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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

26:33

Malware sometimes changes its behavior.

Research Saturday ·

2021/10/30

Dr. Tudor Dumitras from University of Maryland joins Dave Bittner to share a research study conducted in collaboration with industry partners from Facebook, NortonLifeLock Research Group and EURECOM. The project is called: "When Malware Changed Its Mind: An Empirical Study of Variable Program Behaviors in the Real World." In the study, the team analyzed how malware samples change their behavior when executed on different hosts or at different times. Such “split personalities” may confound the

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19:43

When big ransomware goes away, where should...

Research Saturday ·

2021/10/23

Our guest Doel Santos, Threat Research Analyst at Palo Alto Networks, joins Dave Bittner to talk about Unit 42's work on "Ransomware Groups to Watch: Emerging Threats." As part of Unit 42’s commitment to stop ransomware attacks, they monitor the activity of existing groups, search for dark web leak sites and fresh onion sites, identify up-and-coming players and study tactics, techniques and procedures. During their operations, Unit 42 observed four emerging ransomware groups that are currently

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20:48

Groove Gang making a name for themselves.

Research Saturday ·

2021/10/16

Guest Michael DeBolt, Chief Intelligence Officer from Intel471, joins Dave Bittner to discuss their work on "How Groove Gang is shaking up the Ransomware-as-a-Service market to empower affiliates." McAfee Enterprise ATR believes, with high confidence, that the Groove gang is associated with the Babuk gang, either as a former affiliate or subgroup. These cybercriminals are happy to put aside previous Ransomware-as-a-Service hierarchies to focus on the ill-gotten gains to be made from controlling

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16:56

Taking a closer look at UNC1151.

Research Saturday ·

2021/10/09

Matt Stafford, Senior Threat Intelligence Researcher, from Prevailion joins Dave to talk about their work on "Diving Deep into UNC1151’s Infrastructure: Ghostwriter and beyond." Prevailion’s Adversarial Counterintelligence Team (PACT) used advanced infrastructure hunting techniques and Prevailion’s visibility into threat actor infrastructure creation to uncover previously unknown domains associated with UNC1151 and the “Ghostwriter” influence campaign. UNC1151 is likely a state-backed threat actor

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32:20

IoT security and the need for randomness.

Research Saturday ·

2021/10/02

Dan Petro, Lead Researcher, and Allan Cecil, Security Consultant, from Bishop Fox join Dave to share their research "You're Doing IoT RNG," that they presented at DefCon 29. There’s a crack in the foundation of Internet of Things (IoT) security, one that affects 35 billion devices worldwide. Basically, every IoT device with a hardware random number generator (RNG) contains a serious vulnerability whereby it fails to properly generate random numbers, which undermines security for any upstream use. In

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21:45

Vulnerabilities in the public cloud.

Research Saturday ·

2021/09/25

Guest Ariel Zelivansky, Senior Manager of Security Research at Palo Alto Networks, joins Dave to discuss Unit 42's work on the first cross-account container takeover in the public cloud. The Unit 42 Threat Intelligence team has identified the first known vulnerability that could enable one user of a public cloud service to break out of their environment and execute code on environments belonging to other users in the same public cloud service. This unprecedented cross-account takeover affected

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23:09

An IoT educational exercise reveals a far-reaching...

Research Saturday ·

2021/09/18

Guest Jake Valletta, Director of Professional Services at Mandiant, joins Dave to talk about the critical vulnerability Mandiant disclosed that affects millions of IoT devices. Mandiant disclosed a critical risk vulnerability in coordination with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (“CISA”) that affects millions of IoT devices that use the ThroughTek “Kalay” network. This vulnerability, discovered by researchers on Mandiant’s Red Team in late 2020, would enable adversaries to

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19:14

A Google Chrome update that just didn't feel right.

Research Saturday ·

2021/09/11

Guest Jon Hencinski from Expel joins Dave Bittner to discuss his team's recent work on "Expel SOC Stops Ransomware Attack Aimed at WordPress CMS via Drive-By Download Disguised as Google Chrome Update." In July, 2021, Expel's SOC stopped a ransomware attack at a large software and staffing company. The attackers compromised the company’s WordPress CMS and used the SocGholish framework to trigger a drive-by download of a Remote Access Tool (RAT) disguised as a Google Chrome update. In total, four

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23:34

Like a computer network but for physical objects.

Research Saturday ·

2021/09/04

Guest Ben Seri, Armis' VP of Research, joins Dave to talk about a set of remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in the pneumatic tube system of Swisslog. Nine vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure used by 80% of major hospitals in North America. Swisslog’s Translogic Pneumatic Tube System (PTS), a solution that plays a crucial role in patient care, found vulnerable to devastating attack. Dubbed PwnedPiper, the vulnerabilities allow for complete take over of the Translogic Nexus Control

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17:42

Joker malware family: not a joke for Google Play.

