Risky Business

[**PLEASE SEE BELOW FOR A CORRECTION**]

This edition of the show features Adam Boileau and Patrick Gray discussing the week’s security news:

The DPRK indictment and subsequent fall out

British Airways gets owned

Webauthn hits some roadblocks

The latest action from Washington DC

Trend Micro has a bad time

Tesla pays out for key-fob clone attack

Tor browser 0day hits Twitter

Much, much more

We’ve got a great sponsor interview for you this week – we’ll be joined by Haroon Meer of Thinkst Canary. They did something unusual over the last couple of weeks – they removed a feature in their Canary product. We’ll be talking about that, and also about the tendency for security software to be too complicated and configurable.

Links to everything that we discussed are below, including the discussions that were edited out. (That’s why there are extras.) You can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

CORRECTION:

The original release of this podcast included discussion of some rumours that turned out to amount to nothing. We had mentioned three data points:

The CISO of American Airlines, Dan Glass, departing a few weeks ago

Someone I know had their AA/Citi credit card re-issued, despite saying they only ever used that card to buy AA fares

A rumour an FBI computer crime investigator is on site at American Airlines

Well, it turns out Dan Glass is a listener, and he got in touch with us after the podcast ran to clear this up. He says the reason he left is actually because AA was offering some very attractive redundancy packages. Following AA’s merger with US Airways the combined group eventually found itself in the position of having too many executives. As many listeners will know, being a CISO is a pretty hardcore job so Dan jumped at the chance to bounce out and have some time off.

As for the FBI being on-site, Dan says that’s not unusual. They’re one of the largest airlines in the world so they’re frequently liaising with LE. As for my pal’s card getting re-issued… who knows?

The point is it looks like these rumours and data points don’t actually add up to much. This is why I rarely run rumour in the podcast and at least try to do some verification. In this case I just didn’t have time, but still, I just should have just held it over until I’d had a chance to make some basic enquiries. It was sloppy. Sorry.

In particular I’d like to apologise to the fraud teams who may have been asked to follow this up, the PR teams who’ve no doubt been fielding questions about this and also to Dan Glass. Although, it must be said Dan and I had a very nice chat and he didn’t seem upset. Thanks for being a chiller, Dan!

Again, I’m sorry. I’ll do better in the future.

Pat

On this edition of Snake Oilers we hear from three companies, and for one of them, it’s actually their product launch!

Assetnote is a cloud asset discovery and security scanning platform spun out of the bug bounty community. If you’re a CSO with any large public attack surface you’ll really want to hear about that one. This platform finds things you didn’t even know your company had online in cloud environments and then scans them for real, actual RCEs. The user interface is awesome, too.

Then we’re going to hear from Pedram Amini of InQuest – they make a box that reassembles files from network packets captured off the wire or funnelled in through ICAP and then rips them to bits looking for badness. They call it deep file inspection and it’s a great way to supplement client side detection, at scale. You can even pass these reassembled files on to multi-AV or cloud services and use this platform to do spot threat hunting. It’s very powerful stuff, and honestly that’s an interview that got me thinking in a new way about detection concepts.

And then finally we’re joined by Omaru Maruatona of Aiculus. Omaru has a PHD in applying machine learning to bank fraud that he obtained while working for one of the big four banks here in Australia. After that he moved on the PwC as a penetration tester and now he’s running Aiculus. Aiculus has developed an API proxy that uses machine learning to detect funky calls. If you’re not satisfied that your API gateway has you completely covered then yeah, you’ll want to listen to that one.

This edition of the show features Adam Boileau and Patrick Gray discussing the week’s security news:

Five Eyes nations send a clear message on encryption

Massive Azure outage

FBI releases political campaign security guidance

Google wants to kill the URL

MEGA.nz plugin owned sideways

Final “Celebgate” hacker sentenced

Google launches font fuzzing tool

Chinese-made Google/Feitian U2F keys under scrutiny

Some interesting TPM research

MUCH MORE

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

AttackIQ founder Stephan Chenette will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to talk to us about a few things – the MITRE attack matrix being one. He’ll also share with us his view that EDR is the most commonly misconfigured security technology he sees out there, and he has pretty good visibilty into things like that because AttackIQ, of course, makes attack simulation software designed to measure the efficacy of these types of solutions.

Links to everything that we discussed are below, including the discussions that were edited out. (That’s why there are extras.) You can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

The widespread adoption of smart and IoT devices – everything from drones and security cameras to thermostats and routers, mean the developers of non-Windows-based malware have been pretty busy lately

In fact, there’s been an almost tenfold increase in the volume of these (ELF) samples submitted to Virus Total over the past two years. That’s according to a cohort of researchers from the Software and System Security group at French graduate school EURECOM, who set out in 2016 to develop an empirical study of non-Windows malware.

They downloaded hundreds of daily candidate samples from Virus Total for a year, resulting in a dataset of more than 10,000 binaries and a tool called Padawan, an automated framework for dynamic analysis of non-Windows malware.

The researchers presented findings earlier this year at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, and more recently at reverse engineering conference RECon in Montreal. Risky Business contributor Hilary Louise recently caught up over the phone with France-based EURECOM doctoral student Emanuele Cozzi who says the land of Linux-type malware analysis is a bit of a nascent field.

