The Hacker Mind

EP 85: The Rise Of Bots (and Bots As A Service) Nov 28, 2023

Bots are actionable scripts that can slow your day to day business, be enlisted in denial of service attacks, or even keep you from getting those tickets Taylor Swift you desperately want. Antoine Vastel from DataDome explains how it's an arms race: the better we get at detecting them, the more the bots evolve to evade detection. Transcript here.

EP 84: When Old Medical Devices Keep Pre-shared Keys Nov 14, 2023

You would think there is a procedure to End-of-Life a medical device, right? Erase personal health info. Erase network configuration info. Speaking at SecTor 2023, Deral Heiland from Rapid 7 said he found that he was able to buy infusion pumps on the secondary market with the network credentials for the original Health Care Delivery Organization in tact. In theory he could join that network as that device and potentially pivot to other parts of the HDO. No good since there are 100s of thousands of these devices in use today. Transcript here.

EP 83: Tales From The Dark Web: Ransomware, Data Extortion, and Operational Technology Oct 31, 2023

With the recent Clop attack on customers of MoveIt, ransomware is now old news. Attackers are skipping the encryption and simply extorting the exfiltrated data, according to Thomas “Mannie” Wilken, from the Accenture Cyber Threat Intelligence Dark Web Reconnaissance Team. He should know; he spends his days on the Dark Web seeing the rise of new infostealers, deep fakes, and even the rise of OT technologies as potential targets in the near future. Transcript here.

EP 82: The Vulkan Files Oct 17, 2023

Imagine a data dump of files similar to the Snowden Leaks in 2013, only this it’s not from the NSA but from NT Vulkan, a Russian contractor. And it’s a framework for targeting critical IT infrastructures. In a talk at DEF CON 31, Joe Slowick from Huntress, shares what a Russian whistleblower released in the form of emails and documents, and how we can tie some of that back information to some of the Sandworm campaigns and recent attacks against Ukraine. Transcript here.

EP 81: Hacking Visual Studio Code Extensions Oct 03, 2023

Rather than use backdoor exploits, attackers are stealing credentials going through the front door. How are they gaining credentials. Sometimes it’s from the tools we trust. Paul Geste and Thomas Chauchefoin discuss their DEF CON 31 presentation Visual Studio Code is why I have (Workspace) Trust issues as well as the larger question of how much we should trust tools that we depend on daily. Transcript here.

EP 80: Ghost Token Sep 19, 2023

What if an GPC project OAUTH access token wasn’t deleted? This could expose databases to bad actors. Tal Skverer from Astrix discusses his DEF CON 31 presentation GhostToken: Exploiting Google Cloud Platform App Infrastructure to Create Unremovable Trojan Apps. Transcript here.

EP 79: Conducting Incident Response in Costa Rica Post Conti Ransomware Sep 06, 2023

How do you conduct an incident response for an entire country? When it’s 27 different life-critical government ministries each with up to 850 individual devices -- that’s uncharted territory. Esteban Jimenez of ATTI Cyber talks about his experience with the reconstruction of the cybersecurity system following Conti, how the country handled a second ransomware attack from the Hive ransomware group, and we'll discuss what yet remains to be done to secure Costa Rica -- and other Latin American countries from future attacks. Transcript here.

EP 78: Defending Costa Rica From Conti Ransomware Aug 22, 2023

What is is like to hack an entire country, to take it’s government services offline, to deny a government an ability to function? Costa Rica knows. Esteban Jimenez of ATTI Cyber has been helping Costa Rica improve its cybersecurity posture for more than 16 years, and he has been helping them recently recover from a crippling ransomware attack in April 2022 that hit 28 ministries of the government. Central and Latin America appear to be a new playground for bad actors testing new malware. But Central and Latin America are learning how to fight back. Transcript here.

