The Hacker Mind

Say you’re an organization that’s been hit with ransomware. At what point do you need to bring in a ransomware negotiator? Should you pay, should you not? Mark Lance, the VP of DFIR and Threat Intelligence for GuidePoint Security, provides The Hacker Mind with stories of ransomware cases he’s handled and best practices for how to handle such an event.

Small to Medium Business are increasingly the target of APTs and ransomware. Often they lack the visibility of a SOC. Or even basic low level threat analysis. Chris Gray of Deepwatch talks about the view from the inside of a virtual SOC, the ability to see threats against a large number of SMB organizations, and the changes to cyber insurance we’re seeing as a result.

More and more criminals are identified through open source intelligence (OSINT). Sometimes a negative Yelp review can reveal their true identity. Daniel Clemens, CEO of ShadowDragon, talks about his more than two decades of digital investigations, from the origins of the Code Red worm to the mass shooter in Las Vegas, with a fair number of pedophiles and human traffickers identified as well. Find out what Daniel looks for and how he does digital forensics using social media and other open source resources.

It’s time to evolve beyond the UNIX operating system. OSes today are basically ineffective database managers, so why not build an OS that’s a database manager? Michael Coden, Associate Director, Cybersecurity, MIT Sloan, along with Michael Stonebreaker will present this novel concept at RSAC 2023. You can learn more at dbos-project.github.io

Incident response in the cloud. How is it different, and why do we need to pay more attention to it today, before something major happens tomorrow. James Campbell, CEO of Cado Security, shares his experience with traditional incident response, and how the cloud, with its elastic structure, able to spin up and spin down instances, is changing incident response.

We’ve seen drug marketplaces and extremists use the Dark Web. Will generative AI tools like ChatGPT make things crazier by lowering the barrier to entry? Delilah Schwartz, from Cybersixgill, brings her extensive background with online extremism to The Hacker Mind to talk about how she’s seeing a lot of chatter in the dark web.about AI online. She discusses what is and what is not likely to happen next.

Booth babes and rampant sexism were more of a problem in infosec in the past. That is, until Chenxi Wang spoke up. And she’s not done changing the industry. She’s an amazing person who has done an incredible number of things in a short amount of time -- a PhD in Computer Engineering, inventor of a process still used by the DoD today, a successful teaching career at CMU, a role as security analyst at Forrester, and then a role at Intel McAfee. Today she runs a 100% woman owned VC.

What if DEF CON CTFs were televised? What if you could see their screens and have interviews with the players in the moment? Turns out, you can. Jordan Wiens, from Vector 35, maker of Binary Ninja, is no stranger to CTFs. He’s played in ten final DEF CON CTFs, was a part of DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge, and recently he’s moderated the live broadcast of the annual Hack-A-Sat competition. So if anyone can pull off turning CTFs into an eSport, it’s probably Jordan.

When we hear about bad actors on a compromised system for 200+ days, we wonder how they survived for so long. Often they hide in common misconfigurations. From her talk at SecTor 2022, Paula Januszkiewicz, CEO of Cqure, returns to The Hacker Mind and explains how a lot of little configuration errors in common Windows tools and services can open the door to persistence on a system for bad actors and what sysadmins can do to mitigate these. She’ll also be presenting again at RSAC 2023 in April.

Having a common framework around vulnerabilities, around threats, helps us understand the infosec landscape better. STRIDE provides an easy mnemonic. Adam Shostack has a new book, Threats: What Every Engineer Should Learn From Star Wars. that uses both Star Wars and STRIDE to help engineers under vulnerabilities and threats in software development. Adam has more than 20 years in the infosec world, and he even helped create the CVE system that we all use today.

Hacking websites is perhaps often underestimated yet is super interesting with all its potential for command injections and cross site scripting attacks. Tib3rius from White Oak Security discusses his experience as a web application security pen tester, his OSCP certification, and how he’s giving back to the community with his Twitch, Youtube, and tools he's made available on GitHub.

Holiday air travel tips from The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick and Robert Vamosi. This is a short episode until The Hacker Mind returns in the new year.

If you call someone on the other side of the world, perhaps you notice the delay in their response. For voice that’s okay, but for live music that’s disastrous. Mark Goldstein thinks he’s solved the latency problem associated with the production of live musical performances online. Having one musician in Bangalore, another in California, and yet another in New York? No problem. Except, perhaps, for finding a mutually agreeable time for them to be awake and play together.

Sometimes complex technology doesn't necessarily raise the barrier for entry for cyber criminals. Sometimes, as with our cars, it does the exact opposite.

The LockBit ransomware gang no longer offers just one service, like ransomware, but multiple services, like anti-analysis tools and bug bounty programs. Mick Baccio from Splunk’s SURGe explains how ransomware gangs are evolving into crimeware-as-a-service platforms, as a one stop shop for all your online criminal needs.

In this follow up podcast, I talk about encrypting your hard drive with Tails OS, using Virtual Machines, and other ways to keep your laptop secure. In my book The Art of Invisibility, I challenged my co author, Kevin Mitnick, to document various ways to keep your data private. This is a companion episode with episode 41.

You could of course sell your skillz to the dark web. Or you could legitimately report what you find and get paid to do so. You might even travel the world. In this episode of The Hacker Mind, I return to Episode 7 with Tim Becker, Episode 9 with Stok, and Episode 22 with Jack Cable to get their perspective on leaving 1337 skillz while getting paid by various bug bounty programs.

Playing Capture the Flag challenges you to solve problems creatively, something that is missing in computer science programs. What else is needed? In this episode of The Hacker Mind, we return to where we started in Episode One: Why is West Point -- and for that matter, others -- Training Hackers? Think of this as the greatest hits from The Hacker Mind. Insights from Adam Van Prooyan, Zarata, Eyre, Tim Becker, Megan Kearns, and John Hammond on how playing Capture the Flag helped them become who are they are today -- l337.

Red teams and pen tests are point-in-time assessments. What if you could simulate an ongoing attack to test your teams’ readiness? You can with a cyber range. Lee Rossi, CTO and co founder.of SimSpace, a cyber range company, joins The Hacker Mind podcast to explain how using both live Red Teams and automated cyber ranges can keep your organization ahead of the attackers. I have so many stories about hackers who are making a positive difference in the world, and I don't want you to miss out. Let's keep this conversation going. Follow me @RobertVamosi on Twitter.

Just because you have a tool, like ATT&CK, you might not realize its full potential without someone being there to guide you … at least in the beginning. Frank Duff, now the chief innovation officer and co founder of Tidal Security, returns to The Hacker Mind to discuss the ATT&CK framework, only this time from the perspective of his new company. He talks about the new community platform that Tidal Security launched at Black Hat USA 2022.