Podcasts

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

• More info on the Facebook token hack
• Facebook boots “Russian Cambridge Analytica” off platform
• Chinese MSS officer extradited to USA after being lured to Belgium
• NotPetya linked to Sandworm crew
• Czech intelligence services kill Hezbollah APT
• Pentagon travel records pwnt
• No, Khashoggi’s Apple Watch didn’t record his death
• Apple takes aim at Australia’s AA Bill
• US voter records for sale in hack forums
• PHP 5 support ends soon, netpocalypse to commence shortly afterward
• The world’s most hilarious libssh bug
• PLUS MOAR

This week’s show is sponsored by Senrio.

Senrio is best known for doing IoT identification, classification, visualisation and anomaly detection, but they’ve now applied the same approach to general IT. Stephen will be along later in the show to talk about what they’ve been able to engineer here. I’ve actually been working with them on this (in a limited capacity) for a few months and it’s very interesting stuff.

So yeah he’s talking about a feature release, then he’ll be releasing some open source tooling that mine your network metadata and spot interactive shells in your environment, which is handy, and then he’s going to preview some free training he’s doing with some other very well respected security people in New York soon.

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.

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

• Bloomberg’s shaky, disputed report on hardware back doors
• A look back on other false reports about imaginary incidents published by Bloomberg
• GRU operations doxed by GCHQ
• DOJ charges Russian intelligence officers
• APT crews targeting MSPs
• Google+ API exposure the final straw
• Enterprise TLS interception gear is woefully insecure

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.

In this podcast hardware security expert Joe Fitzpatrick, a named source in Bloomberg’s “Big Hack” piece, explains why he felt uncomfortable reading the story when it was published.

He also provided Risky.Biz with emails he sent to Bloomberg, prior to the story’s publication, that said the hardware back-dooring the article described “didn’t make sense”.

The Soap Box podcast series is a wholly sponsored podcast series we do here at Risky.Biz – vendors pay to participate. This soap box edition is brought to you by Trend Micro.

And in this edition we’re speaking with Dustin Childs who works for the Zero Day Initiative. ZDI is the entity responsible for the pwn2own competition. But not just that – they’ve been buying bugs since before it was cool. Everything from enterprise software, to linux bugs.. whatever. You find it, they’ll buy it.

Trend Micro actually owns the ZDI, and there’s a story right there in how that came to pass… but you know what? Trend seems to really be behind the ZDI program.

As you’ll hear, the original idea behind ZDI when it was a TippingPoint thing was so they could write IDS signatures for vulnerabilities that ZDI unearthed. We know today that spinning up sigs for bugs you’re paying for isn’t really a winning strategy for picking up 0day attempts against your computers, so, the question becomes, what do you do with a program like ZDI when you’re Trend Micro?

As it turns out, you do two things with it – there’s the marketing side, but there’s also the constant stream of exploit submissions that come in handy when you’re making endpoint security software.

We’ll also be hearing from Eric Skinner in this podcast – he’s Trend’s VP of Solution Marketing at Trend. Trend is pushing a major release of its endpoint security software and he’s along to spruik that a bit, as well as chiming in on some of the ZDI stuff.

In this podcast I interview Stephen Ridley about Bloomberg’s blockbuster – but so far uncorroborated – story about possible hardware supply chain subversion by the Chinese government.

I also lay out some facts I’ve learned since the story broke.

[CORRECTED] I’ve added a correction to this podcast because the only source I could turn up who would corroborate the Bloomberg piece has retracted their claims.

This is a source who has provided me with good information in the past, I’ve known them for about 15 years and they’re very well plugged in. They showed me photos they said were from a teardown of a supermicro motherboard. These photos showed an unlabelled integrated circuit the source said was likely a hardware back door.

Further, the source said there were other problems with the Supermicro gear, including vulnerable firmware and security functions that just didn’t work properly.

Now the source says the photos were from different equipment, not their teardown of the Supermicro gear, and that they did not find hardware back doors on the Supermicro equipment.

So basically that source’s credibility with me is pretty shot right now, and the best I can do is retract my repetition of the source’s claim that they had verified backdoors in the Supermicro equipment.