EP 77: Security Chaos Engineering with Kelly Shortridge Aug 08, 2023

Speaking at Black Hat 2023, Kelly Shortridge is bringing cybersecurity out of the dark ages by infusing security by design to create secure patterns and practices. It’s a subject of her new book on Security Chaos Computing, and it’s a topic that’s long overdue to be discussed in the field. Transcript.

EP 76: Hacking Medical Systems Jul 25, 2023

Are we doing enough to secure our health delivery organizations? Given the rise of ransomware attacks, one could day we are not. Karl Sigler from Trustwave SpiderLabs, talks about a new report that his team has written that is focused on the threat landscape for medical devices and the healthcare industry in general. Transcript here.

EP 75: Hacking .Mil And Other TLD Domains (Ethically) Jul 11, 2023

Internet domains are brittle. One could hack into a military, a foreign government, or even global commercial web services domain using flaws in the underlying architecture. Fredrik Nordberg Almroth, co-founder of Detectify, talks about how he did just that -- hack .mil, hack the top level domain of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and even Gmail or Wordpress -- just by looking for basic misconfigurations. Transcript.

EP 74: Disarming Document Threats Jun 27, 2023

Phishing is everywhere. Who among us has not seen phish in their inbox? Aviv Grafi, from Votiro, gets into the weeds about how malicious documents are formed and how they might (despite good secure posture) still end up in your inbox or browser. He’s created a rather novel method to strip out the good content from the bad without affecting your overall productivity. And maybe, just maybe, stop phishing as a viable attack vector.

EP 73: Hacking Human Behavior Jun 13, 2023

Could the nudges and prompts like those from our Fitbits and Apple watches be effective in enforcing good security behavior as well? Oz Alashe, CEO and founder of CybSafe, brings his experience in the UK Intelligence Community to the commercial world along with some solid science around what motivates us to make changes in our lives. It’s not just one-off phishing examples, it’s also about providing positive feedback, even gamification, to make things stick in future insider trust programs.

Transcript here.

EP 72: Tales From A Ransomware Negotiator May 30, 2023

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.

EP 71: The Internet As A Pen Test May 17, 2023

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.

EP 70: Hacking Real World Criminals Online May 02, 2023

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.

EP 69: Self-Healing Operating Systems Apr 18, 2023

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

EP 68: Incident Response in the Cloud Apr 04, 2023

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.

EP 67: When The Dark Web Discovered ChatGPT Mar 21, 2023

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.

EP 66: Shattering InfoSec’s Glass Ceiling Mar 07, 2023

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.

EP 65: The Hacker Revolution Will Be Televised Feb 21, 2023

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.

EP 64: Gaining Persistence On Windows Boxes Feb 07, 2023

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.

EP 63: What Star Wars Can Teach Us About Threat Modeling Jan 24, 2023

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.

EP 62: Tib3rius Jan 10, 2023

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.

EP 61: Never Mess With A Hacker Dec 20, 2022

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.

EP 60: Hacking Latency In Live Music Online Dec 06, 2022

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.

EP 59: Hacking Hi-Tech Cars Nov 08, 2022

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

EP 58: Crimeware As A Service Oct 25, 2022

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.

EP 57: Hacking the Art of Invisibility II Oct 11, 2022

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.

EP 56: How To Get Paid To Hack Sep 27, 2022

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.

EP 55: How To Become A 1337 Hacker Sep 13, 2022

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.

EP 54: Cyber Ranges Aug 30, 2022

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.

EP 53: Beyond MITRE ATT&CK Aug 16, 2022

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.

EP 52: DEF CON Villages Aug 02, 2022

DEF CON is 30 years old this year, and it’s bigger and better in part because of topic-specific villages. Here’s an inside look at four of the most popular villages.

In this episode I’m talking to the organizers of the Lockpicking Village,the ICS village, the Car Hacking Village, and the Aerospace Village. And, there’s thirty more villages including Girls Hack Village, the Voting Machine Hacking village, the IoT Village, and the Bio Hacking village. In each you will find people with like interests. You will learn cool new things. And … you won’t be disappointed.

