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.
This is not the regular Risky Business weekly show, the Soap Box series of podcasts that run on Risky.Biz are wholly sponsored. Everyone you hear in Soap Box paid to be here.
With that disclaimer out of the way, this is actually a really interesting conversation. Carsten Willems is the co-founder and CEO of VMRay, a company that makes… well.. what do you call it? Is it an incident response tool? Is it a detection tool? Or is it just a good hypervisor-based sandbox that you can use to do both of those things?
I’m going to say it’s the third – VMRay is a company that makes a great hyper-visor sandbox and has applied that technology to both response and detection.
In an ideal world you’d have a team of malware reversers on staff pulling apart every single binary that looks shady. But this isn’t a perfect world, so that’s never going to happen. So the original use case that Carsten and his team set out to solve was around automating malware reversing. They build a hyper-visor based sandbox that’s very hard to bypass, you can run your standard build on it, throw binaries and documents at it and see what blows up. That’s really the primary use case here.
But there is a second use case, which is detection. VMRay can give you a pretty decent risk score on samples, and they’ve entered into a few OEM arrangements with vendors to provide that extra level of detection.
I’d never met Carsten Willems before we prepared this podcast, but it’s safe to say we hit it off. This podcast basically turned into Carsten telling his story, the story of where VMRay came from and where he wants it to go. Enjoy!
On this week’s show Patrick and Adam talk through all the week’s security news, including:
This week’s show is brought to you by CMD Security. They make security software for Linux that does two things – firstly it gives you visibility into what’s happening on your Linux workloads, which actions are being performed by which accounts, that sort of thing. The second thing it does is allow you to lock down accounts by action, rather than by traditional privilege. They’re funded by Google Ventures, among others, and although they’re a relatively small and new company I think they’re going to do really well.
Jake was just at a MITRE conference in Brussels that was all about the Attack Matrix. He’s joining me this week to have a bit of talk about his experience at that event, then we’ll be talking through some of the issues he’s seeing out there in Linux cloud workload land. Jake’s a great communicator and a very smart guy and that interview is a lot of fun.
Links to everything are below, and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.
This isn’t our weekly news and current affairs show, this is a wholly sponsored podcast we do here at Risky Biz. The idea behind Soap Box is vendors pay to come on to the show and talk about the things they want to talk about.
Today’s Soap Box is brought to you by Signal Sciences. If you’re not familiar with them, they make web security software. If you operate a website and you’re looking to auto-block a lot of the common attacks and attack techniques that are likely to be directed against your website, then Signal Sciences are definitely worth a look.
Their whole pitch is really about making software that’s easy to deploy. You just drop it on your web server or run it as a WAF proxy, and bang, you’re done. Most of their clients run this software in full blocking mode out of the gate and don’t have any issues.
It’s really, really good at blocking stuff like cred stuffing and weird bot activity, as well as your typical OWASPY-style attacks.
Signal Sciences Trusted Appsec Advisor Phillip Maddux is our guest today. We spoke about a bunch of stuff really: the future of appsec, how the pivot to serverless is changing things. Then we talk about app-layer deception, and finally Phillip basically takes a dump on the bulk of RASP solutions out there.
Enjoy!
On this week’s show Patrick and Adam talk through all the week’s security news, including:
This week’s sponsor interview with Ryan Kalember of Proofpoint. Ryan is a listener, and when he heard Adam talking about how password rotations actually result in crappy passwords, it hit a nerve with him. He says Proofpoint, via its CASBY product, is seeing a lot of targeted credential stuffing campaigns cycling through variations of passwords that have appeared in dumps.
Apparently the bad guys are hip to what a typical password rotation variation looks like and they’re using this knowledge to better direct their cred stuffing attempts.
Links to everything are below, and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.
On this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week’s security news, including:
This week’s sponsor interview is with Duo Security advisory CSO Richard Archdeacon and we’ll be talking about zero trust networks. Richard isn’t so worried about every vendor under the sun claiming to be a zero trust tech company. He doesn’t think that’s going to derail the move to zero trust architectures because the move towards them is too strong.
