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PODCAST

Research Saturday

Every Saturday, we sit down with cybersecurity researchers to talk shop about the latest threats, vulnerabilities, and technical discoveries.

technology tech news

All Episodes

18:32

Welcome to New York, it's been waitin' for you.

Research Saturday ·

2023/07/22

Joshua Miller from Proofpoint joins Dave to discuss findings on "Welcome to New York: Exploring TA453's Foray into LNKs and Mac Malware." In mid May, TA453, also known as Charming Kitten, APT42, Mint Sandstorm, and Yellow Garuda, was found sending a benign conversation lure masquerading as a senior fellow with the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) to the public media contact for a nuclear security expert at a US-based think tank focused on foreign affairs. The research states that "the email

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17:22

SCARLETEEL zaps back again.

Research Saturday ·

2023/07/15

Michael Clark from Sysdig joins with Dave to discuss their research on SCARLETEEL 2.0: Fargate, Kubernetes, and Crypto. New research from Sysdig threat researchers found that the group continues to thrive with improved tactics. Most recently, they gained access to AWS Fargate, a more sophisticated environment to breach, thanks to their upgraded attack tools. The research states "In their most recent activities, we saw a similar strategy to what was reported in the previous blog: compromise AWS

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17:03

Creating PANDA-monium.

Research Saturday ·

2023/07/08

Thomas Etheridge from CrowdStrike sits down to discuss their work on "Business as Usual: Falcon Complete MDR Thwarts Novel VANGUARD PANDA (Volt Typhoon) Tradecraft" In May of 2023, industry and government sources detailed China-nexus activity where they found the threat actor dubbed Volt Typhoon targeted U.S. based critical infrastructure entities. CrowdStrike's Intelligence team tracked this actor as VANGUARD PANDA. With CISA’s advisory on VANGUARD PANDA and its link to Chinese adversaries who are

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18:54

The power behind artificial intelligence.

Research Saturday ·

2023/07/01

Daniel dos Santos, Forescout's Head of Security Research is sharing insights from a recent exercise his team conducted on AI-assisted attacks for OT and unmanaged devices. Using ChatGPT, Forescout’s research team converted an existing OT exploit developed in Python to run on Windows to demonstrate how easy it is to create an AI-assisted attack that converts the original exploit into alternative programming languages. The research states "our goal was to convert an existing OT exploit developed in

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23:39

Unleashing the crypto gold rush.

Research Saturday ·

2023/06/24

Ian Ahl from Permiso's PØ Labs joins Dave to discuss their research on "Unmasking GUI-Vil: Financially Motivated Cloud Threat Actor." First observing the group in 2021, they discovered GUI-vil is a financially motivated threat group primarily focused on unauthorized cryptocurrency mining activities. The research states "the group has been observed exploiting Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 instances to facilitate their illicit crypto mining operations." This group is dangerous because unlike many

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18:34

Managing machine learning risks.

Research Saturday ·

2023/06/17

Our guest, Johannes Ullrich from SANS Institute, joins Dave to discuss their research on "Machine Learning Risks: Attacks Against Apache NiFi." Using their honeypot network, researchers were able to collect some interesting data about a threat actor who is currently going after exposed Apache NiFi servers. Researchers state “On May 19th, our distributed sensor network detected a notable spike in requests for ‘/nifi.’” Investigating further, they instructed a subset of their sensors to forward

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19:28

A new botnet takes a frosty bite out of the gaming...

Research Saturday ·

2023/06/10

Our guest, Allen West from Akamai's SIRT team, joins Dave to discuss their research on "The Dark Frost Enigma: An Unexpectedly Prevalent Botnet Author Profile." Akamai found this new botnet was targeting the gaming industry, modeled after Qbot, Mirai, and other malware strains. The botnet has expanded to encompass hundreds of compromised devices. The research states "through reverse engineering and patching the malware binary, our analysis determined the botnet's attack potential at approximately

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16:36

Lancefly screams bloody Merdoor.

Research Saturday ·

2023/06/03

Brigid O Gorman from Symantec joins Dave to discuss their research, “Lancefly: Group Uses Custom Backdoor to Target Orgs in Government, Aviation, Other Sectors." Researchers discovered in 2020 that Lancefly, an APT group, is using a custom-written backdoor in attacks targeting government, aviation, educations, and telecoms organizations in South and Southeast Asia. The research states "The backdoor is used very selectively, appearing on just a handful of networks and a small number of machines over

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17:43

8 GoAnywhere MFT breaches and counting.

Research Saturday ·

2023/05/27

This week, our guests are Emily Austin and Himaja Motheram from Censys and their sharing their research - "Months after first GoAnywhere MFT zero-day attacks, Censys still sees about 180 public admin panels." In early February 2023, Censys researchers discovered a zero-day RCE vulnerability in Fortra’s “GoAnywhere MFT” (Managed File Transfer) software. After finding this the Clop ransomware gang claimed that they exploited this vulnerability to breach the data of 130 organizations and Censys found

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24:19

Dangerous vulnerabilities in H.264 decoders.

Research Saturday ·

2023/05/20

Willy R. Vasquez from The University of Texas at Austin discussing research on "The Most Dangerous Codec in the World - Finding and Exploiting Vulnerabilities in H.264 Decoders." Researchers are looking at the marvel that is modern video encoding standards such as H.264 for vulnerabilities and ultimately hidden security risks. The research states "We introduce and evaluate H26FORGE, domain-specific infrastructure for analyzing, generating, and manipulating syntactically correct but semantically

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22:48

Running away from operation Tainted Love.