EP 51: G-Men In Cyberspace Jul 19, 2022

Fighting organized crime online might seem like a logical extension for law enforcement, but, in fact, it is not all that straight forward.

Michael McPherson is someone with 25 years in the FBI, who has transitioned out to the corporate world, and can best describe the experiences on both sides of fighting cybercrime.

EP 50: The Fog of Cyber War Jul 05, 2022

There’s an online war in Ukraine, one that you haven’t heard much about because that country is holding its own with an army of infosec volunteers worldwide.

Mikko Hypponen joins The Hacker Mind to discuss cybercrime unicorns, the fog of cyber war that surrounds the Ukrainian war with its much larger neighbor, and of course Mikko’s new book, If It’s Smart, It’s Vulnerable.

EP 49: LoL Jun 21, 2022

Living off the Land (LoL) is an attack where files already on your machine, ie your operating system, are used against you. They would be undetectable, right?

Kyle Hanslovan, CEO of Huntress, joins The Hacker Mind to discuss recent LoL attacks, specifically the Microsoft Follina attack and the Kaseya ransomware attack, and how important it is for small and medium sized businesses to start using enterprise grade security, given the evolving nature of these attacks.

EP 48: Hacking Teslas Jun 08, 2022

With digital convenience there’s often a price. And if that means a bad actor can create a wireless key for your new Tesla, that price is pretty steep.

At CanSecWest 2022, researcher Martin Herfurt announced a new tool, TeslaKee, which he hopes prevents wireless key attacks from happening. Martin joins The Hacker Mind to discuss this and his earlier Bluetooth vulnerability research, including the Car Whisperer and the Tesla Radar.

EP 47: Ethical Hacking May 24, 2022

Is hacking a crime? The US Justice Dept says it will no longer prosecute good-faith security researchers, but what constitutes good-faith security research?

Bryan McAninch (Aph3x) talks about his organization, Hacking Is Not A Crime, and the ethical line it draws on various hacking activities. He also talks about the future generation of hacking, what motivates young people today to think outside the box in a world where infosec is increasingly becoming vocational and expected.

EP 46: Reverse Engineering Smart Meters May 10, 2022

After hearing a talk, a Dallas-based hacker set out to find out what was going on inside the smart meter attached to his home, and what he found was surprising.

Since then Hash started a reverse engineering wiki site called Recessim and created dozens of YouTube videos in a channel of that same name to chronicle his adventures. He joins The Hacker Mind to talk about his journey, about mesh networks, and even glitching. Like any true hacker, this isn’t his day job; this is his passion.

EP 45: Hacking Industrial Control Systems Apr 26, 2022

Can criminal hackers shut down a city’s electrical grid? Well, nothing’s impossible. But how might it actually happen? And how might we defend ourselves?

Tom Van Norman, co-founder of the ICS Village, joins The Hacker Mind to share the group’s upcoming plans for RSAC and DEF CON, where they will again present present virtual scenarios and hands on physical models of industrial control systems in order to expose hackers to their inner workings and to provide them with best practices to prevent potential threats to health, life, and safety.

EP 44: Hackers Wanted: Filling the Cybersecurity Skills Gap Apr 12, 2022

Should infosec now be considered vocational training just like becoming an electrician or a plumber? How else should we address the skills gap in infosec?

In this episode, Sonny Sandelius, Assistant Director of the SANS workforce programs, talks about programs that recruit people from outside computer sciences, encouraging those from diverse backgrounds who share the curiosity and the basic aptitude necessary to become hired cybersecurity professionals in as little as six months.

EP 43: Follow The Rabbit Mar 29, 2022

Hackers often make it look easy when in fact they started with no plan and were just following their curiosity, going down paths erratically just like a rabbit.

Researchers Nir Ohfeld and Sagi Tzadik join The Hacker Mind to talk about their presentation at Black Hat Europe 2021 on the ChaosDB vulnerability. It’s about how they started with a deliberately misconfigured version of CosmosDB and ended up with complete unrestricted access to the accounts and the databases of thousands of Microsoft Azure customers.

