Decipher Security Podcast

Zero Cool. Acid Burn. Phantom Phreak. Cereal Killer. Lord Nikon. Twenty-three years after its release, the movie Hackers is still a touchstone for a generation that grew up with AOL disks in their mail, Jolt cola in their fridges, pagers on their belts, and Rollerblades on their feet. Hackers introduced us to Angelina Jolie and Matthew Lillard, brought hacking into the mainstream consciousness and gave us the iconic line: Hack the planet. This is Deciphering Hackers. 

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Released in 1983 and starring '80s movie icons Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy, and Dabney Coleman, WarGames was a huge hit in theaters and remains a classic 35 years later. The movie helped shape the popular perception of hackers as mischievous teens with too much curiosity for their own good and illustrates many of the security mistakes people and organizations still make. Dennis Fisher is joined by Zoe Lindsey and Peter Baker of Duo Security to break down the first true hacker movie: WarGames.

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Communicating the fundamentals of privacy and security is a difficult task, but no more so than helping security and privacy professionals with the fundamentals of communication. In her role at Uber, Melanie Ensign is responsible for both of those tasks, helping customers and journalists understand the company's security and privacy principles, while also working with executives, engineers, and others inside Uber to help them understand the way those principles are communicated externally. It's a long way from the career as a shark researcher Melanie envisioned for herself as a teenager, but the two paths have more in common than you might imagine. She joins Dennis Fisher to talk about her marine biology aspirations and the challenges and rewards she's found in her time in the security field.

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Hacker Katie Moussouris probably knows more about bug bounties, how companies use and misuse them, and the incentives that they create than just about anyone on the planet. She created Microsoft's first bounty program in 2013 and has spent the years since traveling the world advising companies on how to work with security researchers and whether a bounty program is the right move. She talks with Dennis Fisher about why the security industry keeps making the same mistakes over and over and how the lack of talent on the coding and maintenance side of the equation is hurting security.

Learn more about Katie's company Luta Security.

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Decipher Editor-in-Chief Dennis Fisher talks with Mikhail Davidov of Duo Labs about his new research paper on Apple's T2 security chip. The T2 is now included in all of the forthcoming MacBook Pro models and it handles a wide variety of security functions. Mikhail spent eight months on a technical deep dive on the T2 and found a lot of interesting things in that time.

Red the technical paper here.

Read the Decipher story on the T2 research here. 

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Decipher Editor-in-Chief Dennis Fisher talks with Richard Bejtlich, a veteran security practitioner, consultant, and author, about his new role at Corelight, the evolution of network defense, and the difficulty of running complex incident response investigations.

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Andy Greenberg of Wired magazine joins Decipher Editor-in-Chief Dennis Fisher to discuss his in-depth cover story on the NotPetya malware outbreak of 2017 that masqueraded as ransomware but actually destroyed the networks of a number of large corporations and caused billions of dollars in damages.

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Decipher editors Dennis Fisher and Fahmida Rashid preview the talks at Black Hat USA 2018 and discuss the ways in which the conference has evolved in recent years.

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