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

• Facebook breach impacts 50m accounts
• US courts deny authorities’ attempted FB messenger wiretap
• Uber fined $148m for nondisclosure of 2016 breach
• Fancy Bear-linked UEFI malware appears in wild
• UK Conservative party conference app leaks like sieve
• Twitter bans distribution of “hacked material”
• VPNFilter botnet gets more capabilities
• Duo arrested over $14m cryptocurrency SIM-swap heist
• MOAR

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.

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

• Former NSA staffer gets 66 months over incident at heart of Kaspersky scandal
• Zoho has a very bad week
• Telco lobby group raises some legit concerns over Australia’s “anti-encryption” legislation
• Twitter API leaks DMs
• Equifax fined by UK
• Yubikey 5 enables passwordless Windows logins
• Privacy International has an aneurism
• NSS Labs launches antitrust suit against security software makers
• MOAR

This week’s show is brought to you by Rapid7.

Jen Andre is this week’s sponsor guest. She was the founder of Komand, which was a security automation and orchestration company but is now a part of Rapid7 as of about mid way through last year. I spoke to Jen a bit about how she came to start Komand and where the security automation and orchestration discipline is at right now.

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.

Soap Box is the wholly sponsored podcast series we do where vendors pay to participate.

Our guest in this edition is Jerrod Chong, the SVP of product at Yubico, the makers of Yubikeys. We were originally going to publish this Soap Box with Yubico a few weeks ago, but we delayed it for a very good reason.

This podcast is going out at the same time as a press release from Yubico – they’re releasing the Yubikey 5, and it’s a very significant update.

Regular listeners would have heard me talk about seeing Yubico’s booth at Black Hat – it was like a mosh pit, and I think there are two reasons for that. Firstly, they were giving away keys, (haha) but secondly, they were demonstrating FIDO2 Windows logins over NFC.

With the launch of the Yubikey 5, Yubico has actually delivered passwordless logins for Windows networks. You can do tap only via NFC, tap and pin via NFC, or you can roll old school with USB.

So, Jerrod Chong joined me for this conversation. We talk about the Yubikey 5, and more broadly about the future of authentication and authentication devices.

We’re going to be talking to two people in this podcast and the topic is, for the most part, the introduction of pointer authentication on the latest Apple iPhones. This is a development that flew under the radar of most of the infosec media and it’s significant because it is going to basically wipe out ROP exploits as we know them. There’s no such thing as a perfect mitigation, but Apple has leveraged some recent ARM features to really lock down their devices.

In addition to the pointer authentication suff they’ve also made some changes that will affect the ability of companies like Cellebrite to unlock phones. Again, this won’t kill unlocks completely, but in one release Apple really has made life a lot harder for people in the offence game.

This will eventually have some consequences for the crypto debate. These devices are just getting more and more secure through some really cool engineering.

So we’ll be talking to Chris Wade about this, he’s the brain behind Corellium, an iOS emulator. His clients include everyone from exploit developers to the publishers of very popular iOS applications. If you want to back-test an app change on 15 different versions of iOS Corellium is the way to do that… or if you want to, you know, test your latest 0day it’s good for that, too.

Then we’re going to hear from Dr. Silvio Cesare of Infosect here in Oz. He’s going to talk about whether we might see similar mitigations on intel and weigh in on Apple’s changes.

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

• Citizen Lab drops NSO Group report
• “Weaponised Stuxnet” claims are idiotic
• Another State Department email breach! Drink!
• Dutch foil planned attack against Swiss Novichok lab
• Mirai botnet authors working for FBI
• US telcos want to be consumer auth brokers
• US fails to extradite “Mr Bitcoin”
• Much, much more

This week’s show is brought to you by Remediant. They make a just-in-time access solution for privileged account management (PAM), and we’re doing something a little different in this week’s sponsor interview.

Paul Lanzi of Remediant will be along, but so will Harry Perper of MITRE corporation. Harry’s pay-cheques say MITRE, but he’s been working on a NIST project. The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) at NIST has been working on a project to provide guidance on the secure usage and management of privileged accounts. The so-called 1800-18 document is a practical guide and reference architecture for privileged account management and we’ll talk to both Harry and Paul about that after the news.

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.