Research Saturday ·

2023/05/13

Aleksandar Milenkoski and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade from SentinelOne's SentinelLabs join Dave to discuss their research "Operation Tainted Love | Chinese APTs Target Telcos in New Attacks." Researchers found initial phases of attacks against telecommunication providers in the Middle East in Q1 in 2023. The research states "We assess that this activity represents an evolution of tooling associated with Operation Soft Cell." While the exact grouping is unclear, researchers think it is highly likely

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20:55

Phishing campaign takes the energy out of Chinese...

Research Saturday ·

2023/05/06

Ryan Robinson from Intezer to discuss his team's work on "Phishing Campaign Targets Chinese Nuclear Energy Industry." The research team discovered activity targeting the nuclear energy industry in China. Researchers attributed the activity to Bitter APT, a South Asian APT that is known to target the energy, manufacturing and government sectors, mainly in Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, and Saudi Arabia. The article states "We identified seven emails pretending to be from the Embassy of Kyrgyzstan,

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27:26

HinataBot focuses on DDoS attack.

Research Saturday ·

2023/04/29

This week our guests are, Larry Cashdollar, Chad Seaman and Allen West from Akamai Technologies, and they are discussing their research on "Uncovering HinataBot: A Deep Dive into a Go-Based Threat." The team discovered a new Go-based, DDoS-focused botnet. They found it was named after the popular anime show "Naruto," they are calling it "HinataBot" In the research it says "HinataBot was seen being distributed during the first three months of 2023 and is actively being updated by the

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19:22

Don't let the Elon Musk crypto giveaway scam swindle...

Research Saturday ·

2023/04/22

Shiran Guez from Akamai sits down with Dave to discuss their research on "Chatbots, Celebrities, and Victim Retargeting and Why Crypto Giveaway Scams Are Still So Successful." Researchers at Akamai have been on the lookout for crypto giveaway scams. These scams have been impersonating celebrities and brands, most notably Elon Musk and his associated companies. The research states "the scams are delivered through various social media platforms as well as direct messaging apps such as WhatsApp or

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14:28

New Dero cryptojacking operation concentrates on...

Research Saturday ·

2023/04/15

Scott Fanning, Senior Director of Product Management, Cloud Security at CrowdStrike, sits down to talk about the first-ever Dero cryptojacking operation targeting Kubernetes infrastructure. The research defines Dero as "a cryptocurrency that claims to offer improved privacy, anonymity and higher and faster monetary rewards compared to Monero, which is a commonly used cryptocurrency in cryptojacking operations." CrowdStrike was the first organization to discover Dero, and has been observing the

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17:46

A dark side to LLMs.

Research Saturday ·

2023/04/08

Sahar Abdelnabi from CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security sits down with Dave to discuss their work on "A Comprehensive Analysis of Novel Prompt Injection Threats to Application-Integrated Large Language Models." There is currently a large advance in the capabilities of Large Language Models or LLMs, as well as being integrated into many systems, including integrated development environments (IDEs) and search engines. The research states, "The functionalities of current LLMs can be

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13:34

Blackfly flies back again.

Research Saturday ·

2023/04/01

Dick O'Brien from Symantec’s Threat Hunter team discusses their research on "Blackfly - Espionage Group Targets Materials Technology." Researchers say the Blackfly espionage group (aka APT41), has been mounting attacks against Asian materials and composite organizations in attempts to steal intellectual property. This group has been known as one of the longest known Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) groups since at least 2010. The research shares that "early attacks were distinguished by the

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24:37

Popunders are not the good kind of ads.

Research Saturday ·

2023/03/25

On this episode, Jérôme Segura, senior threat researcher at Malwarebytes, shares his team's work, "WordPress sites backdoored with ad fraud plugin." WordPress is an immensely popular content management system (CMS) powering over 43% of all websites. Many webmasters will monetize their sites by running ads and need to draw particular attention to search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to maximize their revenues. The Malwarebytes team discovered a few dozen WordPress blogs using the same plugin

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16:13

ChatGPT grants malicious wishes?

Research Saturday ·

2023/03/18

Bar Block, Threat Intelligence Researcher at Deep Instinct, joins Dave to discuss their work on "ChatGPT and Malware - Making Your Malicious Wishes Come True." Deep Instinct goes into depth on just how dangerous ChatGPT can be in the wrong hands as well as how artificial intelligence is better at creating malware than providing ways to detect it. Researchers go on to explain how the AI app can be used in the wrong hands saying "Examples of malicious content created by the AI tool, such as phishing

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13:35

Files stolen from a sneaky SymStealer.

Research Saturday ·

2023/03/11

Ron Masas of Imperva discusses their work, the "Google Chrome “SymStealer” Vulnerability. How to Protect Your Files from Being Stolen." By reviewing the ways the browser handles file systems, specifically searching for common vulnerabilities relating to how browsers process symlinks, the Imperva Red Team discovered that when files are dropped onto a file input, it’s handled differently. Dubbing it as CVE-2022-40764, researchers found a vulnerability that "allowed for the theft of sensitive files,

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421 results

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