Podcasts

On this week’s show we chat with Peter Wesley. Peter’s well known around the Australian security scene, but a few years back he relocated to China, where security is booming. He did a presentation at the AusCERT conference on the Gold Coast last week all about the Chinese hacker scene and security industry. He joins us in this week’s feature interview to tell us about how the Chinese scene evolved and what its current relationship with the Chinese government looks like.

This week’s sponsor interview is a cracker. We’ll be joined by Ryan Kalember, Senior Vice President of Strategy with Proofpoint, the email filtering company. Ryan is along to talk about a phenomenon the Proofpointers are very interested in – we’ve all heard of VIPs, but he’s here to talk about VAPs – Very Attacked People.

So much attacker behaviour these days is driven by email-based attacks, and the people getting hit the most with this sort of stuff might not be the ones you expect. Ryan joins us later on for that conversation in this week’s sponsor interview, with thanks to Proofpoint.

The show notes/links are below, and you can follow Adam or Patrick on Twitter if that’s your thing.

On this week’s show we’ll be talking about a whole bunch of stuff – the FBI taking down a botnet in a very FBI way, we go deep on the Trisis malware popping up in the US following America’s withdrawal from the so-called Iran agreement. We look at the latest in the crypto debate, breaches, bugs and more!

We’ll hear from Tom Uren of Australia’s Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) on the Trisis side of things. Tom worked in an interesting place in Australia’s defence department but these days spends his days think tanking for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. He shares his thoughts on what it is Iran could be up to with Trisis.

This week’s show is brought to you by: Australia!

AustCYBER is a government-supported industry group here that is trying to get the Australian cybersecurity industry organised. There’s the VC-backed US model, the build a “cyber city” in the desert Israeli model, then there’s the Australia model, which is actually quite different. It’s much more about helping local startups win deals locally, then internationally, to get them on a path to profitability so they don’t have to sign the awful term sheets Australian VCs put in front of them.

Well, there’s more to it than that, but AustCYBER head honcho Michelle Price will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to walk us through what she’s trying to do for the Australian security industry and how foreign multinational companies can also benefit from that.

Soap Box is not our regular weekly show, it’s the monthly podcast here at Risky Biz HQ where vendors pay to come on to the show to talk about what it is they actually do.

Before EclecticIQ sponsored this edition, to be honest, I didn’t really know much about them. All I knew is that their positioning was very much around “threat intelligence,” which, as regular listeners would know, are two words that are usually followed by “derpa derpa” on the regular Risky Business podcast.

BUT! Here’s the thing. EclecticIQ don’t sell a “blinky light” box that receives a creaky feed of 12-month-old IOCs. They sell their solution to either massive organisations or very high risk organisations. They could be national cyber security centres, entire defence departments, very, very big enterprises; basically anyone that has an intelligence team and multiple constituent departments or agencies. They also play in ultra high risk sectors like defence contracting.

The EclecticIQ platform isn’t for small organisations. It really is for orgs that have dedicated, externally-focussed intelligence teams. Their play isn’t “we feed you threat intelligence,” it’s use our tooling to go get your own threat intelligence, develop a strategy for dealing with the resulting product then distributing the strategy that flows from that process out to the relevant people in your organisation. I like to think of this approach as “killing your own meat”. That’s what EclecticIQ is all about. They give you the shotgun and a map, the last known locations of the deer, a cool room and a bunch of cleavers. Delicious. Apologies to any vegetarians listening for that metaphor.

Joep Gommers is our guest. He is the founder and CEO of EclecticIQ. Prior to founding EclecticIQ, Joep served as Head of Global Collection and Global Intelligence Operations at iSIGHT Partners, which was, of course, acquired by FireEye. Joep joined me to talk about what it is that EclecticIQ actually does and the resulting conversation, I hope, will be interesting to anyone who wants to understand how Threat intelligence is developed and disseminated at scale.

There’s a link to EclecticIQ’s website below, and you can follow Joep Gommers on Twitter here.

In this week’s feature interview we’ll be chatting with Shubham Shah and his friend Lord Tuskington about continuous asset discovery’s impact on testing methodologies. Shubs has worked as both a pentester and as a very successful bug bounty hunter. In fact he’s built an entire asset discovery platform that he and his buddies have been using to rip crazy amounts of cash out of bounty programs over the last few years and he’s turning that platform into a product. So I wanted to talk to him about that, but I also wanted to get a pentester’s perspective on how this type of continuous asset discovery tech could change the testing industry.

This week’s show is brought to you by Exabeam, a next generation SIEM company! And it’s amazing how nicely this week’s feature and sponsor interviews dovetail actually, because Exabeam’s Steve Gailey will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to have a chat about how SIEM technology has changed much faster than SOC operations methodologies. Because basically everyone has structured their operations around three levels of response and the workflows are so ingrained, nobody seems to know know what to do with a next generation SIEM.

Adam Boileau is also along, like always, to talk about the week’s security news.

The show notes/news items are below, and you can follow Adam or Patrick on Twitter if that’s your thing.

Here it is – this week’s feature interview with Marisa Emerson! Marisa is a security researcher who did a great talk at BSides Canberra in March all about game cheating.

She was specifically talking about the cheating techniques PUBG gamers are using and just how advanced they are. The crazy thing is the cheaters here are rolling some pretty decent techniques. It’s reminiscent of the iPhone jailbreaking scene – a lot of good hackers who don’t know they’re good hackers.

Marisa is running a binary exploitation bootcamp in Brisbane that will have another session next semester. Details are here.

In this week’s weekly show we’re just going to drill in to the week’s extra long security news section with Adam Boileau then go straight to the sponsor interview. I’ve got a fantastic feature interview for you this week, but I’m going to publish it outside of the news show. It was either that or run stupidly long or cut too much from everything to make it all fit.