EP 42: Hacking Aerospace Mar 15, 2022

Can you hack an airplane? A satellite in orbit? Turns out you can. And the fact that hackers are thinking about this now, that’s actually a good thing.

Steve Luczynski and Matt Mayes join The Hacker Mind to talk about the importance of having hackers, vendors, and the government get together and work through problems. That’s why the Aerospace Village at DEF CON exists. Mayes said “there are a lot of companies that are skeptical of hackers. And both sides are looking at each other, you know, a little bit in an uneasy fashion. So we want to show that neither side is scary.”

EP 41: Hacking The Art of Invisibility Mar 01, 2022

In the book The Art of Invisibility, I challenged my co author Kevin Mitnick to document the steps needed to become invisible online. There are a lot.

In this episode, I'm going to discuss how hard it is to be absolutely invisible online. How there are always breadcrumbs and fingerprints left behind that could potentially identify you. That said, there are some steps that you can take to obfuscate your online presence and to eliminate those breadcrumbs in the first place. And as for staying invisible, well, at some point, it's only human that we sometimes fail.

EP 40: Hacking Ethereum Smart Contracts Feb 15, 2022

How do you stop a half billion dollars in cryptocurrency from being stolen? You perform software testing and responsibly disclose it first, of course.

Yannis Smaragdakis, a researcher with Dedaub, found a major vulnerability in Ethereum smart contracts, arguably within the billion-dollar range, that would have made it one of the largest hacks ever—given that it was a theoretically unbounded threat -- had it not been mostly mitigated by the time it went public. In this episode he steps us though how he discovered the Phantom Function and other vulnerabilities within Ethereum.

EP 39: Fuzzing Crypto Feb 01, 2022

For some people, crypto means cryptography. For others, it means cryptocurrency. Fortunately, in this episode, we’re discussing vulnerabilities in both.

Guido Vranken returns to The Hacker Mind to discuss his CryptoFuzz tool on GitHub, as well as his experience fuzzing and finding vulnerabilities in cryptographic libraries and also within cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum.

EP 38: Going Passwordless Jan 18, 2022

Passwords are everywhere, but they probably weren't intended to be used as much as they are today. Is there something more secure? Something better? Yes.

Simon Moffatt from The Cyber Hut joins The Hacker Mind to discuss how identity and access management (IAM) is fundamental to everything we do online today, and why even multi factor access, while an improvement, needs to yield to more effortless and more secure passwordless technology that’s coming soon.

EP 37: A Hacker From Hollywood Jan 04, 2022

This is the story of a film star who connected the simple concept behind a player piano to complex communication technology in use in our devices today.

Hedy Lamarr is perhaps best known for the dozen or so motion pictures she made -- and as the most beautiful woman in the world -- but did you know that she also co-patented the frequency hopping spread spectrum technology that is the foundation for cellular, Wi-Fi, and even Bluetooth communications?

EP 36: Fuzzing Message Brokers Dec 14, 2021

Fuzzing makes it possible to locate vulnerabilities even in “safe” environments like Erlang, a language designed for high availability and robust services.

Jonathan Knudsen from Synopsys joins The Hacker Mind to discuss his presentation at SecTor 2021 on fuzzing common message brokers such as RabbitMQ and VerneMQ, both written in Erlang, demonstrating that any type of software in any environment can still be vulnerable.

EP 35: Digital Forensics Nov 30, 2021

So you’ve been hit with ransomware and, for whatever reason, you paid the bitcoin but now the decryptor doesn’t work. Who are you going to call for help?

Paula Januszkiewicz, from Cqure, joins The Hacker Mind to discuss her two presentations at SecTor 2021 on digital forensics. She talks about the various ways criminal hackers hide their work, what happens after ransomware hits on a system, how investigators go about looking for recovery information, and what type of skills those practitioners need to succeed.

