BrakeSec Education Podcast

Latest Episodes:

2015-037-making patch management work Aug 31, 2015

Show notes

Once you find a vulnerability, how do you handle patching it? Especially when devs have their own work to do, there are only so many man hours in a sprint or development cycle, and the patching process could take up a good majority of that if the vuln is particularly nasty.

One method is to triage your patches, and we discuss that this week with Mr. Boettcher. We also talk about how our respective company's handle patching of systems.

We also discuss what happens when compensating controls run out of effectiveness, and if there is a point at which they no longer are 'compensating' for anything any further.

2015-036: Checkbox security, or how to make companies go beyond compliance Aug 24, 2015

Show notes

Checkbox Security... checklists required to follow by compliance people and many security people have to fall in line, because they often have no choice.

But what if there was a way to use compliance requirements to get beyond the baseline of PCI/SOCII/HIPAA, and get to be more secure?

Megan Wu (@tottenkoph), Mr. Boettcher, and I spent a bit of time discussing just that. We discuss basic issues with compliance frameworks, how to get management to buy-in to more security, and even how you can get Compliance people to help without them knowing it.

2015-035: Cybrary.it training discussion and Bsides Austin Panel Aug 16, 2015

Show notes

After last week's discussion of end-user training in the SANS top 20 security controls, we realized that it would be great to discuss how a company involved in training does proper training.

So we hit up our sponsor at Cybrary.it to discuss their end-user security training track and how companies can use it to help their employees to be more secure in their workplace.

We end the podcast with a bit of audio from the Bsides Austin blue/red panel Mr. Boettcher moderated. He asked them about training and it's worth. The first answer from Justin Whitehead is telling as to how he believes training will fail regardless. His answer was chilling in fact, and we hope to continue that conversation with him in the future about it.

Flashback: 2014-001_Kicking some Hash Aug 15, 2015

Show notes

For long time listeners of the podcast, back when Brian and I wanted to do the podcast, we were working at the same company, and the first podcast we did was on hashes.

Bob story: Bob was getting tired of explaining what MD5, SHA1, SHA2 were to developers, so as we were developing our idea for the podcast, this was the first episode we had. Mr. Boettcher had several ideas for podcasts prior to.

I was actually gonna go it alone, but wanted him to join me. Thankfully, he broached the idea of being on the podcast. This was actually the second take, as the first one was done in our office and we didn't want any legal issues doing it at work, so we trahed that one and made this version. I thought the first take was better, but what are gonna do... :)

2015-034: SANS Top20 Security Controls #9 - CTFs - Derbycon dicsussion Aug 10, 2015

Show notes

End User training. Lots of companies have need of regular security training. Many treat it as a checkbox for compliance requirements, once a year. With the way training is carried out in many organizations, is it any wonder why phishing emails still get clicked, passwords still get compromised, and sensitive information is still leaked.

We discuss methods to make training more effective, and how to make people want to do training.

Finally, we dicsuss Capture-The-Flag competitions, and why it would behoove blue team people to attempt them. They become a great barometer for understanding your shortcomings, and what you as a blue teamer might need to study up on...

2015-033: Data anonymization and Valuation, Privacy, and Ethical medical research Aug 03, 2015

Show notes

Katherine Carpenter is a privacy consultant who has worked all over the world helping to develop guidelines for ethical medical research, sharing of anonymized data, and helping companies understand privacy issues association with storing and sharing of medical data.

This week, we discuss how companies should assign value to their data, the difficulties of doing research with anonymized data, and the ramifications of research organizations that share data irresponsibly.

email contact: carpenter.katherinej@gmail.com

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=192740

https://depts.washington.edu/bioethx/topics/consent.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-anonymization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_anonymization

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-identification

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Safe_Harbor_Privacy_Principles

http://www.nature.com/news/privacy-protections-the-genome-hacker-1.12940

http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/coveredentities/De-identification/guidance.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy_law

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/06/data-privacy-europe-facebook

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/15/eu-privacy-laws-data-regulations

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/obscurity-a-better-way-to-think-about-your-data-than-privacy/267283/

http://fusion.net/story/171429/app-genetic-access-control-genes-dna-for-password/

###

Katherine’s note, comment, and links.

It is good to be thinking about de-identification (especially regarding health care data)

I think a better question to ask is how easy is it to re-identify information that has been de-identified. The HIPAA rule has 18 Identifiers which count as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or Personal Health Information (PHI) include birth date, zip code, and IP address; When data is collected in non-health contexts, these identifiers are not considered PII/PHI (for example: this kind of information can be used for marketing purposes or financial/credit-related purposes).

