Decipher Security Podcast

The security community is full of interesting characters who have had meandering, random paths to success, and Adam O'Donnell fits that description quite nicely. A gifted student who studied engineering and went on to earn a Ph.D. in computer science, O'Donnell has been a staff engineer, a startup founder, a political fundraiser, and a member of the famous Cult of the Dead Cow hacking group for nearly 20 years. He joins Dennis Fisher to talk about his introduction to the hacking scene in the '90s, joining the cDc, Beto O'Rourke's influence on the group, and the new book about the cDc.

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Joseph Menn's new book The Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World dives deep into the history of not just the cDc, but also the hacking culture that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and has produced some of the most influential hackers, executives, artists, and even politicians working today. Dennis Fisher talks with Joe about the cDc's founding, its members, its lasting influence on the tech industry and the world at large.

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This week, several separate teams of researchers disclosed new speculative execution attacks against Intel processors. Dennis Fisher spoke with Daniel Gruss of TU Graz in Austria, one of the researchers who developed the Zombieload attack and helped work on some of the others, as well.

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The publication of the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report is an important event every year for the infosec community, and the 2019 version includes analysis of data from more than 41,000 incidents and more than 2,000 actual breaches. Dennis Fisher talks with Alex Pinto of Verizon Enterprise about the trends in this year's report, how the data is collected, synthesized and analyzed, and what surprises the report holds.

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There are good movies, there are bad movies, and then there's Swordfish, a movie that exists in a world beyond your world. It has everything: John Travolta, Halle Berry, guns, an incoherent plot, 128-bit DES encryption, a multi-headed worm. Dennis Fisher, Zoe Lindsey, and Pete Baker break it all down and then we mercifully move on to Three Days of the Condor, a classic of the 1970s paranoia genre and early techno-thriller with an all-time great Robert Redford performance.

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The Carbanak backdoor has been in use for many years by the infamous FIN7 attack team, and researchers at FireEye discovered files containing the source code for the malware on VirusTotal two years ago, but only recently published a detailed analysis of it. Dennis Fisher talks with Michael Bailey, who did much of the source code analysis, about the discovery, the work of pulling the code apart, and what makes Carbanak unique.

Read the FireEye analysis here. 

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DNS hijacking and manipulation is a serious ongoing threat and researchers at Cisco Talos Intelligence Group recently uncovered one such campaign called Sea Turtle that has been running for more than two years. The attackers are well-resourced and likely backed by a nation state, and have targeted intelligence agencies, military organizations, and a DNS registry, among others. Craig Williams of Talos joins Dennis Fisher to discuss the Sea Turtle attacks and the ramifications for the Internet as a whole.

Read the Cisco Talos report here.
Read the Decipher story on Sea Turtle here. 

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Dennis Fisher sits down with Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle to talk about his entry into entry, his development of the Objective See suite of Mac security tools, the state of Mac malware and his Objective By the Sea conference.

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Dennis Fisher talks with hardware security researcher JoeFitzPatrick at the CanSecWest conference about the challenges of finding and verifying hardware implants and the questions people should ask when these stories emerge.

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There are heist movies, there are hacker movies, and then there's Ocean's Eleven. Blessed with one of the all-time great ensemble casts and an airtight script, Ocean's Eleven combines brilliant social engineering tactics, clever hacking ideas, revenge, greed, and Julia Roberts. This is Deciphering Ocean's Eleven.

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