Risky Business Podcast

This week's show is sponsored by Check Point Software.

In it we check in with Belgium-based security guy, spare-time researcher and noodler Didier Stevens.

We're talking to Didier about a weird little project he unveiled a couple of months ago. He's taken the source code from the command interpreter from ReactOS and compiled it into a DLL that he can shove into memory.

That way he gets shell without launching a new process. I got him on the show to ask him what the hell's wrong with Meterpreter for that sort of thing.

We'll also be joined by Check Point's Dan Baucaut in this week's sponsor interview. It used to be that outsourcing your firewall management was all the rage, but is it still popular and does it still make sense? Did it ever make sense?

As always, Adam Boileau is the week's news guest.

This week's feature interview is with Matt Olney of Sourcefire's vulnerability research team. These guys have put a bunch of work into a new open source tool that can grab files, like PDFs, off the wire, scan them for dodgy stuff and trigger Snort alerts.

It's called Near Real Time detection and it might just have legs.

This week's edition of the show is brought to you by Tenable Network Security, and as is our custom here at Risky.Biz HQ we chat with Tenable's CEO and industry stalwart Ron Gula in this week's sponsor interview. In it we discuss McAfee's borked update of a couple of weeks ago, logic bugs in the cloud and more.

Adam Boileau, as usual, drops in to discuss the week's news headlines.

You can find more info on NRT here.

H D Moore is this week's feature guest. The company he works for, Rapid7, will soon release a commercial version of Metasploit.

Risky Business asks HD about the new product and discusses the controversy that may arise from the commercialisation of the open source project.

Vitaly Kamlyuk from Kaspersky Lab is this week's sponsor guest. In the interview Vitaly expresses concerns that some legitimate research -- his, at times, included -- is playing into the hands of the bad guys.

And Adam Boileau is this week's news guest.

BTW Risky Business rules.

On this week's show we have a chat to Paul Ducklin about what he sees as questionable ethics behind some mobile malware research.

Researchers from Rutgers University and Veracode have written mobile phone malware or trojans; the latter even released the source code to their BlackBerry trojan. But what purpose does this serve, asks Duck. Is there any benefit at all to be had from writing and releasing trojans, even if they are written for academic purposes?

This week's sponsor interview is with Check Point's Fredrik Borjesson, and Adam Boileau is the week's feature guest.

This week we speak to iDefense analyst Kim Zenz, who's currently based in Moscow. We'll be getting an update on what the bad guys are up to in the former USSR, after all it's usually a good indicator of what they'll get up to in Western countries in the not too distant future.

After that we'll check in with Chris Wysopal, aka Weld Pond. He's the CTO of Veraocde and joins us to talk about the company's first ever state of software security report which is a surprisingly engaging read. That's this week's sponsor interview.

Adam Boileau, as usual, sheds his beardy McUNIXguy perspective on the week's news.

Here is a link to the APNIC stuff Adam and I talk about in the show.

There's no feature interview in this week's show -- it has an empty middle, just like an Easter egg!

Between me getting bumped out with a cold for a couple of days last week and this being a four day week, I just couldn't pull one together in time. Apologies.

So on this week's show we've got an extra long news segment with Adam Boileau, which is a bunch of fun.

In it we discuss:

• Aurora not all it's cracked up to be
• RIP SCO
• Claims of a Vietnamese government sponsored botnet. (WTF?)
• The march of China's great firewall
• When two networks are better than one
• A $100 kit for sniffing wireless keyboards

PLUS!

• Cisco's latest round of ghastly bugs
• Apple's latest round of ghastly bugs
• Microsoft's latest round of ghastly bugs

We also have an interesting chat with Ron Gula, chief executive of Tenable Network Security, in this week's sponsor interview. The topic is vulnerability scoring and knowing when a vulnerability scan is actually pointless.

This week we chat with Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan of Australia's Federal Police about trends in fraud.

We'll also have a bit of a chat about all things Gumblar with Vitaly Kamlyuk of Kaspersky Lab in Japan in this week's sponsor interview. Vitaly's been having a bunch of fun with the creators of Gumblar. In fact, it seems the guys behind the system have gotten so sick of Vitaly and his buddies profiling the Gumblar systems from their Japanese offices that they've blackholed the entire country of Japan to slow him down.

It's a bumper news session this week -- Albert Gonzalez has been sentenced for his TJX hack, spooks have been busted man-in-the-middling SSL connections, someone's released DNS tunnelling shellcode for Metasploit (yummy), etc and so on, so forth etc.

Link to DNS tunnelling shellcode stuff here.

Link to the IE8 exploit paper mentioned by Adam is here.

This week we've got Brian Snow on the show again. Brian had a 34 year career with the NSA in the States -- when he retired just a few years ago he was the technical director of Information Assurance there.

He's joining the show this week to talk about PKI, and specifically, why PKI hasn't taken off like we all thought it would. Brian actually has a pretty decent explanation for why things like federated identity never took off in the early to mid naughties like we all thought it would.

That's after the news.

Also this week we chat with Matt Moynahan, Veracode's chief executive. We're talking to Matt about the testing of applications sold via things like Apple's app store and Google's equivalent. That's our sponsor interview.

Adam Boileau, as usual, is this week's news guest.

On this week's show we're having an extended chat with our good mate Greg Shipley.

Greg's best known as the CTO of Chicago-based information security consultancy Neohapsis, and he'll be joining us to talk about what was on the agenda at the RSA conference. Apparently it's cloud, cloud, cloud... but what does that actually mean, mean, mean? Greg will be along soon to discuss, he's always good.

There will be no sponsor interview this week -- the team at Check Point are snowed under at the moment so we just didn't get an interview organised, but that's cool, because it leaves more time for me and Greg to talk about stuff.

Adam Boileau joins us for the news this week.

Risky Business is hosted by the team at Virtual.Offis in Sydney but sponsored, this week, by Tenable Network Security.

This week's feature guest is H D Moore, who'll be joining us to talk about some fun stuff he's been doing with NTP. Believe it or not you can use NTP to do massive recon on the Intertubez. H D has built a database of millions of hosts by querying NTP boxens. It's cool.

Tenable Network Security CEO Ron Gula joins us in this week's sponsor interview, and Adam "Beardy McUNIXguy" Boileau drops in to discuss the week's news.