Cyber Security Weekly Podcast

Interview with Ben Frengley (Masters student, University of Melbourne) and Vanessa Teague (CEO, Thinking Cybersecurity Pty Ltd and the A/Prof (Adj.), Australian National University)

Recorded 22 September 2020.

Tim Watts MP, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications & Cyber Security, comments on the Cyber Power Index released by Harvard’s Belfer Center which shows Australia is ranked 8th for intent but 16th for capability overall...

Interview by Jane Lo, Singapore Correspondent with Joshua McCloud, National Cybersecurity Officer, Security and Trust Organization, CISCO Systems following ISACA Singapore Chapter's GTACS 2020 conference. Taking a dive into Cyber Physical Systems for an IT security perspective.

Joshua McCloud is the lead for cybersecurity strategic country engagement and consulting in Cisco's Security & Trust Organization (STO) in ASEAN. STO is responsible for protecting Cisco’s enterprise infrastructure, ensuring the security of Cisco’s products and services, and collaborating with governments, industry, and standards bodies to improve national cybersecurity posture. Joshua works with government cybersecurity agencies, critical industry sectors, and large enterprise organizations to improve cybersecurity effectiveness in alignment with organizational and business goals.

Joshua has worked for over 20 years in the public and private sector environment supporting customers in Asia, the US, Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Joshua has deep expertise in the areas of cybersecurity, architectural methodologies and frameworks, and software defined networking. He is a speaker at industry events, has published numerous articles, and co- authored the book “SAP on the Cloud”.

Recorded 1st September 2020, Singapore

Jane Lo, Singapore Correspondent speaks with Dr Paola Magni, Senior Lecturer in Forensic Science at Murdoch University (Perth, Western Australia) and the Deputy Dean at Murdoch University Singapore.

Paola is a forensic biologist with a key focus on the application of natural sciences (entomology, taphonomy and aquatic biology) to crime scene investigation. She has several years of experience as a lecturer, researcher and expert witness in the Court of Law on cases of homicide, suspicious death, animal cruelty/wildlife, food forensic and stored products security. She is the co-author of several books, book chapters and peer reviewed articles focused on her research and case-work.

She is the developer of “SmartInsects – Forensic Entomology”, the smartphone App designed to facilitate the work of law enforcement agencies and pathologists at crime scenes, and of “VirtualCSI”, the Virtual Reality training suite for forensic science students and law enforcement. These projects are hosted at the Murdoch Virtual Centre for Simulation lead by Prof. Susan Ledger.

In the last few years, Paola has also undertaken research into the pedagogy behind innovative methods in forensic education, with a special focus in the internationalization of the Forensic Science curricula. Example of this are the successful projects for the New Colombo Mobility Plans and the Endeavour Leadership Program founded by the Australian Government.

Deeply interested in science communication and advocate for women in STEM, Paola is the Australian winner of the global science communication competition FameLab, a TEDx speaker and a Woman in Technology WA (WiTWA) Role Model. In 2020 she received the AIPS Tall Poppy Award and has been nominated one of the 100 people who will influence Western Australia in the biggest way.

Recorded on 13th August 2020, following Dr Magni’s presentation at EMTech Asia 2020 by MIT Technology Review.

More links to the virtual CSI resources can be found here:

Murdoch University: https://www.murdoch.edu.au/ (https://www.murdoch.edu.au/)

Murdoch University Singapore: https://www.murdoch.sg/murdoch-singapore/ (https://www.murdoch.sg/murdoch-singapore/)

Murdoch Virtual Centre for Simulation: https://www.murdoch.edu.au/research/industry-and-partnerships/murdoch-virtual-centre-for-simulation (https://www.murdoch.edu.au/research/industry-and-partnerships/murdoch-virtual-centre-for-simulation)

CSI-VR video presented at EdTech Asia: https://vimeo.com/354137862/d12a79eed8 (https://vimeo.com/354137862/d12a79eed8)

Interview with Jane Lo, Singapore Correspondent, MySecurity Media, Dr Magda Chelly, Organiser and Judge, founder of Women of Security (WoSEC) Singapore Chapter and one of the winners of the Top 20 Women in Cyber Security in Singapore - Shuchen Hu, B...

Interview with the Senior Threat Intelligence Analyst from Insikt Group, Recorded Future into the RedDelta Report (https://go.recordedfuture.com/hubfs/reports/cta-2020-0728.pdf), an analysis of how the Vatican and the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong were among several Catholic Church-related organizations targeted by RedDelta, a Chinese-state sponsored threat activity group tracked by Insikt Group.