Links to everything are below, and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.
This isn’t the regular weekly risky biz news and current affairs show, this is the special podcast series we do here at Risky Biz HQ where we take that dirty, dirty vendor cash and let security companies tell the audience all about what they do. Think of it as show and tell for security vendors!
In this edition we’ve got three more vendors vying for your hard-earned bread. We’ll be hearing from Rapid7 on their InsightConnect product, that one used to be known as Komand. What can you automate and orchestrate with it? How does it work? Who’s using it? What are they doing with it?
Then we’ll be hearing from Trend Micro about their O365 mail security product, and this one is legit interesting for one very simple reason – the deployment method. Most of the mail security firms basically make you route your mail through them.
In this case what Trend has done is create a mail security product that just fiddles with your mailboxes through the Microsoft O365 API. They have literally set up a demo account for an enterprise over a beer at a bar. So yeah, I suspect we’ll be seeing more mail security products deploying this way… and because it’s show and tell, Trend will be along to talk about some of the bells and whistles that come with that product.
Then finally we’ll be hearing from Cybermerc. This is a group based out of Canberra in Australia. They’ve done a lot of enterprise deception hybrid hardware/consulting, that’s something they’ve gotten very good at. They also do a lot of cyber cyber training, but now they’re trying to market a managed service towards small to medium businesses – those with 50 to a few hundred seats. A managed honeypot, some internal vuln scans, and a partridge in a pear tree!
On this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week’s security news, including:
This week’s sponsor interview is with Casey Ellis, the CTO and co-founder of Bugcrowd.
As most of you are probably aware, Bugcrowd announced its so-called “next generation penetration testing” product last year, a move followed some months later by its competitor HackerOne. With others in the bounty space already offering these types of penetration testing packages, it looks like these efforts are here to stay.
But where do crowdsourced penetration tests sit in the wider penetration testing market? Are they coming after the Insomnia and Atredis Partners type firms? The NCCs? The shonky nessus-scan “penetration testers”? Well, not surprisingly Casey argues that this is a new sub-niche in the market and he makes a pretty compelling case to support that argument.
Links to everything are below, and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.
On this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week’s security news, including:
This week’s show is brought to you by Signal Sciences, their CEO Andrew Peterson will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to have a bit of a chat about how a lot of traditional enterprises are running serious business web app shops these days.
Links to everything are below, and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.
On this edition of Snake Oilers you’ll be hearing from three vendors offering what I believe to be excellent security technology. I haven’t personally used this tech, but conceptually everything featured in this edition is The Good Stuff. You’ll see. Or hear. You know what I mean.
First up we’ll be hearing from CMD, they make killer software for Linux that lets you lock down account actions. Not permissions, actions. Do all the default and service accounts you have to run on your Linux fleet terrify you? Well, this is a solution for that. There’s a visibility component there, too.
Then we’ll be hearing from AlphaSOC. When we last spoke to them they were just doing domain-based analytics, but they’ve expanded their tech and now offer IP-based and http request-based analytics. You can deploy AlphaSOC as a Splunk app or hook up to their API any other way you want. They’re offering free trials, but even when you’re on the paid service it’s actually pretty affordable.
The brain behind AlphaSOC is Chris McNab who used to run incident response at NCC Group. He’s seen how the planes crash into the mountains and he has created a product that performs eminently sensible analysis on your traffic and metadata to alert you to badness.
Then finally we’ll be hearing from Nucleus. This is a new company and if your job is managing vulnerabilities and vuln scanners in your org then straight up, just skip to the Nucleus interview immediately. They’ve created a web app that normalises vulnerability scanning information. It’ll take the outputs from Snyk, Rapid7, Checkmarx, Netsparker, OpenVAS, Twistlock, Fortify, Burp Suite, Nessus, Qualys, Acunetix AND others.
It ingests all of this data, normalises it, then plumbs these alerts through to the right people through a multitude of different ticketing systems. If your’e stuck in the 7th layer of Sharepoint or Spreadsheet vulnerability management hell, this is a solution to your problems. You will weep salty tears of joy when you hear this one. Free trials of Nucleus are also available.