EP 34: Hacking Behavioral Biometrics Nov 16, 2021

AI is almost good enough at simulating human activity to defeat the biometric systems designed to fight fraud, effectively putting us back at square one.

Iain Paterson and Justin Macorin join The Hacker Mind podcast to share insights from their SecTor 2021 talk on hacking behavioral biometrics. If an adversarial actor wants to simulate user behavior, that actor can use techniques similar to those that a behavioral biometrics firm would use to detect abnormal usage. The researchers predict that soon it'll be hard to tell a human user at the keyboard, or at the mouse, from a bot or AI-driven entity.

EP 33: Scanning the Internet Nov 02, 2021

Traditional anti-malware research relies on customer systems but what if a particular malware wasn’t on the same platform as your solution software?

Marc-Etienne M.Léveillé from ESET joins The Hacker Mind podcast to talk about the challenges of building his own internet scanner to scan for elusive malware. Speaking at this year’s SecTor 2021, he shares some of his findings on Kabolos, a stealthy malware that uses SSH credentials to hide, that is perhaps exposed much easier through scanning the IPv4 space -- all 3.7 billion addresses.

EP 32: The Hunt For Ghost #1 Oct 19, 2021

Ghost #1 was a digital film server that should have stayed blacklisted but due to a unique software flaw it continued to produce pirated films.

Patrick Von Sychowski from the Celluloid Junkie joins the Hacker Mind podcast to discuss his SecTor 2021 talk on Ghost #1, explaining how the transition from 35mm to digital in theaters and how the unique third iteration of cinema in China also allowed this digital projector to evade anti-piracy safeguards for nearly three years. He credits one engineer at the Chinese propaganda department for helping solve a mystery that resulted in the largest film piracy takedown operation of all time, anywhere in the world.

EP 31: Stopping the Mirai IoT Botnet, One CnC Server At A Time Oct 05, 2021

In 2016, the Mirai IoT botnet shut down part of the internet, yet variations still plague us today. Maybe our current approach to IoT botnets isn’t working?

Ali Davanian and Ahmad Darki join the Hacker Mind podcast to discuss their Black Hat USA 2021 talk and their tool, CnCHunter, which looks for active CnC servers that can be discovered, so law enforcement can take them down, or at least networks can block them, effectively denying them access to the 100s of thousands of compromised devices worldwide.

EP 30: Surviving Stalkerware Sep 21, 2021

What role does technology play in facilitating intimate partner abuse? What role might the security industry have in identifying or even stopping it?

Martijn Grooten and Lodrina Cherne join the The Hacker Mind podcast to discuss their Black Hat USA 2021 presentation. They talk about how software and IoT companies can avoid becoming the next Black Mirror episode and share resources that can help survivors (and those who want to help them) deal with the technology issues that can be associated with technologically facilitated abuse.

EP 29: Learn Competitive Hacking with picoCTF Sep 07, 2021

PPP wanted to give their past high school selves the infosec education they didn’t have. But if you think picoCTF is only for HS students, think again.

Megan Kearns of Carnegie-Mellon University's Cylab joins The Hacker Mind to talk about the early days and the continued evolution of this popular online infosec competition site. No matter what your age or interest level, picoCTF probably has something new for you to learn.

EP 28: Fuzzing Hyper-V Aug 24, 2021

At Black Hat USA 2021, two researchers presented how they used their own fuzzer designed for hypervisors to find a critical vulnerability in Microsoft Azure.

Ophir Harpaz and Peleg Hadar join The Hacker Mind to discuss their journey from designing a custom hypervisor fuzzer to identifying a vulnerability within Hyper-V and how their new research tool, hAFL1, can benefit others looking to secure cloud architectures.

EP 27: Car Hacking 0x05 Aug 10, 2021

We haven’t seen many attacks on our smart cars. That’s perhaps because of a dedicated group of hackers who are working to improve automotive security.

