-post this. Originally we linked to the wrong mp3 (soapbox1 instead of snakeoilers1). It was rectified within about five minutes, but caches gonna cache, so we’ve reposted it. Sorry if you downloaded it twice!

This is the first ever Snake Oilers podcast from Risky.biz. It’s a wholly sponsored podcast in which vendors pop in and take 10 minutes each to pitch the audience on their stuff. The idea behind this whole thing is so that infosec buyers can actually hear a bunch of ten minute pitches without having to go to lunch with a salesperson with giant shiny teeth who doesn’t really understand what they’re selling.

These are product pitches from people who actually get the technology. And you know what? Even if you’re not a technology buyer, you’ll probably still find a lot of this interesting – it’s good to know how vendors are slicing and dicing some of the challenges we all face in security.

In this edition:

• Exabeam says it can save you buttloads of cash compared to other SIEM solutions like Splunk or ArcSight.
• Senetas urges you not to use babby’s first encryptor cards and opt for its 100gbps full line rate layer 2 encryptor instead
• Kolide pitches its osquery-based EDR solution. If it’s good enough for Facebook, it’s good enough for you!
• Senrio pitches its impressive IoT network sensor and developer tools.

Links below!

On this week’s show we talk about the latest Shadowbrokers shenanigans with Adam, as well as all the other major security news of the last couple of weeks.

After that we’ll be chatting with Adam’s colleague at Insomnia Security, Pipes, about the interesting aspects to the dump – what did it teach us about how NSA rolls? Well quite a lot, as it turns out. And yeah, the N0day bugs aren’t the interesting bit.

This week’s show is sponsored by Tenable Network Security. This week Tenable’s VP of federal, Darron Makrokanis, will be along to talk about how to speed up federal government adoption of new tech – what’s the best way for that to happen? That’s this week’s sponsor interview!

Links to items discussed in this week’s show have moved – they’re now included in this post, below.

Oh, and do add Patrick, or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

This week’s show is a fun one! We’ll be chatting with Josh Corman, the Atlantic Council’s Director of Cyber Statecraft. We’ll be speaking with him about an exercise he did recently with a whole bunch of students. Basically the whole thing was a simulation where students walked through various scenarios and had to respond. Unfortunately, Josh discovered that most students had a predisposition to escalating things unnecessarily. From Mirai to mushroom clouds, that’s this week’s feature interview.

This week’s sponsor interview is also an absolute corker. Rapid7 is this week’s sponsor. In addition to making enterprise security software and running a pentest practice, Rapid7 also spends a considerable amount of time and money on developing Metasploit.

Rapid7 research director Tod Beardsley and director of transportation security Craig Smith join the show this week to talk about some recent changes to Metasploit that I’m amazed haven’t made a bigger splash. You can now run Metasploit against a CAN bus and they’ve built an RF module as well. That is absolutely awesome stuff, coming up in this week’s sponsor interview, with special thanks to Rapid7!

Adam Boileau, as always, joins us to talk about the week’s security news.

Links to items discussed in this week’s show have moved – they’re now included in this post, below.

Oh, and do add Patrick, or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

Soap Box is back! This time we’re chatting with Stephen Ridley and Jamison Utter about the tech Stephen has launched: Senrio Insight and Senrio Trace!

This is a fully sponsored blabfest about IoT security. Specifically, we drill into two different problems Senrio is trying to solve. The first is how the hell you deal with monitoring IoT on your network, especially when you can’t do DPI because of HIPAA. If you’re a CISO from a hospital, you will be very interested in this part of the podcast.

Then we talk about IoT security approaches for developers. Not only has Senrio developed a boring old network sensor to remedy the dumb but profitable-to-solve problem, they’ve also created a developer toolkit for manufacturers of IoT devices who need to be able to monitor them in the field.

Stephen Ridley is a bona fide expert on IoT. So much so, he used to actually train NSA staff on hacking IoT devices. Personally I think when you’re training NSA on how to own stuff, that makes you a genuine expert.

Jamison Utter, Senrio’s VP of Field Operations, also joins us for this podcast. I hope you enjoy it!

To book a demo with Senrio, click here.

On this week’s show I’ll be playing part two of my interview with In-Q-Tel’s chief security officer Dan Geer. That’s all about machine learning in infosec. Is it actually going to turn into something? Or is it just another infosec thought bubble?

This week’s sponsor interview is with Dan Guido of Trail of Bits.

Trail of Bits is a New York-based security engineering and testing company that does very interesting work. They don’t just break apps, they actually work on securing them. With that in mind, Dan’s team has been looking at implementing control flow integrity protections to various software projects. So we speak to him about the llvm versus Microsoft control flow guard approach, which is achievable. We also speak to him about mcsema, a tool they developed for reversing binaries into an intermediate language.

Adam Boileau, as always, joins us to talk about the week’s security news.

Links to items discussed in this week’s show have moved – they’re now included in this post, below.

Oh, and do add Patrick, or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

We’ve got a great show for you this week. In-Q-Tel CSO Dan Geer will be along for a very interesting conversation about the major cloud providers. Are they too big to fail the same way some banks are? Does the efficiency of highly concentrated ownership of a large chunk of the world’s Internet service capacity make it less resilient? We talk about that and more in this week’s feature interview.

This week’s sponsor interview is also an absolute cracker. We’re speaking with Mike Hanley of Duo Security. Mike is the senior director of security at Duo, and he’s along this week to talk about Google’s BeyondCorp initiative.

BeyondCorp is Google’s vision for the next generation of enterprise environments and it has a lot to do with deperimiterisation. Mike is along this week to talk about that concept and how solid authentication is basically the first step in moving towards that vision. It’s really, really solid stuff, so do stick around for that one.

Adam Boileau, as always, joins us to talk about the week’s security news.

Links to items discussed in this week’s show have moved – they’re now included in this post, below.

Oh, and do add Patrick, or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

On this week’s show Patrick and Adam have a look at the surprisingly great report about 0day prepared by RAND Corporation, as well as the other security news of the week. How ‘bout dat Struts bug, eh?

Dr. Vanessa Teague of the University of Melbourne also joins the show to talk about the latest developments around computerised voting. Vanessa is an expert on e-voting and she’s been in the space for a long time – she’ll be joining us this week to talk about how European authorities have been responding to the risks posed to their elections by outside parties, and we take a look at some voting security ideas for America.

This week’s show is brought to you by Netsparker. Netsparker is a black-box web application testing tool that aims to speed up webapp tests through automation. Netsparker’s creator Ferruh Mavituna is this week’s sponsor guest. He’s joining us to basically talk about what you can actually automate in webapp testing, but also about what you can’t automate. That’s a really interesting chat, one that the pentesters will love I’m sure.

Links to items discussed in this week’s show have moved – they’re now included in this post, below.

Oh, and do add Patrick, or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.