Risky Business

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

Cyber Command kicks the IRA off the Internet on election day

WSJ reporting on Iran vs Australia likely incorrect

Two Russian cybersecurity professionals sentenced over treason

DPRK spearphishing US summit participants

LOTS of technical news and research this week

This week’s show is brought to you by Remediant. Their CEO Tim Keeler will be along in this week’s sponsor segment to talk about how they’re doing “virtual directory binding” to make managing Linux accounts via Active Directory less traumatic. If you’re struggling with horrible, horrible PAM solutions in your devops environments have a listen to that one.

*** NOTE FROM PAT: I made some mistakes in the recording phase of this week’s show. As a result, my vocal audio is pretty atrocious. Sorry! ***

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

Adam Boileau is along this week to discuss the week’s security news, which also features comment from Dmitri Alperovitch, Klon Kitchen and The Grugq. We cover:

Former USAF counterintelligence official indicted over spearphishing, leaking secrets

Australia’s major political parties targeted by APT crew that totally isn’t Chinese. (It’s Chinese)

More on the Iran DNS hijacks

Venezuelans phished by their own government

China’s mass surveillance of Uyghur Muslims laid bare in data leak

Millions of Swedes have their healthcare help-line calls exposed

Bank of Valletta dodges a bullet, catches fraudulent transfers

VK gets Samy’d

Calls for GDPR-like law in USA

Marcus “Malwaretech” Hutchins has a bad week

This week’s sponsor interview is with Jason Haddix of Bugcrowd. He’ll be along to talk a little more about what Bugcrowd calls next-generation pentests. They claim one of their tests is sufficient for compliance purposes under PCI, ISO or NIST and they’ve had a third party auditor prove that for them. They also say the service has really taken off despite being launched only a couple of months ago.

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

Adam Boileau is back in the news seat this week. We talk about:

Amazing Reuters report on UAE’s “Project Raven”

Bezos’ dick pics, Saudi Arabia and a creepy brother

US government security staffers play post-shutdown catch-up

Krebs: National Credit Union Administration probably pwned

Russia to test complete disconnection from wider Internet

China suspected of involvement in Australian parliament hack

Trump likely to ban all Chinese telco equipment makers from US builds

Lasers

Google: iOS privesc 0days were in wild

$145m in cryptocurrency lost forever due to exchange CEO death

VFEmail has a very bad day

Facebook/Apple cert wars

MORE

This week’s show is brought to you by AustCyber, a nonprofit funded by grants from the Australian government. Its goal is to promote Australia’s cybersecurity industry.

AustCyber CEO Michelle Price will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to tell us all about what they’ve got planned for RSA.

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

As regular listeners know, this isn’t the regular weekly Risky Business podcast, all Soap Box podcasts are paid promotions. We ran 10 of these last year, we’re running more of them this year – the total number is up to 14, but we’re running fewer of our other promotional podcast Snake Oilers.

In this Soap Box podcast we’re chatting with a company with a legitimately fascinating origin story.

You remember how in 2017 and 2018 people were running all these shonky initial coin offerings where they’d sell off millions of dollars of crypto tokens on the basis of a two minute video and a whitepaper? What happened in a lot of these cases is after the ICO the founders would take the money, launder it and move to the Bahamas.

Well, Polyswarm raised its money in an ICO. About $26m US dollars (!!). And, because they weren’t mainlining the ICO Kool-Aid, they cashed out about half of what they raised into real money before cryptocurrency values crashed.

Instead of moving to the Bahamas, they actually stuck around to build the business that tokenholders had chosen to fund. Their token value has crashed like everyone else’s has, but that doesn’t matter – they’re funded, and because of their unconventional funding source they don’t have a whole bunch of venture capitalists breathing down their neck.

So, what’s the business? It’s a marketplace for threat detection. Yes, my pinned tweet says “I do not want your blockchain expert as a guest on my podcast,” and yes, this company does use blockchain fairy dust, but as you’ll hear, the blockchain element to this business isn’t really what it’s about. Indeed, the founder and CEO of Polyswarm, Steve Bassi, says he would find life a lot easier in many ways if they weren’t actually using blockchain tech here as a marketplace enabler. He’s also banned himself from ever attending a blockchain conference again in his life.

