The Defender's Advantage Podcast

Mandiant Senior Consultant Alishia Hui joins host Luke McNamara to discuss all things tabletop exercise related. Alishia walks through the elements of a tabletop exercise, important preparatory steps, the success factors for a good exercise, and how organizations can implement lessons learned. 

https://cloud.google.com/transform/the-empty-chair-guess-whos-missing-from-your-cybersecurity-tabletop-exercise

https://www.mandiant.com/sites/default/files/2021-09/ds-tabletop-exercise-000005-2.pdf

Vicente Diaz, Threat Intelligence Strategist at VirusTotal, joins host Luke McNamara to discuss his research into using LLMs to analyze malware. Vicente covers how he used Gemini to analyze various windows binaries, the use cases this could help address for security operations, technical challenges with de-obfuscation, and more.

For more on this topic: https://blog.virustotal.com/2023/04/introducing-virustotal-code-insight.html

https://blog.virustotal.com/2024/04/analyzing-malware-in-binaries-and.html

Josh Fleischer, Principal Security Analyst with Mandiant's Managed Defense organization sits down with host Luke McNamara to discuss trends in MFA bypass and how threat actors are conducting adversary in the middle (AiTM) attacks to gain access to targeted organizations. Josh walks through a case study of MFA bypass, how token theft occurs, the increasing amount of AiTM activity with more features being added to phishing kits, and more. 

Host Luke McNamara is joined by Clement Lecigne, security researcher at Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) to discuss his work tracking commercial surveillance vendors (CSVs). Clement dives into the history and evolution of the CSV industry, how these entities carry out operations against platforms like mobile, and the nexus of this problem into the increasing rise of zero-day exploitation. 

For more on TAG's work on CSVs:
https://blog.google/threat-analysis-group/state-backed-attackers-and-commercial-surveillance-vendors-repeatedly-use-the-same-exploits/

https://blog.google/threat-analysis-group/commercial-surveillance-vendors-google-tag-report/

https://blog.google/threat-analysis-group/googles-efforts-to-identify-and-counter-spyware/

Mandiant APT Researcher Ofir Rozmann joins host Luke McNamara to discuss some notable Iranian cyber espionage actors and what they have been up to in 2024. Ofir covers campaigns from suspected IRGC-nexus actors such as APT42 and APT35-related clusters, as well as activity from TEMP.Zagros.  

For more on this topic, please see:  

https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/tool-of-first-resort-israel-hamas-war-in-cyber/

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/untangling-iran-apt42-operations?e=48754805

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/suspected-iranian-unc1549-targets-israel-middle-east?e=48754805

Mandiant Consultants Trisha Alexander, Muhammed Muneer, and Pat McCoy join host Luke McNamara to discuss Mandiant's recently launched services for securing AI. They discuss how organizations can proactively approach securing the implementation of AI workloads, red-team and test these security controls protecting generative AI models in production, and then also employ AI within the security organization itself. 

For more, please see: https://cloud.google.com/security/solutions/mandiant-ai-consulting

Mandiant consultants Will Silverstone (Senior Consultant) and Omar ElAhdan (Principal Consultant) discuss their research into cloud compromise trends over 2023.  They discuss living off the land techniques in the cloud, the concept of the extended cloud attack surface, how organizations can better secure their identities, third party cloud compromise trends, and more.  

Will and Omar's talk at Google Next: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg13kGsN9ok&t=2s

Michael Raggi (Principal Analyst, Mandiant Intelligence) joins host Luke McNamara to discuss Mandiant's research into China-nexus threat actors using proxy networks known as “ORBs” (operational relay box networks). Michael discusses the anatomy and framework Mandiant developed to map out these proxy networks, how ORB networks like SPACEHOP are leveraged by China-nexus APTs, and what this all means for defenders. 

For more,  check out: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/china-nexus-espionage-orb-networks

Follow Michael on X at @aRtAGGI 

Mandiant Principal Analysts John Wolfram and Tyler McLellan join host Luke McNamara to discuss their research in the "Cutting Edge" blog series, a series of investigations into zero-day exploitation of Ivanti appliances.  John and Tyler discuss the process of analyzing the initial exploitation, and the attribution challenges that emerged following the disclosure and widespread exploitation by a range of threat actors.  They also discuss the role a suspected Volt Typhoon cluster played into the follow-on exploitation, and share their thoughts on what else we might see from China-nexus zero-day exploitation of edge infrastructure this year.  

For more on this research, please check out: 

Cutting Edge, Part 1: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/suspected-apt-targets-ivanti-zero-day
Cutting Edge, Part 2: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/investigating-ivanti-zero-day-exploitation
Cutting Edge, Part 3: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/investigating-ivanti-exploitation-persistence
Cutting Edge, Part 4: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/ivanti-post-exploitation-lateral-movement

Follow John on X at  @Big_Bad_W0lf_
Follow Tyler on X at @tylabs

Jurgen Kutscher, Mandiant Vice President for Consulting, joins host Luke McNamara to discuss the findings of the M-Trends 2024 report.  Jurgen shares his perspective on the "By the Numbers" data, the theme of evasion of detection in this year's report, and how Mandiant consultants have been leveraging AI in purple and red teaming operations. 

For more on the M-Trends 2024 report: http://cloud.google.com/security/m-trends