From early May 2020, this series of suspected network intrusions also targeted the Hong Kong Study Mission to China and the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME), Italy. These organizations have not been publicly reported as targets of Chinese threat activity groups prior to this campaign.

These network intrusions occurred ahead of the anticipated September 2020 renewal of the landmark 2018 China-Vatican provisional agreement, a deal which reportedly resulted in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gaining more control and oversight over the country’s historically persecuted “underground” Catholic community.

In addition to the Holy See itself, another likely target of the campaign includes the current head of the Hong Kong Study Mission to China, whose predecessor was considered to have played a vital role in the 2018 agreement. The suspected intrusion into the Vatican would offer RedDelta insight into the negotiating position of the Holy See ahead of the deal’s September 2020 renewal.

The identified RedDelta intrusions feature infrastructure, tooling, and victimology overlap with the threat activity group publicly reported as Mustang Panda (also known as BRONZE PRESIDENT and HoneyMyte). This includes the use of overlapping network infrastructure and similar victimology previously attributed to this group in public reporting, as well as using malware typically used by Mustang Panda, such as PlugX, Poison Ivy, and Cobalt Strike.

This podcast is a report walk through with the lead analyst and covers the background, overview of Catholic Church intrusions, other targeted organizations and the infrastructure analysis. In this campaign, RedDelta favored three primary IP hosting providers, and used multiple C2 servers within the same /24 CIDR ranges across intrusions.

Importantly, we also cover the key network defense recommendations corporations should be applying to deter and prevent such attacks.

Recorded 27 August between Sydney and London in recognition of Recorded Future being Platinum supporter of the Cyber Risk Meetups (https://www.cyberriskmeetup.com) for 2020 - 2021

In the final edition of this three part podcast series with Fortinet, we dive into Compliance, taking a focus on risk management for cyber risk and business risk. The discussion covers the cost of compliance, responsibility of compliance and benefits of compliance - as well as the risk of doing compliance poorly.

Joined by Cornelius Mare, Director of Security Solutions Fortinet ANZ and Glenn Maiden, Director FortiGuard Threat Intelligence, ANZ this continues a highly insightful discussion and directly relevant to the on-going management of enterprise crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic and its relationship and impacts on corporate culture and compliance frameworks.

Following the release of the Australian Cyber Security Strategy 2020, the implications of an emerging accreditation framework in and around the critical infrastructure supply chain means cyber related compliance programs will be ever more important and requiring the right skill and tool sets to meet these requirements with minimal cost and maximising business risk management.

This series explored crisis management and connections to culture and the renewed challenge of building a team in a remote workforce and bench-marking compliance, risk and regulations. Thanks to Fortinet for supporting this series.

Recorded between Sydney and Canberra, 24 August 2020, courtesy of Fortinet.

For more information on Fortinet visit www.fortinet.com (https://www.fortinet.com/)

Episode 207 - The 3 C's of Cyber - Crisis, Culture & Compliance - Fortinet Series Ep1 (https://blubrry.com/mysecurity/63027397/episode-207-the-3-cs-of-cyber-crisis-culture-compliance-fortinet-series-ep1/)

Episode 210 - The 3 C's of Cyber - Crisis, Culture & Compliance - Fortinet Series Ep2 (https://blubrry.com/mysecurity/64800426/episode-210-the-3-cs-of-cyber-crisis-culture-compliance-fortinet-series-ep2/)

MySecurity Media's Singapore Correspondent Jane Lo speaks with Leslie Shannon, Head of Ecosystem and Trend Scouting, Nokia, based in San Francisco, USA.

Leslie heads up Ecosystem and Trend Scouting, Corporate Strategy. Based in Silicon Valley, she investigates new technologies, including AR/VR, AI, self-driving cars, Blockchain, and all manners of other advances, looking for the examples that will offer significant new opportunities to entities in the telco sector.

Leslie entered the mobile communications world as a billing database analyst in the early 1990s. She joined Nokia Australia in 2000 and became the manager of the FutureLab, an early developer incubator in the days of WAP, GPRS and 3G. Building on her first-hand technical and business experience of the reality of bringing applications to market, she developed an analysis service for Nokia that examined success and failure factors for operators bringing mobile data to market for 4G that proved so successful that Nokia created a new department around her work. While in this role, she was based in Finland and worked with over 100 operators in more than 60 countries.

Always on the lookout for all the ways that new thinking and tech are going to disrupt and enhance our world, she travels and speaks globally, both in researching new tech and in sharing her findings with Nokia telco customers.

