Beers with Talos Podcast

Quotes intended, we think you know why. Mitch takes control to present the best of the first (partial) year of the podcast. He covers some of our guests, some of our favorite non-security bits, and a look back at our in-the-moment view of some of the top stories of the year.Things you can look forward to: Mitch struggling through sailing solo with bad bits and unnecessary ukulele music, and a not-at-all-contrived apology for permanently deleting the hilarious fallout from an embarrassing faux pas. …but the clips are really good!

It’s the last full episode of the year! Thanks to you and the diligent work of Matt’s loving mother, the first 17 EPs of Beers with Talos were downloaded over 200,000 times in 2017! To show our gratitude, we are giving you not one, but TWO roundtables this week and even a special bonus rant! Also, Mitch can’t say words good, and Craig reads us stories from the blog!

Matt hijacks the Roundtable to tell us which Spice Girl each host is, because where else does a PR gimmick from KFC lead? Also, what’s worse than clicking a search result and getting a slideshow listicle? Getting a trojan payload when searching for banking forms (but that is the only thing that is worse - ARE YOU LISTENING BUZZFEED?). We also discuss the misnaming of troll farms and how patching and proper network segmentation are your friends - unlike anyone who publishes clickbait slideshows - STILL LOOKING AT YOU, BUZZFEED)

The crew takes on Apache OpenOffice vulns and when you need one CVE versus one hundred. We spend a lot of time discussing signal to noise ratio and Twitter canaries getting things wrong. Of course, we also discuss Bad Rabbit, its relationship to Nyetya, and why OpenOffice vulns are a worry, even to businesses that are run like hippie communes. As per usual, we mostly just make bad jokes.

In this EP, we take on interviewing and finding a job with technical questions and tests (hint: don’t oversell yourself, and make sure your mute button actually works). We also talk about enabling users with security as opposed to hobbling them. When Craig brings up the Google Home Mini beta test issues, he ends up taking a ration over his choices in handling the situation. We also discuss some clever new phishing techniques that insert malware links mid-conversation with a trusted party.

We haven’t gone around the table and introduced ourselves in some time (about 50k downloads ago), so we take the time we usually complain about things at the top of the show to do that. We have seen a massive amount of “top-tier” threats in the last six months or so. While it might seem like comparing apples and oranges (hint: it is), the crew takes a stab at ranking these recent threats/attacks: CCleaner, Deloitte, Equifax, Nyetya, SEC, Shamoon2, WannaCry. Shockingly, all of us have a different ranking. What’s your list look like?Regarding response: Consistency matters, don’t be clever. We discuss some recent unbelievably boneheaded things we have seen in security response. More importantly, we discuss how you SHOULD respond to an incident.Remember: Complexity kills. Unfortunately, it doesn’t kill thought leaders

Struts - when to patch and when to patch with a vengeance. In light of the Equifax breach, we discuss how patching can make you live better days, Never look back and say, Could have been me. Naturally, that covo leads into the biggest story of the week around Pwning the Supply Chain - CCleaner, Python, and Nyetya style. Avast made some mistakes, but every tech company is susceptible to supply chain attacks. What can companies do to protect themselves and how can users adopt a stronger security posture in this area? We also talk Ex$ploit Economy - Valuing exploits by supply and demand. Zerodium has an extensive price list, what can we discern about the availability and difficulty of various exploits using basic economics?

Matt runs the ship this week in Mitch’s absence. Craig and Nigel are joined by Bill Largent and Joel was… in a meeting? The crew discusses ambulance chasing and crying wolf in the security industry and also what the security press is doing to perpetuate questionable reporting. We also chat at length about what exactly goes into vulnerability discovery, chaining exploits, and the months of work to get to those “12 seconds” of glory at Pwn2Own.Did we mention the internet ate our attempted episode last week? Sorry about that. We do our best to make up for missing a week this time. But man, that was a great episode you missed…

Off the top: Better late than never? On top of being distributed all around the planet this week, we had some technical issues with our recording platform. Matt’s audio remained a challenge; it is rough this week. Bear with us, the audio quality will be back to what you have come to expect next episode. If you would like to speak to the manager, please hold. The last several years have seen a continuing surge in booters, DDOS, and combined exploit campaigns for-hire coming out of Asia and other regions. What does this tell us about the continued “professionalization” of the cyber criminal enterprise? We also discuss “hacking back” - some say it should be legal. Most people who know what they are talking about seem to think otherwise.

The BlackHat/DEFCON recovery episode. This one may be a touch rough, with some great gems. We discuss why music in 1994 was so terrible, including a BWT rendition of some classic Ace of Bass. The FIRST tool is discussed in some detail, how using our IDA Pro plug-in saves time a reduces duplication of effort. A vital topic in this EP is Matt’s post “On Conveying Doubt” how can intel professionals couch our findings in the appropriate amount of certainty.We discuss Warren’s amazing shorts ad nauseam (thanks Sammi for the submission!!) and also talk about ClamAV 0.99.3 release and what you’ll find inside.Main topic - what is the value in the mega-cons? Are they getting too big? Has the value increased, decreased, or just changed with growth?