Risky Business News Podcast

Japan passes a new active cyber defense law, printer software gets shipped with malware, a UK telco leaks user data and geolocation via its 4G network, and Volkswagen patches major bugs in its mobile app.

In this Risky Bulletin sponsor interview Justin Kohler, Chief Product Officer at SpecterOps talks to Tom Uren about the impossible challenge of managing identity directory services securely. Organisations try to implement the principle of least privilege but have no idea if they have done a good job. Justin talks about approaches SpecterOps is developing to address this problem.

Coinbase was extorted by hackers who bribed employees for user data, America’s largest steel producer halts production after a cyberattack, Scattered Spider shifts to targeting US retailers, and the US abandons plans to protect Americans from data brokers.

In this special edition of the Seriously Risky Business podcast Patrick Gray speaks with former NSA Cybersecurity Director Rob Joyce and former director of the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence Andy Boyd.

The talk about what offensive cyber could look like under Trump 2.0, and the shake-up the intelligence community is going through under various White House initiatives.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

The EU launches its own vulnerability database, a Turkish APT deploys a zero-day in Iraq, North Korea tasks an APT to Ukraine, and Spain will probe cyber’s role in last month’s energy grid collapse.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq examine whether the US should steal intellectual property from Chinese companies.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

The Kaleidoscope ad fraud network infects 2.5 million devices a month, Germany seizes the eXch crypto-mixing service, the US takes down the Anyproxy botnet, and Chrome will use on-device AI to detect tech support scams.

In this Risky Bulletin sponsor interview James Pope, Director of Technical Enablement, talks to Tom Uren about his experience running networks and security centres at Black Hat conferences around the world. Pope talks about the challenges of running a SOC at a hacker conference, how conference networks around the world have a different character and talks about all the weird and wonderful security snafus he has found.

France says Russia’s influence operations are achieving results, Crowdstrike lays off 5% of its staff, a hacker dumps LockBit’s ransomware database, and a ransomware attack slows production at a major US medical device maker.

Tom Uren and Patrick Gray talk about how the US is planning to take the gloves off in cyberspace and conduct much more aggressive offensive cyber operations. US responses to cyber espionage have not been very aggressive to date, but Tom is not convinced that cyber punches are required, so much as blows that really hurt.

The pair also discuss TeleMessage, the Signal clone the Trump cabinet has been using. The app managed to sidestep certification and assessment processes and ended up being used by various agencies in the US government. And the White House. It’s a mystery how this happened.

This episode is also available on Youtube.