A brief history on the topic:

in 1997 a precocious grad student IDed the Governor of MA using purchased voter records to reID deIDed health information that was released. (This study was one motivator to pass HIPAA.) Further research along the same lines of the previous project can be summed up with a simple and scary statistic: in 2000, 87% of Americans may be uniquely identified by combining zip code, birthday and sex(gender).

For this reason, health information is threatened not only by deID’n & reID’n, but by the combination of and other types of information that are publicly available or available for purchase and could reveal things about an individual that would contribute to reID of individual’s health info.

Here are a bunch of articles that discuss the topic from different angles.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/09/your-secrets-live-online-in-databases-of-ruin/

https://datafloq.com/read/re-identifying-anonymous-people-with-big-data/228

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-05/states-hospital-data-for-sale-puts-privacy-in-jeopardy

https://epic.org/privacy/reidentification/

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/10/you%E2%80%99re-not-so-anonymous/

Dwork, C. and Yekhanin, S. (2008), “New Efficient Attacks on Statistical Disclosure Control Mechanisms,” Advances in Cryptology—CRYPTO 2008, to appear, also at http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/DatabasePrivacy/dy08.pdf

Is Deidentification Sufficient to Protect Health Privacy in Research?

Mark A. Rothstein http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3032399/

2015-032: Incident response, effective communication, and DerbyCon Contest Jul 26, 2015

Show notes

In an incident response, the need for clear communication is key to effective management of an incident. This week, we had Mick Douglas, DFIR instructor at SANS, and Jarrod Frates, who is a pentester at InGuardians, and has great experience handling incidents. Find out some roles in an incident response (the Shadow, the event coordinator, the lead tech), and how companies should have an IR plan that handles various 'incident severities'.

Jarrod updates us on "TheLab.ms" and how you might like to help them!

Finally, We are holding a contest to win a ticket to DerbyCon, full instructions are below. We are giving away two tickets.

DerbyCon 1st Ticket contest expires 31 July 2015.

1. To enter for a ticket to DerbyCon

a. A donation must be made to Hackers for Charity (http://www.hackersforcharity.org/)

b. Once the donation is made, email your receipt of your donation to bds.podcast@gmail.com

c. If you win: We will contact you by the email you mailed the receipt from with our contact information. You will need to contact us when you get to DerbyCon, as we will not send you the ticket directly. You will also be responsible for airfare and accommodations at DerbyCon.

2015-031: Fab and Megan-High_Math-Psychology_and Scarves Jul 18, 2015

Show notes

Strap yourselves in ladies and Gentlemen. With Mr. Boettcher gone on "vacation" this week, I needed some help with the podcast, and boy did we pick a doozy. If you're a fan of Turing Complete algorithms, frankly, who isn't ;) , we had Ms. Fabienne Serrière (@fbz) and Ms. Magen Wu (@tottenkoph) who discuss higher order math and psychology on our podcast this week.

We also discuss a little project management and even talk about why proper survey sizes and getting a good cross-section is important.

Be sure to pick up one of Ms. Fbz's scarves, especially if you're a math nut, and love fracctals and patterns as I do.

Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fbz/knityak-custom-mathematical-knit-scarves

Elementary Cellular Automaton : http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ElementaryCellularAutomaton.html

Turing Complete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness

Sierpinski Triangle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpinski_triangle

Chomsky Hierarchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

Hammer/LangSec: https://github.com/UpstandingHackers/hammer

Sergey Bratis: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/

Stego Hats: http://www.ravelry.com/projects/fbz/pseudo-random-reversible-hat

SeaSec East: http://www.meetup.com/SEASec-East/

2015-030: Bsides Austin panel Discussion (Red Team vs. Blue Team) Jul 13, 2015

Show notes

My podcast co-host Brian Boettcher, along with Kate Brew, an Austin, TX based security blogger, headed up this panel called "Red Team Vs. Blue Team". The idea was to ask people from various sides of the aisles (attackers and defenders) pressing questions about how the industry operates.

Infosec heavyweights like Kevin Johnson (@secureideas), Mano Paul (@manopaul), Josh Sokol (@joshSokol), made this a very excellent podcast...

We hope you enjoy!

2015-029: Big Brown cloud honeyblog with @theroxyd Jul 06, 2015

Show notes

Roxy, who we interviewed a few months ago on our podcast about hackerspaces, is back with us this week to discuss a project she is working on, called 'Big Brown Cloud'. If you've ever wanted to setup your own fake blog and send people to it to gain information on possible attacks, you've come to the right place.

We also get an update on the hackerspace that Jarrod, Sean, and Roxy were getting setup a few months ago. They've come a long way, and they are about to move into their new facility

https://thelab.ms/

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