Ok, so what is the Polyswarm marketplace and how does it work. As you’ll hear in this interview it took me a bit to actually understand exactly what they’re doing here, but what they’ve essentially built is a marketplace for AV. The best way to explain this is to just explain how it works. If you’re an enterprise client or an MSSP you can submit a sample to this marketplace. You’re submitting it with a question – is this file bad or good – and you attach a tokenised value to the answer.

On the other side of the equation are all these AV engines. Big ones, small ones… even tiny little micro engines that are only good at detecting very niche threats. So the enterprise submits the sample – that can be a whole file or just a hash – and it gets distributed to all the people who are running these AV engines. They scan the file, and if they’re super confident on an answer, they return that answer as well as a tokenised stake as a measure of their confidence. The idea is you can have a competitive marketplace for threat detection in which even niche players can participate. Polyswarm CEO Steve Bassi joined me to talk me through the whole concept.

There’s no news segment in this week’s show. Instead, you’re going to hear a long-form feature interview I did with the NSA’s Rob Joyce.

Rob is probably best known for his tenure as special assistant to the president on cybersecurity and for being the cybersecurity coordinator on the US National Security Council.

He also served as acting homeland security advisor to Donald Trump for a short time following the departure of Tom Bossert from the Whitehouse. In May last year he went back to NSA where he now serves as a senior advisor to the director of NSA for Cyber Security strategy.

Some of you may also know Rob for his blockbuster January 2016 conference talk “disrupting nation state hackers” back when he was heading TAO at NSA. Good talk, that one, and it’s on YouTube. (Link below.)

But gradually over the last couple of years Rob has emerged as a sort of friendly-face of NSA, at least as far as the infosec industry is concerned. He’s spoke at DEF CON last year, he often appears at events and on panels and he’s doesn’t seem terrified of actually comment on things.

This is a huge departure from the historical way agencies like NSA handled themselves. But as you’ll hear, Rob sees this new approach as being vital to the NSA’s current-day mission.

Topics covered include:

DoJ indictments of foreign gov hackers

5G networks and Huawei

Kaspersky AV

Bloomberg’s Supermicro story

Software and hardware supply chain security

The USG aggressively burning adversary tools

We also have a sponsor interview for you this week with Zane Lackey, the co-founder of Signal Sciences. I guess you’d call these guys “next generation WAF,” more on that later… but Zane will be along a little bit later with some pretty incredible stats on the way security spending has changed over the last year or two. Money is just piling into appsec while spending on some other controls is actually reducing. It’s a sign of change.

Adam Boileau co-hosts this week’s Risky Business episode. We talk about:

The Huawei indictments

The epic Facetime logic bug

The even more epic Exchange privesc bug

CISA’s “fix yo DNS” directive

Black Cube busted doing shady stuff to Citizen Lab

Yahoo shareholder lawsuit settlement makes directors twitchy

Internet filtering kicks off in Venezuela

Much, much MORE!

This week’s show is brought to you by Thinkst Canary – they make hardware honeypots and the tools you need to deploy canarytokens at scale. They also make virtual honeypots! This week Thinkst’s founder Haroon Meer will be along to wave his finger at basically all of us over what he sees as the security discipline’s tendency to not really learn anything from security conferences. It’s “contertainment,” he says, followed by “GET OFF MY LAWN”.

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

Alex Stamos co-hosts this week’s episode. Topics discussed include:

DNC says Russia tried to own its servers in November 2018

South Korean Defence Ministry owned

Lazarus Group busy in Chile

West African banks suffer multiple intrusions

Michael Cohen admits rigging online poll for Trump

Nine charged over SEC hack

More USG SSL certificates due to expire

apt-get remote root RCE

Don’t use your Garmin to scope your murder escape route

Big plot twist in viral video outrage

This week’s show is brought to you by Duo Security, which I guess is now Cisco Duo Security. Wendy Nather - Duo’s head of advisory CISOs - will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to talk about a topic near and dear to my heart: victim shaming. That’s a good one so please do stick around for that.