Links to the companies featured are below!
On this week’s show Adam Boileau and Patrick Gray discuss the week’s security news:
This week’s show is brought to you by Thinkst Canary! Thinkst founder Haroon Meer will be along in this week’s show to talk about the effect venture capital is having on the security ecosystem. He thinks VC money often makes weak ideas look strong, and in a market where it’s quite difficult to make informed purchasing decisions, that’s not a good thing.
Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.
In this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau recap all the infosec news of the last three weeks, including:
This week’s sponsor interview is with Kumud Kalia, the Chief Information and Technology Officer of Cylance. They actually dropped a really interesting product announcement at RSA a few weeks back and Kumud will be along later on to tell us about that. The tl;dr it’s an agent that models endpoint behaviour so when someone - or something - else starts using that endpoint to do things that don’t fit the user profile, action can be taken.
It’s the type of tech concept that normally belongs in academic papers, not in actual products people can actually buy. That’s an interesting chat.
Links to everything are below, and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.
This is a wholly sponsored podcast brought to you by Duo Security.
WebAuthn is a new multifactor authentication standard for the web that is all rooted in very smart encryption tech. Some of you would already be using similar authentication standards in apps without even thinking about it, like doing biometric authentication in your banking apps. You want to log in via your app and it scans your face to auth you, that sort of thing. WebAuthn makes those types of authentication actions available to users through the browser.
It’s now an official W3C standard supported by most browsers. It’s the future of auth on the Web.
Duo Security has been involved a little bit with the standards process and in this edition of the Soap Box podcast you’re going to hear a nearly hour long conversation between myself, Nick Steele and James Barclay who are Duo’s resident Webauthn dudes at Duo Labs.
I hope you enjoy this conversation.
In this week’s show Patrick Gray and Alex Stamos discuss the week’s news, as well as discussing the rise of white supremacist communities and propaganda on the Internet and what can be done about it.
News:
This week’s show is brought to you by Chronicle Security! We’ll be joined by Chronicle co-founders Shapor Naghibzadeh and Mike Wiacek. They had a tremendously successful launch at RSA and they’re going to pop in to tell us about some near future plans they have for their Backstory product.
Links to everything are below, and you can follow Patrick or Alex on Twitter if that’s your thing.
On this week’s show Adam Boileau and Patrick Gray discuss the week’s news:
This week’s sponsor is Senetas. They make layer 2 encryption gear but recently made a US$8m investment into Votiro, a Content Disarm and Reconstruction (CDR) play. Votiro CEO Aviv Grafi is this week’s sponsor guest. He stops by to explain CDR tech.
Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.
On this week’s show Adam Boileau and Patrick Gray discuss the week’s news:
This week’s sponsor interview is with Chris Kennedy, AttackIQ’s CISO and VP of customer success. And we’ll be talking about a few things really, like about how continuous validation of security controls like monitoring is a good thing. Everyone uses software like Tenable to verify patching, why not do the same for your monitoring?
Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.
In this edition of the show we’re playing a small part in Chronicle’s launch of its flagship product, Backstory.
Chronicle is of course the security spinoff of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. The launch of Chronicle itself was announced about a year ago, but until now it’s only really had one product: Virus Total Enterprise. That all changed today when Chronicle launched Backstory at the RSA conference in the USA.
I was lucky enough to see a demo of Backstory before we recorded this interview last week, and I’m going to characterise it in a way that Chronicle probably won’t like, but it’s basically a cloud-SIEM, albeit a very good one.
Backstory ingests logs from a bunch of data sources – DNS lookup information, DHCP info, your EDR logs (from your Crowdstrike or Carbon Black software), web proxy logs, firewall alerts – and then it structures this stuff so you can make use of it. You get nice pointy-clicky timelines and useful visualisations. That’s handy enough, but keep in mind your logs are now with the company that is responsible for Virus Total. They have some pretty good intel, and they can now apply various IOCs to the logs you’ve submitted.