Robert Leale, the driving force behind the Car Hacking village at DEF CON, joins The Hacker Mind to talk about CANBus basics, and whether we’ll see cars subjected to ransomware attacks. He also shares some tools, books, and website resources that you can use to get started hacking cars yourself.

EP 26: Hacking Charity Jul 27, 2021

Hackers are charitable in ways that might surprise you. Whether it is in Africa or rural Arkansas, hackers find ways to use their skills for good reasons.

Jack Daniel and Jason Kent return to The Hacker Mind to discuss the various ways hackers are helping society by contributing to charitable organizations … even starting their own. From BSides, to DerbyCon, to Shmoocon, even on the Apple App Store you can find evidence of their hard work.

EP 25: Hacking Communities Jul 13, 2021

As we head to Hacker Summer Camp, how should we rebuild our infosec communities to be more inclusive and diverse? Jack Daniel offers his unique voice.

As one of the founders of BSides, and as a community advocate for Tenable, Jack provides guidance on how we can re-emerge from the pandemic and successfully amplify and support people of different ethnicities, faiths, and genders within our hacking communities without being patronizing.

EP 24: Hacking Biology Jun 29, 2021

There are a lot of parallels between computer security and biology. If you think you already understand hacking systems, then I’ve got a story for you.

In this episode, Harrison Green talks about his experience creating exploits during capture the flag competitions and how it relates to his current day to day work with the Durrant Lab at the University of Pittsburgh on computational biology.

EP 23: Hacking APIs Jun 15, 2021

APIs are vital in our mobile digital world, but the consequences of API security flaws have yet to be seen. So how hard is it to hack APIs? Not very hard.

In this Episode, Jason Kent from Cequence talks about his experience hacking a garage door opener API, the tools he uses such as Burp, ZAP, and APK tool, and why we need to be paying more attention to the OWASP API Security Top 10.

EP 22: Hacking Social Media Jun 01, 2021

With more than 600K followers on YouTube, LiveOverflow is one of infosec’s first social media influencers. How did he get started and what’s next?

In this episode, LiveOverflow talks about his six years of producing engaging YouTube content and what the rise of social media influencers might mean for traditional conferences like Black Hat. He also gives a preview of his new YouTube series on the sudo vulnerability.

EP 21: Hacking Ransomware May 18, 2021

What if you discovered a flaw in a ransomware payment system that unlocked the data without paying the ransom? Would you use it? Would you help others?

In this episode, Jack Cable talks about hacking the Qlocker ransomware and briefly interrupting its payment system. He also talks about his infosec journey hacking cryptocurrencies, joining the Digital Defense Service and CISA, and helping secure the 2020 presidential election… all before the age of 22.

EP 20: MITRE ATT&CK Evaluations May 04, 2021

MITRE ATT&CK catalogs the known tactics, techniques, and procedures of past advanced persistent threats, providing a roadmap for any red or blue team.

In this episode, Frank Duff, Director of ATT&CK Evaluations for MITRE Engenuity, talks about how both red and blue teams can directly benefit from ATT&CK, and how organizations -- and even some security vendors -- are now evaluating their solutions against it.

EP 19: Hacking IoT Apr 20, 2021

It seems everything smart is hackable, with startups sometimes repeating security mistakes first made decades ago. How then does one start securing IoT?

In this episode, Beau Woods and Paulino Calderon discuss their book, Practical IoT Hacking: The Definitive Guide to Attacking the Internet of Things. They talk about IoT threat models, the technologies being used today, and what tools and knowledge you need to get started successfully hacking IoT devices today.

EP 18: Hacking Diversity Apr 06, 2021

You’d think that having an amazing resume, a couple of bug bounties, or a CTF win would land you that dream infosec job. For many, though, that isn’t true.

That’s why Tennisha Martin founded Black Girls Hack, an organization designed to help the next generation receive the skills and experience they need to land jobs in the C-suites, and perhaps begin to address the acute shortage of infosec professionals with qualified people of color.