We’re going to stick with the revised format this week – we’re going long on news with Adam, then diving right in to the sponsor interview with Zane Lackey of Signal Sciences.

A bunch of you heard my long form, Soap Box interview with Zane from a few weeks back. We’re extending that interview out a bit in this week’s interview. Zane will be outlining what he thinks needs to change in DevSecOps tooling and workflow for things to really work nicely – it’s just a solid 12 minutes of good thinking and advice, that interview, so do stick around for it.

Adam Boileau will join the show to recap the week’s news:

Australia and Japan to ban Huawei from their 5G builds

Struts bug: Big deal or meh?

Voting machine maker ES&S rebuked by researchers AND US gov

The DNC phish that wasn’t

Recapping Andy Greenberg’s Maersk/Notpetya coverage

Instagram adds real 2FA

Windows privesc 0day on teh twittarz

T-Mobile pwned harder than it initially admitted

Log in to Windows with Google accounts

Some hilarious Lazarus group shenanigans

Much, much more

Links to everything that we discussed are below, including the discussions that were edited out. (That’s why there are extras.) You can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.

We’ve got two vendors pitching their wares in this edition of Snake Oilers. First up we’re talking to Rapid7 about its vulnerability scanning and management software. They’ve made some changes and they’ve got a couple more coming. This is bread and butter infosec stuff.

Then we’re going to hear from the team at ITProTV. They’re a video-based online training site, pitching themselves as like a Netflix but for online training. Instead of instructor-led training, they try to make stuff less dry – half hour training videos with two instructors on all sorts of topics.

The online training video sector is just booming right now, and ITProTV’s co-founder and “edutainer” Don Pezet will be along to walk through all of that.

Both of these companies are tracking enquiries originating from the podcast, so please do use the URLs in the show notes below if you’re interested in learning more.

In this podcast you’ll hear an interview I did with Bob Lord, the Chief Security Officer for the Democratic National Committee, the DNC. Bob has previously served as the CISOs for both Yahoo and Twitter, before spending some time in vendorland with Rapid7 as their CISO in residence.

The state-sponsored attack against the DNC is without doubt the most politically consequential data theft event the planet has ever witnessed. It trumped both the Manning/Wikileaks disclosures and “climategate” in terms of impact, and indeed to a large degree the fallout of the DNC hack is still ongoing.

So, I wanted to bring Bob in to talk about his job.

The DNC isn’t a large organisation, in a head office sense. They have about 200 core staff members, but as you’ll hear, a political organisation’s IT setup is pretty atypical. So Bob and I mostly just spoke about how one handles security for an organisation like the DNC.

On this week’s show we’ll be running through the week’s security news, then diving right on in to a sponsor interview with Lauren Pearl of Trail of Bits. She’s joining us to talk about something Trail of Bits have been up to lately: adding features to open source software – and auditing open source software – on behalf of its customers.

I do have a feature interview this week, but it’s a long one so I’ll be breaking that out in to a separate podcast. It’s a nice long chat with Bob Lord, the CSO for the Democratic National Committee. You know, the guy who hid “the server”.

The news we’re covering this week:

Melbourne teenager hacky-hack hacks Apple

Facebook nukes Iranian and RU influence ops

Report: Sealed court order seeks Facebook Messenger E2E intercept

USG ditches PPD-20 equities process

A look at “Intrusion Truth” CN operator doxing ring

Microsoft kills RU phishing domains

PLUS MOAR

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

In this breakout podcast we chat with Adam Boileau about the talks that caught his attention in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago. The Black Hat PR team were kind enough to credential Adam for the con so he could go and see a few talks with his Risky Business hat on.

I was at Black Hat but spent most of my time running around like a headless chicken. These days Vegas week for me is mostly about locking in the next year’s sponsorships, as well as catching up with friends I hardly ever see. The good news is the sponsorship side is done. We’re almost sold out across the weekly show, Snake Oilers and Soap Box until 2020. The bad news is I didn’t really get to go to any talks.

But that’s ok, because Adam went to both Black Hat and DEF CON and he joined me to talk about the highlights from his point of view. This was his first trip to the Vegas cons since 2005, and agreed with me that the content this year was actually pretty bloody good.

I’ve done my best to assemble links to everything Adam talks about into a list below:

Adam and I have just returned from Black Hat and DEF CON in Las Vegas, so in this week’s show we’re going to have a look at the infosec news we missed over last couple of weeks. We did plan to recap Black Hat in this podcast, but we’ve wound up a bit short on space so I’m busting that out into a separate podcast that I’ll publish on Monday. So this podcast will just be a discussion around news plus a sponsor interview.

The news we’re covering:

Australia’s new surveillance/”anti-encryption” laws

Intel SGX vulnerability research

Taiwan Semiconductor WannaCry woes

Details on CYBERCOM op against ISIS

Reddit pwnage

Bitcoin investor sues AT&T over $23m loss

FIN7 arrests

CIA’s loss of scores of China assets may have been hack-related

Massive ATM cashout and SWIFT attack hits Indian bank

Much, much more

Bugcrowd CTO Casey Ellis joins us in this week’s sponsor interview to talk about a few things – firstly, how some research presented at Black Hat by the team at Portswigger is a sign that serious research teams are using bounties to cash in on their serious security research. Then we’ll be talking about the Bugcrowd University initiative and a reboot of the disclose.io project.

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