So one obvious use case for Backstory is doing the type of threat hunting threat hunters like to do, but beyond that, this is likely going to become a pretty useful alerting platform.
On this week’s show Adam and Patrick discuss the week’s security news:
This week’s show is brought to you by Remediant. Their CEO Tim Keeler will be along in this week’s sponsor segment to talk about how they’re doing “virtual directory binding” to make managing Linux accounts via Active Directory less traumatic. If you’re struggling with horrible, horrible PAM solutions in your devops environments have a listen to that one.
*** NOTE FROM PAT: I made some mistakes in the recording phase of this week’s show. As a result, my vocal audio is pretty atrocious. Sorry! ***
Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.
Adam Boileau is along this week to discuss the week’s security news, which also features comment from Dmitri Alperovitch, Klon Kitchen and The Grugq. We cover:
This week’s sponsor interview is with Jason Haddix of Bugcrowd. He’ll be along to talk a little more about what Bugcrowd calls next-generation pentests. They claim one of their tests is sufficient for compliance purposes under PCI, ISO or NIST and they’ve had a third party auditor prove that for them. They also say the service has really taken off despite being launched only a couple of months ago.
Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.
Adam Boileau is back in the news seat this week. We talk about:
This week’s show is brought to you by AustCyber, a nonprofit funded by grants from the Australian government. Its goal is to promote Australia’s cybersecurity industry.
AustCyber CEO Michelle Price will be along in this week’s sponsor interview to tell us all about what they’ve got planned for RSA.
Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing.
As regular listeners know, this isn’t the regular weekly Risky Business podcast, all Soap Box podcasts are paid promotions. We ran 10 of these last year, we’re running more of them this year – the total number is up to 14, but we’re running fewer of our other promotional podcast Snake Oilers.
In this Soap Box podcast we’re chatting with a company with a legitimately fascinating origin story.
You remember how in 2017 and 2018 people were running all these shonky initial coin offerings where they’d sell off millions of dollars of crypto tokens on the basis of a two minute video and a whitepaper? What happened in a lot of these cases is after the ICO the founders would take the money, launder it and move to the Bahamas.
Well, Polyswarm raised its money in an ICO. About $26m US dollars (!!). And, because they weren’t mainlining the ICO Kool-Aid, they cashed out about half of what they raised into real money before cryptocurrency values crashed.
Instead of moving to the Bahamas, they actually stuck around to build the business that tokenholders had chosen to fund. Their token value has crashed like everyone else’s has, but that doesn’t matter – they’re funded, and because of their unconventional funding source they don’t have a whole bunch of venture capitalists breathing down their neck.
So, what’s the business? It’s a marketplace for threat detection. Yes, my pinned tweet says “I do not want your blockchain expert as a guest on my podcast,” and yes, this company does use blockchain fairy dust, but as you’ll hear, the blockchain element to this business isn’t really what it’s about. Indeed, the founder and CEO of Polyswarm, Steve Bassi, says he would find life a lot easier in many ways if they weren’t actually using blockchain tech here as a marketplace enabler. He’s also banned himself from ever attending a blockchain conference again in his life.
Ok, so what is the Polyswarm marketplace and how does it work. As you’ll hear in this interview it took me a bit to actually understand exactly what they’re doing here, but what they’ve essentially built is a marketplace for AV. The best way to explain this is to just explain how it works. If you’re an enterprise client or an MSSP you can submit a sample to this marketplace. You’re submitting it with a question – is this file bad or good – and you attach a tokenised value to the answer.
On the other side of the equation are all these AV engines. Big ones, small ones… even tiny little micro engines that are only good at detecting very niche threats. So the enterprise submits the sample – that can be a whole file or just a hash – and it gets distributed to all the people who are running these AV engines. They scan the file, and if they’re super confident on an answer, they return that answer as well as a tokenised stake as a measure of their confidence. The idea is you can have a competitive marketplace for threat detection in which even niche players can participate. Polyswarm CEO Steve Bassi joined me to talk me through the whole concept.
