Risky Business is a weekly information security podcast featuring news and in-depth interviews with industry luminaries. Launched in February 2007, Risky Business is a must-listen digest for information security pros. With a running time of approximately 50-60 minutes, Risky Business is pacy; a security podcast without the waffle.
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Risky Business #492 -- Thomas Rid on sloppy active measures
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 their VPN when logging in to their Guccifer 2.0 persona accounts. Oops.
It’s hilarious stuff, but it’s brought out the conspiracy types who are saying hey, as if they’d make this mistake. Something’s fishy! Well, as you’ll hear, these types of agencies make similar mistakes on a pretty routine basis. Thomas joins us to talk about that, and also about how mistakes like this don’t really matter in the broad scheme of things. They’re a bit of a distraction.
This week’s show is brought to you by Bugcrowd, the managed bug bounty company. Bugcrowd’s founder and CTO Casey Ellis will be dropping by to talk about a few things. They’ve raised a stack of cash since we last spoke and they plan to spend it on a bunch of stuff – they’re working on doing more efficient triage and they’re also looking at creating better legal agreements between their customers and their researchers. That’s all interesting stuff, and it’s coming up later.
The show notes/links are below, and you can follow Adam or Patrick on Twitter if that’s your thing.
Show notes A cyberattack hobbles Atlanta, and security experts shudder City of Atlanta still crippled six days after ransomware attack - CNN Boeing hit by WannaCry virus, fears it could cripple some jet production | The Seattle Times EXCLUSIVE: ‘Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer Guccifer 2.0 Was Always Sloppy - Motherboard Facebook denies it collects call and SMS data from phones without permission | TechCrunch Facebook Wants Security Researchers to Hunt Down Apps That Misuse User Data Report: Kaspersky Lab to open new data center in Switzerland to curb espionage suspicions Eugene Kaspersky defends publishing 'Slingshot' report US Charges Nine Iranians With Hacking Over 300 Universities Iranian Hackers Charged Last Week Were Actually Pretty Damn Good Phishers US Congress Passes CLOUD Act Hidden in Budget Spending Bill CLOUD Act, Tucked Into Omnibus, Likely To Derail Supreme Court Tech Privacy Case : NPR Four Alleged Associates of Sinaloa Cartel-Linked Encrypted Phone Company Are On the Run - Motherboard Secure Phone Companies Clamp Down After Sinaloa Cartel-Linked Arrest - Motherboard UK police mobile device extraction tech raises eyebrows, study FBI Barely Tried to Hack San Bernardino iPhone Before Going to Court With Apple - Motherboard FBI has a unit solely devoted to its 'going dark' problem zeynep tufekci on Twitter: "That @theintercept story about Facebook used by ICE to track immigrants that went pretty viral? It wasn't an immigrant. It was a legal subpoena on a child exploitation/abuse case. (Incredible correction at the end!!!) Motivated reasoning isn't just a right-wing phenomenon. 1/x… https://t.co/dxYOPznkrA" Minneapolis FBI agent charged with leaking classified information to reporter | Minnesota Public Radio News How security alerts are keeping your code safer | The GitHub Blog Ecuador Cut Off Julian Assange’s Internet For His Political Tirades on Twitter - Motherboard Reddit Bans Subreddits Dedicated to Dark Web Drug Markets and Selling Guns - Motherboard NSA has been tracking bitcoin users since 2013 Angry Users Donate $120K to Cancer Research After Brian Krebs' Coinhive Article With cryptojacking rising, exploit kits rapidly decline - CyberScoop IETF Approves TLS 1.3 as Internet Standard Chrome Extension Detects URL Homograph (Unicode) Attacks Drupal Fixes Drupalgeddon2 Security Flaw That Allows Hackers to Take Over Sites Many VPN Providers Leak Customer's IP Address via WebRTC Bug Microsoft's Meltdown patches introduced a whole new vulnerability Cisco IOS XE Software Static Credential Vulnerability Digital arms merchants selling products to Australian police forces? – Digital Rights Watch pariscid.pl: fix nasty typo in CRYPTO_memcmp. · openssl/openssl@56d5a4b · GitHub Nyotron-OilRig-Malware-Report-March-2018.pdf