Research Saturday

Researchers from Cisco Talos continue to track malware they've named VPNFilter, a multi-stage infection with multiple capabilities, targeting consumer-grade routers. Craig Williams is head of Cisco Talos Outreach, and he joins us with the details. 

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Researchers at Check Point Research recently discovered vulnerabilities in some LG smartphone keyboards, vulnerabilities that could have been used to remotely execute code with elevated privileges, act as a keylogger and thereby compromise the users’ privacy and authentication details.

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Carbon Black's Chief Cybersecurity Officer Tom Kellerman shares the results of their recent report, Modern Bank Heists: Cyberattacks & Lateral Movement in the Financial Sector.

For the report, they interviewed CISOs at 40 major financial institutions, revealing attack and mitigation trends.

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Researchers from ProtectWise's 401TRG team recently published research linking a variety of new and previously reported Chinese cyber threat groups.

Tom Hegel is a Senior Threat Researcher with the 401TRG, and he joins us to share their findings. 

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Researchers from Flashpoint recently explored ISIS' ability to distribute propaganda across the internet, and their use of major internet service providers to help them achieve persistence.

Ken Wolf is a Senior Analyst at Flashpoint, and he describes what they learned.

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Researchers at Akamai recently published a white paper titled UPnProxy: Blackhat proxies via NAT Injections.

In it, they describe vulnerabilities with Universal Plug and Play capabilities in home routers, and how malicious actors could take advantage of them. 

Chad Seaman is a senior CERT engineer at Akamai, and he's our guide. 

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Researchers from Arbor Networks' ASERT Threat Intelligence Team recently published a report titled, "Lojack Becomes a Double Agent." It outlines how threat actors are altering legitimate recovery utility software and simulating its command and control servers to gain access to target machines. 

Richard Hummel is manager of the ASERT Threat Research Team, and he joins us to describe their work. 

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Bobby Filar is a Principal Data Scientist at Endgame, and coauthor of the research paper, The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation. The report surveys the landscape of potential security threats from malicious uses of AI, and proposes ways to better forecast, prevent, and mitigate these threats. Bobby Filar joins us to discuss the paper, and his views on the evolving role of AI in cybersecurity. 

The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation

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Kevin Epstein is Vice President of Proofpoint's Threat Operations Center. We’re discussing two bits of research with him today. The first is about BlackTDS, a traffic distribution tool for sale in dark web markets. A little later in the show, he’ll tell us about ThreadKit, a document exploit builder.

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Researchers at Trend Micro recently discovered a backdoor targeting MacOS users that they believe is the work of the OceanLotus threat group, an organization previously thought to have launched targeted attacks against human rights organizations, media organizations, research institutes, and maritime construction firms.

Mark Nunnikhoven is VP of Cloud Research at Trend Micro, and he explains what they've learned. 

https://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/new-macos-backdoor-linked-to-oceanlotus-found/

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