Risky Business

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

Inside the new American “e2ee busting” bill

Julian Assange hit with (another) superseding indictment

Trustwave uncovers sneaky Chinese accounting software backdoor

Much, much more…

This week’s show is brought to you by Okta. They are, of course, the identity and auth giant and one of the few sponsors we actually approached last year for 2020 because, well, they are very good at what they do. This week Marc will be joining us to talk about a privacy-related topic. The discussion is nuanced, but it’s basically about how the public perception of privacy risks has diverged from the reality/ Further, that the COVID-19 crisis and the advent of digital contact tracing apps have actually brought general concerns around digital privacy to the fore.

You can subscribe to the new Risky Business newsletter, Seriously Risky Business, here.

You can subscribe to our new YouTube channel here.

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 and Adam discuss the week’s security news, including:

Australia “under attack” - a wrap

Microsoft releases more security protections for E5 customers

US to introduce “anti encryption” bill

Shady encrypted phone company owned by the cops

NSA to offer filtered DNS services to defence industry

MORE

This week’s sponsor is Kasada. They offer a service that eliminates synthetic/bot traffic from the web. Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is an investor and has joined Kasada’s board. Kasada’s CEO Pascal Podvin is this week’s sponsor guest.

You can subscribe to the new Risky Business newsletter, Seriously Risky Business, here.

You can subscribe to our new YouTube channel here.

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

This podcast is brought to you by the Cyber Initiative at the Hewlett Foundation. They gave us a grant so we can do these podcast interviews that have relevance to cyber policy, so big thanks to the Cyber Initiative at the Hewlett Foundation for funding this work.

Today we’re chatting with Citizen Lab Senior Researcher John Scott-Railton about the work they did investigating the Indian hacker-for-hire firm BellTrox.

For those of you who didn’t catch the news, The Citizen Lab, which operates out of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, dropped a huge report a couple of weeks back that lays Belltrox’s operations bare. As you’ll hear this company attempted to hack tens of thousands of email accounts belonging to everyone from government officials to hedge fund managers and activists.

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

Facebook commissioned custom 0day to de-cloak child sex predator

IP stack bugs to plague IoT, ICS for years

Sandworm was doxxed by the NSA and hardly anyone noticed

Congress demands answers on 2015 Juniper NetScreen back door investigation

Amazon, Microsoft join moratorium on sale of facial recognition to police

Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Signal Sciences. And instead of having one of their staff on the show, they nominated one of their customers to appear instead. So in this week’s sponsored segment we’re going to hear from Keith Hoodlet. Keith is currently the Senior Manager of Application Experience at Thermo Fisher Scientific, a $137 billion company. He built their appsec program and he’ll be along later on to talk through all of that. It’s a rapid-fire interview about how he was able to get started and make a dent quickly. Keith used to co-host the Application Security Weekly podcast and he’s worked for Bugcrowd and Veracode. He’s a cool guy, it’s a great interview, make sure you stick around for that one.

You can subscribe to the new Risky Business newsletter, Seriously Risky Business, here.

You can subscribe to our new YouTube channel here.

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 and Adam discuss the week’s security news, including:

Full scale of Indian hacker-for-hire firm revealed

IBM exits facial recognition

Contact tracing apps flop

Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by AttackIQ.

AttackIQ’s Chris Kennedy will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to talk about how for some organisations threat intelligence has moved from a nice-to-have to being central to blue team efforts. As you’ll hear he says MITRE ATT&CK makes threat intel actionable, and some orgs playing on hard mode are really kicking some goals that way.

You can subscribe to the new Risky Business newsletter, Seriously Risky Business, here.

You can subscribe to our new YouTube channel here.

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

The Soap Box podcasts we run here at Risky.Biz are wholly sponsored affairs – everyone you hear in a soap box podcast, paid to be here.

The idea is vendors get to come on to the show and chat about their products, what their stuff does, the thinking behind it, so on and so on.

Today we’re hearing from Justin McCarthy of strongDM.

Essentially strongDM makes a product that provisions secure access to engineers who need to access various back end services.

You can think of them as an identity aware proxy of sorts, but for engineers. So instead of provisioning regular users with access to web applications like a typical identity aware proxy, a strongDM user will use the product to get access to the production database, or to kubernetes, or other services like SSH.

And since the COVID crisis kicked off, business has gone pretty berserk.

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

NSA warns of Sandworm Exim exploitation

Huawei CFO extradition process to continue

Google TAG implicates Indian hacker-for-hire outfits in espionage

Black lives matter

F–k police brutality

This week’s sponsor interview is with Marco Slaviero of Thinkst Canary. He’ll be talking through a few of the partnerships Thinkst has entered into over the years. He’ll also talk a bit about some new Canary integrations, such as a new one with HD Moore’s Rumble.

You can subscribe to the new Risky Business newsletter, Seriously Risky Business, here.

You can subscribe to our new YouTube channel here.

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

This feature podcast series is produced with the assistance of the Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. They gave us a grant so we could spend more time focussing on issues around cyber policy, and today we’re really going to hook in to a topic that’s near and dear to my heart: alternative approaches to dealing with ransomware.

Regular listeners to the podcast would know that for the last year or so, my cohost Adam Boileau and I have been talking a lot about how governments might involve non law enforcement agencies in a response to the big game ransomware epidemic. To discuss that, we’re joined by Bobby Chesney, the co-founder of the Lawfare blog and a very highly respected figure in US national security circles.

After we hear from Bobby we’re chatting with Mieke Eoyang about more traditional cyber law enforcement concepts. Mieke is the Vice President of Third Way’s national security program and she’ll be joining us to tell us how traditional cybercrime enforcement might be improved.

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

German intelligence warns of widespread Russian infrastructure hacks

NGOs urge COVID-19 hack de-escalation

UK mulls total Huawei ban… we think it’s a done deal

DHS warning on 5G “moronavirus”

Wen jailbreak? NOW JAILBREAK!!

iOS 14 leaks

Much, much more…

This week’s sponsor interview is with Casey Ellis, the CTO of Bugcrowd. As you’ll hear, Bugcrowd did a survey of managers in security to see if their attitudes around work from home had changed since the COVID-19 crisis, and yes, they have. Casey also tells us about Bugcrowd’s latest LevelUp virtual conference. That conversation led to him sharing some interesting insights about trends amongst the crowd of registered testers on Bugcrowd’s platform.

You can subscribe to the new Risky Business newsletter, Seriously Risky Business, here.

You can subscribe to our new YouTube channel here.

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 and Adam discuss the week’s security news, including:

easyJet breach linked to Chinese APT

Israel claims credit for attack against Iranian port

Chinese-linked crew behind Taiwan energy hax

Crypto-wars reignite over Pensacola shooter’s phone

Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Gigamon Threat Insight. Will Peteroy is our sponsor guest in this week’s show and he drops by with a pretty sobering message: large companies are provisioning VPN access to all and sundry right now because of the COVID-19 crisis and ransomware crews are sailing right on in on the back of that access.

You can subscribe to the new Risky Business newsletter, Seriously Risky Business, here.

You can subscribe to our new YouTube channel here.

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