This week’s sponsor interview is a good one though. We’re chatting with the team behind DarkTrace. They make a machine learning-backed network monitor. A key different with this kit is it actually gets involved on the network. If it sees something it’s confident is attacker behaviour it will start spraying TCP resets to boot them off the network.

This is something the IPS systems of old used to do but it’s an approach that fell out of favour. We’ll find out why that approach was discarded and why it’s coming back, as well as generally discuss the role of machine learning in security with a company that has invested in it heavily. This isn’t a “for or against” interview segment. This is a discussion with one company that is getting value out of the approach, so stick around for that.

The show notes/news items are below, and you can follow Adam or Patrick on Twitter if that’s your thing.

On this week’s show we’re taking a look at some recent data out of Microsoft trumpeting its Defender antivirus install figures on Windows. They’ve got 18% market share on windows 7/9 and 50% on Win10.

For the AV and endpoint security industry Microsoft has always been the existential threat, but has the plane flown into the mountain already? We’ll speak with Securosis analyst and DisruptOps founder Rich Mogull about that in this week’s feature interview.

In this week’s sponsor interview we’re joined by the always entertaining Haroon Meer of Thinkst Canary. When we spoke Haroon had just wrapped up his first ever booth at the RSA conference. He’ll join us this week to tell us, surprisingly, that it was a really worthwhile exercise for Thinkst, but as you’ll hear he also thinks the broader industry can be a pack of dumbasses when it comes to actually marketing tech at events like RSA. If he becomes global ruler RSA booths will be gimmick-free and just show people product demos.

The show notes/news items are below, and you can follow Adam or Patrick on Twitter if that’s your thing.

In this edition of Soap Box we’re chatting with Root9b. They’ve just launched an updated version of their ORION platform. And I guess the way you’d describe Root9b is as a threat hunt product maker and managed threat hunt provider. And their approach is a bit different – their software is agentless. They basically authenticate to a machine, inject various payloads into memory, and use that to pull back all sorts of telemetry from machines.

They say this means it’s much less likely that attackers will see them and they offer this as a product, ORION, or they offer it as a service. They say their managed services customers come to them because pretty unhappy with their MDR and MSSP providers and want better signalling.

So I was joined by John Harbaugh, COO of Root9b, and Mike Morris, CTO. Both of these guys were US Air Force cyberdudes before jumping out to the private sector. The company actually started off doing training before developing their platform ORION.

John and Mike joined me by Skype for this podcast. Enjoy!

This week’s Risky Business is kind of going back to its roots a bit. As much as we love talking about policy and the intersection of cyber security with global affairs, sometimes it pays to remember that computer security is actually about computers.

With that in mind this week we’ve got two fantastic interviews for you. We’ll be chatting with Dr. Silvio Cesare in this week’s feature interview. Silvio’s dusted off his bug hunting hat and he’s taken to Twitch-streaming his auditing sessions. Dave Aitel described watching Silvio’s Twitch stream as like seeing a Titan ransack a small Greek village. Five months, 100 bugs, 50 of them in kernel stuff.

He’s doing this for a couple of reasons – he wants to show people how it’s done, and he wants people to realise there are still lots of bugs out there to be found. We’ll chat to him about that in this week’s feature.

This week’s sponsor interview is with another old school hacker, Stephen Ridley. Stephen is the founder of Senrio, which is technically an IoT security play, but the thing is the tech he’s developed has turned out to be useful for all sorts of other stuff too.

Senrio is another one of those hacker-led startups in the spirit of Duo Security or Thinkst Canary. Stephen is a really well respected guy and this week he’s joining us to talk about a bunch of stuff. A lot of it is related to the unexpected uses for Senrio’s monitoring platform. He built a classifier for network-connected devices as a part of Senrio’s IoT security platform, and it turns out it’s actually running rings around a bunch of Enterprise Asset Management tools. People are actually using his IoT security monitoring solution to do asset management and figure out install gaps for their EDR solutions.

Totally not what he intended people to use it for, but hey, a win’s a win. So Stephen joins us this week to talk about that, also to talk about recent developments in the IoT space and really a bunch more stuff.

The show notes/links are below, and you can follow Adam or Patrick on Twitter if that’s your thing.

On this week’s show we hear from Jennifer Bisceglie, the CEO of Interos Solutions, a company that recently prepared a report on supply chain security for the US government’s US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Risky Business contributor Brian Donohue caught up with Jennifer to talk about the report and really get an idea of what supply chain risks look like from a macro level. The long and the short of it is the supply chain is already very, very opaque, so governments and the private sector will have to work pretty hard to mitigate the risks involved here.

This week’s show is brought to you by Netsparker, the web application security scanning toolmaker. Netsparker was founded nine years ago by this week’s sponsor guest, Ferruh Mavituna. He was a pentester who created Netsparker to help him with his own work. But just recently they raised a bundle of cash: US$40m. We’ll catch up with him and find out if a webapp scanning company with $40m is like the mule with the spinning wheel. It certainly seems like Ferruh has some ambitious plans. We haven’t seen this sort of money being raised by comparable companies so it’s definitely interesting stuff.

In this week’s news we cover off:

• Mysterious BGP route hijacking for lame Ether theft (??)
• Google disabling domain fronting
• Canadian teen charged with downloading documents from a website
• City of Atlanta spending $2.6m to recover from its ransomware event
• RSA’s conference app fail
• White House chaos over Rob Joyce replacement (MAGA!!! MAGAAAAAA!!!!!)
• Much more

The show notes/links are below, and you can follow Adam, Brian or Patrick on Twitter if that’s your thing.