Risky Business

You might have noticed North Korea’s been in the news over the last couple of days. Well, we’re sticking with the theme – we’ve got a great feature interview for you this week with Andrea Berger. She’s a senior research associate at the US-based James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies and the co-host of the Arms Control Wonk podcast. This week she speaks with Risky Business contributor Hilary Louise about a report the centre did into North Korea’s IT industry. Yep, they have one,...

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...

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...

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!...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We’re still running in a trimmed down format this week, sorry about that. Regular listeners would know we’ve been dealing with some unexpected stuff over here in the house of Business, but the good news is things have settled down and we’re actually back home after more than three weeks away. Things are looking good for a return to a full format show either next week or the week after. But don’t worry, there’s plenty of good stuff in this week’s news segment with Mark Piper,...

Regular listeners would know Risky Business is just running the news and sponsor segments at the moment so there’s no feature interview in this week’s show. But that’s fine because we’ve got plenty to get through in the news segment with Adam Boileau. Then we’ve got a killer sponsor interview for you this week with Nick Steele and James Barclay of Duo Security. They’re here to talk about WebAuthn. It’s the new authentication spec currently going through the W3C process. Both Nick and...

This week’s show is just the news segment and sponsor interview. But, as always, there’s plenty to discuss with our news guest Adam Boileau! In this week’s sponsor interview we’ll be hearing from Timothy Keeler from Remediant. Remediant is a small but growing company that does privileged account management stuff, but they’re not a password vault. Tim’s joining us this week to walk through some of the challenges of managing privileged access in devops environments and also to talk a bit...

This Soap Box edition is brought to you by ICEBRG. ICEBRG is in the business of network-based response and detection. In simple terms they drop a box on your network that strips network metadata and shunts it up to their cloud for analysis. This allows incident responders in particular to really, really speed up their investigations. We know that a lot of internet traffic is encrypted these days, and that’s made some people take their eye off the network ball. The focus and buzz these...

Sorry this week’s show is late – I found myself taking an unexpected and unavoidable trip. But I’m back on deck and we’ve got a great show for you this week. This week we hear from Thomas Rid, Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. We’re having a conversation inspired by the latest spectacular Russian intelligence blunder: a Russian SIGINT operator exposing their GRU headquarters’ IP address because they forgot to fire up...

Snake Oilers is a wholly sponsored podcast where vendors pay to pitch their tech at you, the listeners. Last week we heard from Rapid7, Mimecast and VMRay, but this week we’ve got two more pitches for you. First up we’re going to hear from Penten, an Australian based company that is doing some genuinely interesting stuff with honey documents. Also in this edition we’ll be chatting with the team at Trend Micro. And this isn’t really about pitching a product – there more here to combat...

What a week, huh? As you’ll soon hear it’s been an absolute monster week for infosec news. Top of the list is the Cambridge Analytica scandal. For those who haven’t had time to catch up on this one, a former staffer from the data analytics firm has given some interviews in which he says the company scraped 50 million Facebook profiles and used that data to target US voters with political messages on behalf of Donald Trump’s campaign. Obviously this has made people feel quite uncomfortable,...

As most of you know this isn’t the regular weekly show, this is a special edition we publish four times a year, and as you may have guessed from the title, this is the Risky Business podcast where vendors pay for time to pitch their products to you, the listeners. And we’ve actually got some great pitches for you today. We’ll be hearing from Rapid7 first – they’ve developed a new addition to their Insight platform – Insight Phish. There are already so many phishing simulation tools out...

On this week’s show we’re taking a look at how an acceleration in 24-carat bonkers state-sponsored hacking is leading to calls at senior levels of government for some actual norms to be established. We’ve got Russia hacking the planet with NotPetya, North Korea owning central banks and cryptocurrency exchanges, China owning the CCleaner supply chain and… well.. it’s all getting a bit much. So in this week’s feature segment we’re going to zero in on one norm-breaking country, North Korea....