Risky Business

This feature podcast was made possible by the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. The foundation has given us grant funding to produce this podcast series, which is designed to educate policymakers in cybersecurity so they can make better decisions.

In this edition you’ll hear an interview I recorded with Mark Dowd.

Mark is a world-renowned security researcher who, some years ago, co-founded a company called Azimuth Security. As you’ll hear, the original plan was to provide security research and consulting services to vendors. But, pretty quickly, Azimuth became a serious player in offensive security, selling exploits and other tools to government agencies in the Five Eyes countries.

We recorded this interview touching on the history of Azimuth, what the public gets wrong when talking about 0day and surveillance, and were this whole thing could go – especially considering writing memory corruption exploits is getting so much harder.

On this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week’s security news, including:

UK, Netherlands and Australia promise offensive response to big ticket ransomware

Wave of major cyber regulation and legislation in USA

Iran up in yer O365s, Russians in yer gmails

Submarine spy guy would have been fine, if he didn’t make one very big mistake

Much, much more

Jonathan Reiber is this week’s sponsor guest. He’s senior director of cybersecurity at AttackIQ and he’s joining us to talk through the US Government’s executive order on Zero Trust. Jonathan says it is actually born of a realisation the US Government needs to do something differently, that the old approaches aren’t working.

Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

On this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week’s security news, including:

Group-IB CEO arrested in Russia for treason

Lawsuit alleges ransomware contributed to hospitalised baby’s death

Nakasone outs self as hound release advocate

Syniverse owned, but we don’t know how badly

Why Google keyword warrants are awesome

Much, much more…

Nucleus co-founder Scott Kuffer is this week’s sponsor guest and the topic is actually a bit hilarious. They’ve found a killer use case that customers are clamouring for: Being able to map vulnerabilities to org groups within your enterprise so you can see who’s slacking off when it comes to patching.

Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

In this edition of the Snake Oilers we’ll hear pitches from three vendors:

Stairwell! A new startup from Chronicle Security co-founder Mike Wiacek

Red Canary explains what modern managed detection and response looks like

Pierre Betouin from Datadog talks about the challenges around bringing together DevOps and Security while providing full-stack security

Links to everything we talked about are in the show notes.

[CORRECTION: Mike Wiacek was originally described as the co-founder of VirusTotal in this podcast. He is in fact a co-founder of Chronicle Security, which absorbed VirusTotal after launching.]

On this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week’s security news, including:

The amazing Yahoo! News story on the former CIA director’s awesome brainwaves

Hostage diplomacy pays off for Huawei CFO

NSA releases great guidance on VPN security

Microsoft has actually hired a cybersecurity executive

Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Material Security. Material’s co-founder Ryan Noon will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to talk about smarter ways to do email retention and destruction. They have a product that interfaces with your mail provider’s API – whether you’re on Google Workspace or O365 – to do things like archive and redact email, and they’re finding their customers are using these features to actually implement retention email strategies.

Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

On this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week’s security news, including:

BlackMatter is back in the USA’s critical supply chain

The FBI and friends apparently got up in REvil’s business

The Azure OMI thing is totally the disaster we were expecting

Much, much more

Brett Winterford is this week’s sponsor guest. These days Brett is a senior director of cybersecurity strategy at Okta, but the reason you might recognise his name is because he took a year off working for vendors to be our newsletter author – he was the founding editor of the Seriously Risky Business newsletter.

He’ll be along to talk about legacy auth and why vendors should have deprecation policies.

Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

On this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss recent security news, including:

Apple 0day has everyone freaking out

So much more 0day in the wild

American Project Raven staffers settle with DoJ

Two absolutely bonkers Azure security problems

SEC tells corporate America to spill on breaches

Much, much more

In this week’s sponsor interview Gigamon’s security product manager Fayyaz Rajpari will be along to talk about some of the work they’ve been doing to integrate their NDR product with Crowdstrike.

Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

Snake Oilers: Get Signal Sciences in your CDN, automate canary generation and cloud your SIEM!

Three solid pitches in this edition…

In this edition of the Snake Oilers we’ll hear pitches from three vendors:

Brian Joe from Fastly talks about its integration of the Signal Sciences WAF into its CDN

Ben Whitham and Dan Holman talk about HoneyTrace, a canary creation and monitoring automation play

Anton Chuvakin from Google Cloud talks about cloud native SIEMs

Links to everything we talked about are in the show notes.

On this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss recent security news, including:

Apple backs down on CSAM measures

FTC shuts down spouseware company

REvil is back!

Confluence boxes are getting owned a lot

Trickbot crew member arrested in South Korea

The Juniper/NSA backdoor story just keeps on truckin’

This week’s show is brought to you by Thinkst Canary. Thinkst’s Jacob Torrey is this week’s sponsor guest. He pops by to tell us about the relaunch of Thinkstscapes, a fantastic quarterly publication that analyses security research.

(Editor’s note: Dmitri Alperovitch is a guest in this podcast and wishes to express his gratitude to Matthew Green of Johns Hopkins University for helping guide him on the Juniper story.)

Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

On this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss recent security news, including:

More info on the Belarusian Cyber Patriots

How infosec overhyped election security risks

Is data ransoming dying?

All about the Azure Cosmos DB drama

Much, much more…

In this week’s sponsor interview Airlock Digital’s Daniel Schell and David Cottingham join the show to talk about EDR bypasses. They are a thing.

Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.