Born in Manhattan, Leslie has a BA in Psychology from the University of Virginia and a Master’s Degree in the History of Art from Yale University. She was an undefeated five-time champion in the American television game show “Jeopardy!” in 1992 and was invited to return to the show to compete in a tournament for one million dollars as one of the show’s “most memorable contestants” in 2002 and again in 2014. (She didn’t win, but still had a lot of fun.) She also got four questions away from willing a million dollars on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” in August 2017.

Leslie lives in Santa Clara, California, with her husband and their two mobile-data enthusiast children.

Podcast recorded on 19th August 2020.

Accenture Podcast Series: Building cyber resilience to grow and innovate with confidence

Recorded between Sydney and Melbourne in the third episode of a three part series with Accenture, we are joined by Joseph Failla, Leads Accenture Security for Australia and New Zealand and Mark Sayer, leads cyber defence across Asia Pacific and has recently spearheaded the opening of Accenture’s new Cyber Fusion Centre in Sydney.

The discussion focus is on the changing ‘modus operandi’ (MO) and evolving threat landscape in the COVID-19 environment, halfway through 2020, as well as the implications for company executives and what they need to be thinking about. This includes insight into a global incident response by Accenture against the tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) identified during the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s (ACSC) investigation of a cyber campaign targeting Australian networks.

The Australian Government released its awareness of sustained targeting of Australian governments and companies by a sophisticated state-based actor and released an advisory, ‘Copy-Paste Compromises (https://mysecuritymarketplace.com/reports/advisory-2020-008-copy-paste-compromises-tactics-techniques-and-procedures-used-to-target-multiple-australian-networks/)’, derived from the heavy use of proof of concept exploit code, web shells and other tools copied almost identically from open source.

Accenture works with clients along the whole security life cycle and with a large and global incident response team they regularly deal with attacks that have the potential to cripple Australian businesses. This interview covers how the threat landscape has shifted over the past few months and what is being observed in terms of the threat actors, the MO, the reasons for attack.

With consideration to key cyber threats, and a challenging business environment, the strategic priorities of C-suite executives and company board members has also changed and how concerned should they be, as well as how to adapt their security teams preparing for and dealing with attacks.

Joseph was a co-founder and owner of Redcore, a specialised cyber security firm that was acquired by Accenture in 2016, and he has 26+ years’ experience in IT with a core focus on information security and risk management strategies. His areas of expertise are cyber security, public key infrastructure (PKI) and security strategy. LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-a-failla-7161611/)

Mark is a respected IT security professional with over 20 years of experience across a diverse range of roles, organisations and industries. As the AAPAC lead for Cyber Defence, Mark has led the development of local technical cyber capability across the region. LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marksayer/)

Recorded 29 July 2020 courtesy of Accenture.

Series #1 - Episode 195 - Accenture Podcast Series: Why threat intelligence is your best defence - Accenture’s new Cyber Fusion Centre, Sydney (https://blubrry.com/mysecurity/57136545/episode-195-accenture-podcast-series-why-threat-intelligence-is-your-best-defence-accentures-new-cyber-fusion-centre-sydney/)

Series #2 - Episode 204 - Accenture Podcast Series: The IT-OT attack surface and developing Australia's cybersecurity posture (https://blubrry.com/mysecurity/60139392/episode-204-accenture-podcast-series-the-it-ot-attack-surface-and-developing-australias-cybersecurity-posture/)

Interview with Dan Holman, CEO and Eric Flis, COO the co-founders of Australian OSINT focused start-up, WorldStack (www.worldstack.net (http://www.worldstack.net)).

WorldStack was created to find solutions that turn public data such as web, social media, deep and dark net into actionable intelligence. Their open source intelligence solutions automate the collection and analysis of data from the surface deep and dark web to generate actionable intelligence at scale. Applications include cyber threat intelligence, background screening, data breach detection, security and risk monitoring, and fraud detection.

Dan holds a degree in Computer Science and has completed certifications in software engineering, security engineering, systems analysis, security operations and personnel security vetting. Dan is passionate about using open source information to help protect organisations and individuals through better decision making, in particular, using this information to help the vulnerable and those who cannot protect themselves

Eric holds a Master’s degree in Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism and has completed training in various other OSINT area as well as security and risk. Eric has been involved in using OSINT techniques since 2006 and is very passionate about using OSINT to help protect organisations assets, be it information or people.

Recorded 31 July 2020 courtesy of MySecurity Media.