Harrison Van Riper and Rafael Amado join Michael Marriott to discuss the latest stories from the week. This week’s podcast has a strong Guy Richie flavor, with a focus on lock, stock and ru smoking barrels. We begin by discussing October’s hot ransomware activity, including the most popular variants, common targets, and mitigation advice. Second, we discuss sliding stock value amid reports of data breaches: we dig into the Cathay Pacific and Facebook breaches. And, finally we discuss the recent attribution of Triton malware to a Russian entity and why it’s TTPs you should care about.

Following on from last week’s conversation on how managed service providers can increase your attack surface, Simon Hall and Richard Gold join Rafael Amado to discuss supply chain risks. With so much to cover, the team break this topic down into hardware, software and third-party service risks, including examples such as the MeDoc-NotPetya campaign and the recent SuperMicro hardware allegations. As always, Richard and Simon cover some useful good practices for those looking to improve their risk management processes.

Digital Shadows CISO Rick Holland, Dr Richard Gold and Simon Hall join Rafael Amado to cover the Hidden Cobra FASTCash campaign alert issued by US authorities, detailing ATM cash out campaigns performed by North Korean actors. The team look over the Five Eyes joint report into publicly available hacking tools. And, finally, are companies who use MSPs at greater risk of attack? For more on the Powershell blog referenced by the Five Eyes report, visit: https://www.digitalshadows.com/blog-and-research/powershell-security-best-practices/

In this week’s Shadow Talk, Rafael Amado joins Michael Marriott to discuss Digital Shadows’ latest research on Business Email Compromise. We discuss how criminals are outsourcing this work, and how the exposure of 33,000 finance department credentials is increasing the ease for attackers. However, even without taking over accounts, criminals can get their hands on sensitive financial information. We dig into the 12.5 million exposed email archives that are available through misconfigured online file stores, including invoices, purchase orders, and payments. Finally, we provide advice for mitigating these risks.

Rick Holland, CISO of Digital Shadows, joins Richard Gold and Michael Marriott to discuss the latest cybersecurity news. In part one, we discuss the possible implications of Facebook security flaws affecting 50 million accounts. In part two, one year after reports of the Equifax breach surface, the UK arm has been fined £500,000 by the ICO. We look at the lessons learned.

Simon Hall and Richard Gold join Rafael Amado to focus on the trade-offs between security and usability, as well as the practice of security layering that can often make us more insecure. The team look over security measures such as regular complex password expiry policies that create headaches for organizations and end users, why it’s not easy to make security usable, whether certain security measures such as anti-virus software actually make us more insecure, and what alternative system defences can bridge the gap between security and usability. For the NCSC blog on security and usability, visit: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/security-and-usability-you-can-have-it-all

In this week’s ShadowTalk, Richard Gold and Simon Hall join Michael Marriott to discuss the latest spate of attacks by the threat actor known as Magecart. We dig into the history of Magecart, different approaches to web skimming, and provide advice on how organizations can best protect against this threat.

In this week’s ShadowTalk, Richard Gold and Rafael Amado join Michael Marriott to discuss the latest Department of Justice complaint against an individual working for Chosun Expo, an alleged front for the North Korean state. The individual is accused of involvement in a host of campaigns, including attacks against Sony Pictures Entertainment, banks, defense contractors, and the many victims of the WannaCry ransomware variant. We discuss the most interesting revelations, outlining the different techniques used, and what this all means for organizations.

Dr. Richard Gold and Simon Hall join Rafael Amado to discuss the age-old problem of credential hygiene. We’ve all heard of not reusing passwords, employing two factor authentication and using password vaults, but why then do organizations still struggle with good credential hygiene? We’ll cover the ways in which attackers steal and take advantage of credentials, what most companies are getting wrong, and the steps you can take to improve your overall credential hygiene practices.

This week it was revealed that six new domains registered by APT28, spoofing nonprofit, Senate, and Microsoft domains, have been sinkholed. With November’s US midterm elections fast-approaching, we dive into the latest threats and discuss how organizations can understand the threat posed to them by such malicious actors. Dr Richard Gold, Head of Security Engineering at Digital Shadows, joins Mike Marriott to discuss threat modeling; outlining the steps organizations can take to define their critical assets, understand the threat landscape, and create scenarios based on these. This enables organizations to identify security controls that are in place to mitigate, prevent and detect a specific threat actor's tradecraft, as well as uncover gaps in controls and establish a remediation plan.