Risky Business Podcast

On this week's show we chat with Ruxcon organiser and vulnerability researcher Chris Spencer.

Chris pops by to offer a five percent discount on Ruxcon training to Risky Business listeners, and we also have a quick chat to him about trends in the vulnerability research game.

Chris was popping shells and publishing exploits since the nineties, so he's seen a few things change!

Also this week, RSA's Mason Hooper joins the show for this week's sponsor interview. We ask Mason for his thoughts on a not-particularly-convincing Norton survey report that estimates cybercrime is now bigger than the illegal drugs industry. Ha!

Mark "Longpipes" Piper is this week's news guest. He's filling in while Adam Boileau is in Afghanistan seeking advanced beard grooming tips.

On this week's show we take a look at the security of browser JIT engines with two extremely smart guys: Chris Rohlf and Yan Ivnitskiy of Matasano Security.

They presented a paper in Vegas all about attacking clientside JIT compilers. It's good, old-fashioned security research -- the type of research that's increasingly being withheld from the public these days.

What is a JIT compiler? How does it work? Do they present inherent security problems? Tune in to find out!

This week's show is brought to you by Sophos Network Security. In this week's sponsor interview we're joined by that company's product manager Angelo Comazzetto to discuss network visibility and application aware firewalls.

Normally Adam Boileau joins the show to discuss the week's news, but he's off globetrotting for the next few weeks, so instead his buddy Mark "Longpipes" Piper steps into the news slot to fill in. Thanks Mark!

What a week in information security! Between Kernel.org getting owned, the Iranian Government apparently hacking a Dutch CA to mint around 250 valid certs for stuff like *.google.com and Wikileaks experiencing a spectacular opsec fail, there's plenty to talk about in this week's news segment with Adam Boileau.

In this week's feature interview we speak with Greens Senator Scott Ludlam about the governments proposed Cybercrime Legislation Amendment Bill. There's been a lot of FUD out there on this one and Senator Ludlam joins the show to dispel some myths and discuss some specific improvements the Greens would like to see made to the package of legislation.

This week's sponsor interview is with Ron Gula, CEO of Tenable Network Security.

Ron says some people out there in the market are forming a consensus that preventing attacks is just too hard, and so they're focussing too much on merely detecting compromises. Ron says a balanced approach is better. He joined me by phone to discuss.

* By the way, the company Ron mentions a company named Kyrus. Wasn't very clear in the recording.

This week's feature interview is with anonymous infosec blogger Diocyde.

He has access to some fairly sensitive shit, so we can't tell you his name and we've had to disguise his voice.

Diocyde is best known as the author of the Veiled Shadows blog.

On it, he's written volumes about state-sponsored attacks against the United States. He's tracked who he says are Chinese malware writers and basically doxed them on the blog. He's advocated a hot cyber-war against China to stop that country from continuing to siphon off US-developed intellectual property and intelligence and he's written it all under the influence of pure fury.

Chinese attacks against the USA make this guy angry, as does the idea that attribution in the cyber sphere is difficult.

Interest in Diocyde's blog really took off when links to it popped up in e-mail stolen from HBGary Federal. Things got even more interesting when a few of his posts not only disappeared from the blog, but also disappeared from Google's cache.

In particular, one post titled "Busting the APT can wide open" went missing. It contained a large amount of intelligence on Chinese malware writers.

It was a fascinating read, and it's been completely removed from the Internet.

Doicyde joined me to discuss his blog, the missing posts, Chinese cyber espionage and attribution.

This week's sponsor interview is with RSA Product Manager Jeffery Carpenter.

This week we're chatting to Jeff about RSA's vision for the future of two-factor authentication. Are soft tokens becoming more popular? Is that a problem? What role will mobile device features like NFC play in the 2FA equation in the future?

Also this week, Adam Boileau joins us with the week's news headlines.

You may have heard about Microsoft's Blue Hat Prize for defensive security research. The company is running a contest for the best memory corruption bug mitigation technology. So, if you reckon you've found the next DEP or ASLR, you could be eligible for the company's $200,000 first prize.

It marks a departure from bug bounties -- this is a contest that rewards defensive research, not just new attacks.

There has, however, been a limited but vocal backlash. Security development firm Supreption took to its blog to describe the contest as a "late April Fools joke".

Winners of the contest maintain ownership of their ideas and intellectual property, but Microsoft assumes right to implement any entries it chooses into its operating systems. The guys at Supreption say that means Microsoft is getting way too good a deal for its prizemoney.

The blog claims the PaX team, creators of ASLR, support the company's position.