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

This week’s podcast features Patrick and Adam talking about the week’s security news, including:

Huawei staffer arrested for spying in Poland

Conviction in DPRK SWIFT hack against Bangladesh central bank

El Chapo used Flexispy to spy on mistresses and staff

NSO group on charm offensive

Iran hijacking DNS entries, conducting PITM with DV certs

Kaspersky tipped NSA on Hal Martin

US government certificates expire amid shutdown

Idiot sentenced to 10 years prison for DDoSing children’s hospital

This week’s show is brought to you by Trail of Bits! Trail of Bits is a security engineering firm and consultancy based in New York. They aren’t a typical pen-testing firm, they build as well as break.

In this week’s sponsor interview JP Smith from Trail of Bits joins us to talk about the work he put in to CSAW. Not the Centre for Sustainable Architecture with Wood, which is a thing, but the Cyber Security Awareness Worldwide CTF.

JP is a sick man. He’s sick. You’ll hear about the mind-bending CTF challenges he put together for CSAW. Remarkably, some teams were actually able to solve his problems, some of which featured complex numbers mapped to a four dimensional unit sphere being used to drive the rotation of a virtual IBM Selectric typewriter golfball in Second Life. As I say, he’s a sick, sick man.

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

In this week’s show Adam Boileau and Patrick Gray discuss the security news of the last few weeks, including:

German politicians pwnt, suspect arrested

Possible ransomware attack affects US newspapers

Mass 2FA bypasses impacting Gmail users in Middle East

Emergency warning system in Australia popped

Ethereum Classic double-spend attack a sign of things to come

EU to fund open source bug bounties

Attackers steal details of 1,000 North Korean defectors

Doing the Bloomberg hack for real at 35C3

El Chapo should have used Signal

Much, much more…

This week’s show is brought to you by Cylance! BlackBerry announced that it’s acquiring Cylance for $1.4bn (I don’t know if that’s closed yet) which is great news for all the founders and early employees there – some of whom I know reasonably well. So congrats to team Cylance on that!

But we’re not talking about that this week. Instead, Cylance’s very own Scott Scheferman joins us to talk about the MITRE ATT&CK framework and how it’s informing their product dev. There’s some product talk in that interview but there’s also some real meat there so I let it run long. Scott says we’re close to the terrible situation where security companies are going to start using MITRE ATT&CK as a marketing tool, like “Full MITRE ATT&CK coverage!”

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

Soap Box is the podcast series we do here at Risky.Biz where we have detailed discussions with vendors about all sorts of stuff – sometimes it’s about their products, other times it’s about the landscape as they see it, other times it’s about research they’ve done that they want to promote. Soap Box is a wholly sponsored podcast series – just so you know – so everyone you hear on it, paid to be on it.

And this Soap Box edition is brought to you by Respond Software. We’ll be joined by Respond Software’s co-founder and CEO, Mike Armistead to talk about Respond’s tech. Mike has an interesting history in infosec… he actually co-founded Fortify, the software security firm, before winding up at HPE as the VP and General Manager for Arcsight, the poor fella. But he’s free now! Freeeeeee! And he’s co-founded the venture we’re talking about today.

So, what’s the idea behind Respond Software? Well, to break it down into really simple terms the whole idea is to take all the zillions of events your existing security kit flags and distill them down into meaningful alerts. To put this into context, Mike says that during the 30 days in the lead up to the interview we recorded, his customers fed two billion events into their Respond Software gear. Of those two billion events, Respond deemed 7 million of them worthy of escalation, and from there determined 45,000 were malicious, but then… and this is the cool part, this only resulted in 350 incidents raised by the Respond platform. From 2 billion to 350.

So it’s a great idea – tune out the crap and look at meaningful correlations. Automate the decision making around what’s serious and what’s not. You’ve got all this gear, maybe you’ve got something aggregating it, but what’s applying decision logic to it?

Mike sent me a list of software Respond currently supports: all manner of IDSes, AV and EDR suites and then other stuff that gives their software the context it needs to make better decisions, like active directory, Nessus, Qualys, Splunk, QRadar… whatever! The idea is, plug ALL your over-alerting crap into Respond Software’s gear and it’ll do a good enough job of correlating events that you’ll only have to deal with what’s real. Well, that’s the pitch. Mike Armistead joined me to to flesh it out a bit more.