Decipher Security Podcast

The first Mission: Impossible film gave us so many wonderful gifts: goofy Usenet searches, Apple PowerBook action shots, CIA mainframe hacking, and some great mid-career Tom Cruise running. Before the series turned into a high-stakes, high-budget action franchise, the original film was a fun, sometimes goofy heist story with a vein of technobabble running through it. This is Deciphering Mission: Impossible.

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Dennis Fisher sits down with Fahmida Rashid, Mike Mimoso, and Jessy Irwin at the RSA Conference in San Francisco to talk about the major themes of the conference.

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Dennis Fisher talks with Yonathan Klijnsma of RiskIQ about his new research into Magecart Group 4, the background and tactics of the web skimming group, and how the defender community responds through takedowns and other techniques.

Read the RiskIQ report here.
Read our coverage of Magecart here. 

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Sneakers isn't just one of the best hacker movies of all time, it's one of the best movies ever. Full stop. The tale of a crew of outcasts with sketchy pasts who break into companies for a living (not a very good one), Sneakers has an all-star cast, a killer script, and a terrifyingly prescient story about information and its control over our lives in the modern age. This is Deciphering Sneakers.

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All of the movies in the Die Hard franchise include more than their share of absurd stunts and ridiculous moments, and the fourth installment, Live Free or Die Hard, sets the standard. From throwing a car at a helicopter to hacking the power grid to Kevin Smith's basement lair to everything Justin Long does, this movie is 128 minutes of over the top stunts, stunt hacking, and stunted dialogue. This is Deciphering Live Free or Die Hard.

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David Scott Lewis was part of the early generation of computer hobbyists who built their own machines, learned through trial-and-error, and paved the way for the hackers and tinkerers who would follow in their footsteps in the next few decades. As a college student in the late 1970s, David met two screenwriters who were working on a script about a brilliant scientist and his teen protege. That story eventually evolved into the script for WarGames and David became the inspiration for Matthew Broderick's character, David Lightman. Dennis Fisher sat down with David to talk about his introduction to hacking, his involvement in WarGames, and how he's stayed involved in the scene throughout the years.

If you'd like to contact David, send an email to [email protected]. 

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When The Net hit theaters in 1995, the World Wide Web was in its infancy, Internet access was spotty, slow, and unreliable, and the concepts of identity theft and database hacking were completely foreign to most people. Sandra Bullock's character Angela Bennett is a smart and resourceful but introverted systems analyst whose world is thrown into chaos by a shadowy hacking group, a story that foreshadows much of what has come to pass in the nearly 25 years since. This is Deciphering The Net, with Fahmida Rashid, Melanie Ensign, and Dennis Fisher.

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Dennis Fisher talks with Nate Cardozo, senior information security counsel at the EFF, about a proposal from the UK's spy agency, GCHQ, that would insert a backdoor into encrypted communications by adding a "ghost", or invisible third party, to two-party conversations. The proposal is the latest in a long line of ideas to weaken or cripple encryption systems in the name of easier access for law enforcement and Dennis and Nate discuss the risks of the ghost method as well as what it could portend for users in other countries.

Read Nate's piece on the ghost proposal on the EFF Deeplinks blog.

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Dennis Fisher talks with Stefan Tanase, a principal security researcher at Ixia, about the concept of Internet Balkanization, the consequences of large-scale censorship for users, and how technical and policy experts can help address the problem. 

You can watch Stefan's TedX Bucharest talk on this topic here: https://youtu.be/liSD3lL_-Kw

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For anyone who has worked a thankless job for a tyrannical, ineffectual boss, Office Space touches a nerve. The story of a trio of programmers--Peter Gibbons, Michael Bolton, and Samir Nagheenanajar--at the faceless Initech in the late 1990s, Office Space mixes the existential dread of dead-end jobs with the illicit thrill of deciding to get back at your boss and everyone else. In this case, the revenge comes in the form of a virus that steals money from Initech and transfers it to Peter and his pals. Office Space is perhaps the quintessential tech industry comedy and set the stage for Silicon Valley nearly 20 years later. This is Deciphering Office Space.

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