Microsoft's Katie Moussouris joins the show to face the criticisms and defend the prize.

Adam Boileau, of course, joins the show to discuss the week's news headlines.

In this week's feature interview we're chatting with Dino A Dai Zovi about Mac security -- Dino's well known as a Mac hacker and he's just done a BlackHat talk in which he evaluated Apple's IOS 4.x operating system for enterprise suitability. How did it stack up? Find out after the news!

Also this week we check in with Sophos Network Security director of support Alan Toews about Moxie Marlinspike's latest work, an alternative way of doing SSL certificates that completely does away with CAs. That's this week's sponsor interview.

Adam Boileau, of course, joins us for this week's news.

On this week's show we're taking a look at the most devastating state sponsored planet melting, child eating APT the world has ever seen... according to Gizmodo it's the BIGGEST CYBER ATTACK IN HISTORY.

Ummm... actually no, it's a fairly unsophisticated botnet comprising of 70 targeted infections.

It seems like the tech guys and analysts at McAfee did some interesting work in seizing control of a small botnet, then the salesbots, marketroids and public relationamatrons got their hands on it and spun it way out of perspective. The result? The media describing a fairly run-of-the-mill spooky botnet as the end of the world.

We'll be joined by Searn Duca of McAfee -- a very nice chap -- to have a chat about some of the detail of the so-called operation Shady RAT, which to me, seems more like operation shady AV vendor sales and marketing pitch. The media has spun this one way out of control, much, I'm sure, to the delight of the PRs at McAfee and the irritation of the wider infosec industry!

Also in this week's show we're joined by Marcus Ranum in the sponsor interview. Marcus is, of course, Tenable Network Security's CSO, and he joins me to discuss the US military's new cyber warfare doctrine -- you know, the one that explicitly states the US can use kinetic retribution in the event of a cyber attack.

So, like, doesn't that mean Iran can go and air-strike US nuclear refineries now? Heh... heh... yeah. :'( Marcus joins us to discuss that toward the end of the show -- that's actually a really interesting chat.

We're also joined by Adam Boileau, as usual, to go over the week's news headlines.

This week we're chatting with Detective Superintendent Brad Marden of the Australian Federal Police. While the FBI are out locking up Low Orbit Ion Cannon users on no-bail warrants, Mr. Marden and his team, apparently, are out doing real, actual police work to catch real, alleged criminals. How refreshing!

Listeners to this program would have heard of the case of Distribute.IT -- an Australian domain name registrar and hosting company that got majorly worked by a hacker calling himself "Evil from efnet".

After entry, the attacker rm -rf'd the entire company and basically destroyed the business. What remained of the company's assets were sold at presumably fire-sale prices to NetRegistry, another Australian company.

Well, earlier this week the AFP arrested an unemployed truck driver as a result of its investigation into the distribute.it matter. The suspect, 25-year-old David Cecil, has been charged with 49 offences relating a breach at a company called Platform Networks, but police have hinted that further charges are to come.

Marden joins the program to discuss the arrest.

Adam Boileau drops in to discuss the week's news, including the arrest of alleged LulzSec member Topiary in Scotland.

In this week's feature interview we're chatting with Silvio Cesare.

Silvio's an extremely well regarded infosec guy down here in Oz. He'll be chatting to us about his experience in academia. Silvio argues much criticism of academia in industry largely misses the point, and academia actually serves infosec quite well. Cryptography anyone?

This was also the week that saw LulzSec make a spectacular return to the public eye. It was also the week the FBI rounded up around 16 "cyber criminals". Well, actually it was more like 14 LOIC users and a couple of scripty-tardos. More on that in the news.

In this week's sponsor interview we catch up with RSA's CSO Eddie Schwartz to chat about everything from crappy marketing to problems with mobile device-based 2FA. It's good stuff.

Adam Boileau, of course, takes a break from grooming his spectacular, manly beard to discuss the week's news headlines.

This week's show is all about the news -- a 30 minute dose of Metl!

With Anons being arrested, parties unknown pwning defence contractors in the name of #antisec, Sony doing (even more) dumb stuff, Zeus-grade viruses smashing Android devices, India trying to wiretap Skype, support for XP running out in less than three years, Microsoft Security Centre dishing out porn and Morgan Stanley losing customer info on unencrypted disks, we just didn't have time for a feature interview this week!

In this week's sponsor interview Astaro founder Markus Hennig joins us to discuss Sony's curious statement that its brand is recovering from all the negative press surrounding its security woes. Are they dreaming?