EP 17: Shellshock Mar 23, 2021

Shortly after OpenSSL’s Heartbleed, Shellshock was discovered lurking in Bash code two decades old. How could open source software be vulnerable for so long?

This episode looks at how fuzz testing has evolved over the years, how open source projects have for the most part gone untested over time, and how new efforts to match fuzzing to software development are today helping to discover dangerous new vulnerabilities before they become the next Shellshock.

EP 16: The Gentle Art of Lockpicking Mar 09, 2021

What is the allure of lockpicking at hacker conferences? In this episode Deviant Ollam explains why these mechanical puzzles remain popular with hackers.

Ollam, who was an early member of Toool, The Open Organization of Lockpickers, discusses his career as a physical pen tester and also shares some basic lockpicking hacks.

EP 15: So You Want To Be A Pentester Feb 23, 2021

To help more people become penetration testers, Kim Crawley and Phillip L. Wylie wrote The Pentester BluePrint: Starting A Career As An Ethical Hacker.

In this episode of The Hacker Mind, Kim talks about the practical steps anyone can take to gain the skills and confidence necessary to become a successful pentester -- from gaining certifications, to building your own lab, to participating in bug bounties and even CTFs.

EP 14: The Right To Repair Feb 09, 2021

How do the current DMCA laws impact those who hack digital devices? And why doesn’t the basic right to repair our devices extend into the digital world?

To answer these questions, Paul Roberts, Editor-in-Chief of The Security Ledger, has founded securepairs.org, a group of infosec experts who are volunteering their free time to fight for the digital right to repair in local legislation. In this episode of The Hacker Mind, Paul talks about the consequences of not paying enough attention today.

EP 13: Shall We Play A Game? Jan 26, 2021

Capture the Flag is a game, a community, and a really cool hacker culture. But will we one day stream CTFs like we do World of Warcraft or League of Legends?

Whether it’s designing or just playing CTFs, John Hammond knows a lot about the gamification of infosec. He even has his own YouTube channel where he shares what he’s learned from different challenges. In this episode of The Hacker Mind John shares his experiences building and executing his own CTFs.

EP 12: Hacking Healthcare Jan 12, 2021

After breaches like SolarWinds, companies pledge to improve their digital hygiene. What if they don’t? And what parallels might infosec learn from COVID-19?

In this episode, Mike Ahmadi draws on his years of experience in infosec, his years hacking medical devices. Mike notes how some basic rules of physical hygiene that can slow the spread of COVID-19 can also map into the digital world.

EP 11: Hacking OpenWRT Dec 08, 2020

For three years OpenWRT had a severe validation problem with its download package manager, until a fuzz tester found and reported the vulnerability.

In this episode, Guido Vranken talks about his approach to hacking, about the differences between memory safe and unsafe languages, his use of fuzz testing as a preferred tool, and how he came to discover the validation error in OpenWRT, as well as a serialization error in Cereal, and other vulnerabilities.

EP 10: Hunting The Next Heartbleed Nov 24, 2020

For two years Heartbleed was a zero-day in OpenSSL until fuzz testing exposed it. How many others are in the wild now? And how will we find the next one?

In this episode I talk about how Heartbleed (CVE 2014-0160) was found and also interview Rauli Kaksonen, someone who was at Codenomicon at the time of its discovery and is now a senior security specialist at the University of Oulu in Finland, about how new security tools are still needed to find the next big zero day.

EP 09: Bug Bounty Hunters Nov 10, 2020

You’ve probably heard of bug bounties. But did you know there’s an elite group of bug bounty hunters that travel the world? Meet Stok; he’s one of them.

In this episode, Stok talks about his beginnings in enterprise security and his transition into the top tier of bug bounty hunters. Star of his own YouTube channel, Stok believes in community and in giving back what he’s learned along the way.

EP 08: Hacking Voting Systems Oct 27, 2020

While digital polling booth devices are more secure today, what about the larger ecosystem, starting from the moment you register until your vote is counted? Who’s keeping those systems secure?

In this episode of The Hacker Mind, Dr. Jared DeMott of VDA Labs talks about his work securing voter registration tablets and also about the prospects for downloadable, safe voting applications on your preferred mobile device in the future. JBSA5E9aNj9D6pkOTI7p

EP 07: Hacking the Chrome Sandbox Oct 13, 2020

In 1994, the first commercial internet browser was released. Netscape Navigator went on to be eclipsed by Internet Explore, Safari, Firefox, and now Chrome, but it helped kick start the internet-focused world we live in today. And along with that we’ve also learned a lot about browser security.

No matter how strong we build our browsers, that does not prevent hackers from trying to break new things. In this episode, one researcher explains how he successfully escaped the Chrome sandbox, and how bug bounties might just be a good thing resulting in better security for us all.

EP 06: Hacking With Light And Sound Sep 29, 2020

If you think hacking only involves the use of a keyboard or code, then you’re probably missing out. What about using light? What about using sound?

In this episode, The Hacker Mind looks at some of the work Dr. Kevin Fu has been doing at the University of Michigan -- in particular using laser pointers to pwn voice-activated digital assistants, and using specific frequencies of sound to corrupt or crash magnetic hard disk drives.

EP 05: Why Are Blue Team Hackers More L33T? Sep 15, 2020

In the infosec world, blue team hackers are hands down the more elite--and why not? They are defending the crown jewels, 24/7. They have to think of every attack vector. And the red team? They only have to be right once.

EP 04: Can A Machine Think Like A Hacker? Sep 01, 2020

Game Theory is an important part of the underlying strategy used by hackers when playing attack and defend Capture the Flag. It’s thinking how your opponent might respond to an event and then planning for it. Knowing when to patch and when not to was part of the winning strategy behind DARPA’s 2016 Cyber Grand Challenge, which was modeled off the DEF CON CTF.

But what happened the day after CGC at DEF CON 24? That was the day the very best human CTF hackers were invited to play against the winner of CGC, a computer reasoning system named Mayhem. This episode of The Hacker Mind starts to answer the question, can a machine really think like a hacker?

EP 03: Inside DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge Aug 18, 2020

DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge in 2016 showed the world what's coming -- autonomous adversaries -- and raised serious questions. How can organizations react to something that makes decisions in milliseconds? How can you still have humans in the loop when reaction time is key? And how can organizations defend or stop something that increases its own cyber capabilities autonomously?

In this episode we go behind the scenes for the first and only completely autonomous capture the flag competition at DEF CON 24 with Team ForAllSecure.

EP 02: Inside DEF CON’s Champion CTF Team PPP Aug 04, 2020

After winning DEF CON's annual Capture The Flag (CTF) competition five of the last seven years, the Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP) returns as reigning champions but under very different conditions because of COVID 19. So, how is the team preparing?

In this The Hacker Mind episode, one of PPP's members, Zaratec, tells how she first joined PPP, how the team is making changes for this year's online CTF final, and what skills she’s learned from CTFs in general that apply to real-world infosec jobs.

EP 01: Why Is West Point Training Hackers? Jul 21, 2020

In this inaugural episode, The Hacker Mind looks at why the West Point Military Academy, and other organizations within the DoD, is training its young cadets to hack. The answer? To help fill a critical shortage of infosec experts that is only getting worse.

This is the story of how DARPA created a series of capture the flag contests to train and define infosec talent at the U.S. military academies, and how one young cadet joined a team of competitive hackers at West Point.

EP 00: The Hacker Mind (Promo) Jul 15, 2020

Welcome to Hacker Mind, an original podcast from ForAllSecure. It’s about solving software security problems through advanced fuzz testing technology.

In each episode, host Robert Vamosi shares stories from the individuals who are influencing the world of software security, and the real world impact that is having in our cars, our planes, our weapons systems, and in our mobile phones and browsers.

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