Research Saturday ·

2021/08/28

Guest Deepen Desai, Zscaler's Chief Information Security Officer and VP Security Research & Operations, joins Dave to discuss their ThreatLabz team's research "Joker Joking in Google Play: Joker malware targets Google Play store with new tactics." Joker is one of the most prominent malware families targeting Android devices. Despite public awareness of this particular malware, it keeps finding its way into Google’s official application market by employing changes in its code, execution methods, or

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16:15

Exploring vulnerabilities of off-the-shelf software.

Research Saturday ·

2021/08/21

Guest Tomislav Peričin, Reversing Labs' Chief Software Architect and Co-Founder, joins Dave to discuss his team's research that addresses the importance of validating third-party software components as a way to manage the risks that they can introduce. Developing software solutions is a complex task requiring a lot of time and resources. In order to accelerate time to market and reduce the cost, software developers create smaller pieces of functional code which can be reused across many projects

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30:59

You can add new features, just secure the old stuff...

Research Saturday ·

2021/08/14

Guests Will Schroeder and Lee Christensen from SpecterOps join Dave to share the research they recently presented at Black Hat USA on the security of Microsoft's Active Directory Certificate Services. Their abstract: Microsoft’s Active Directory Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) implementation, known as Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS), has largely flown under the radar of both the offensive and defensive communities. AD CS is widely deployed, and provides attackers opportunities for

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20:03

SideCopy malware campaigns expand and evolve.

Research Saturday ·

2021/08/07

Guest Asheer Malhotra, Threat Researcher of Cisco Talos Intelligence Group, joins Dave to discuss his team's research "InSideCopy: How this APT continues to evolve its arsenal." Cisco Talos has observed an expansion in the activity of SideCopy malware campaigns, targeting entities in India. In the past, the attackers have used malicious LNK files and documents to distribute their staple C#-based RAT. We are calling this malware "CetaRAT." SideCopy also relies heavily on the use of Allakore RAT, a

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19:55

China's influence grows through Digital Silk Road...

Research Saturday ·

2021/07/31

Guest Charity Wright, Cyber Threat Intelligence Expert in Recorded Future's Insikt Group, joins Dave to discuss her research "China’s Digital Colonialism: Espionage and Repression Along the Digital Silk Road". Through the Digital Silk Road Initiative (DSR), announced in 2015, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is building an expansive global data infrastructure and exporting surveillance technologies to dictators and illiberal regimes throughout the developing world, in some cases trading

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16:17

Free malware with cracked software.

Research Saturday ·

2021/07/24

Guest Christopher Budd, Senior Global Threat Communications Manager at Avast, joins Dave to talk about some research his team did when they looked into a Reddit report saying their Avast folder was empty and other reports like it. The team found a new malware they’re calling “Crackonosh” in part because of some possible indications that the malware author may be Czech. Crackonosh is distributed along with illegal, cracked copies of popular software and searches for and disables many popular

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20:30

Enabling connectivity enables exposures.

Research Saturday ·

2021/07/17

Guest Nathan Howe, Vice President of Emerging Technology at Zscaler, joins Dave to discuss his team's work, "2021 “Exposed” Report Reveals Corporate and Cloud Infrastructures More at Risk Than Ever From Expanded Attack Surfaces." The modern workforce has resulted in an increase of users, devices, and applications existing outside of controlled networks, including corporate networks, the business emphasis on the “network” has decreased and the reliance on the internet as the connective tissue for

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20:49

Dealing illicit goods on encrypted chat apps.

Research Saturday ·

2021/07/10

Guest Daniel Kats, Senior Principal Research Engineer at NortonLifeLock, joins Dave to discuss his team's work, "Encrypted Chat Apps Doubling as Illegal Marketplaces." Encrypted chat apps are gaining popularity worldwide due to their central premise of not sending user data to tech giants. Some popular examples include WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal. These apps have also been adopted by businesses to securely communicate directly to their users. Additionally, these apps have been instrumental to

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14:05

Malware in pirated Windows installation files.

Research Saturday ·

2021/07/03

Guest Tom Roter from Minera Labs joins Dave to discuss his team research: "Rigging a Windows Installation." It is common knowledge that pirated software might contain malware, yet millions still put themselves and their devices at risk and download from dubious sources. It is even more surprising to see the popularity of torrented operating system installations, which are ranked at the top of most torrent tracker ranking lists. Today we will prove conventional wisdom right and show off a devious,

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21:45

Exhibiting advanced APT-like behavior.

Research Saturday ·

2021/06/26

Guest Yonatan Striem-Amit joins Dave to talk about Cybereason's research "Prometei Botnet Exploiting Microsoft Exchange Vulnerabilities." The Cybereason Nocturnus Team responded to several incident response (IR) cases involving infections of the Prometei Botnet against companies in North America, observing that the attackers exploited recently published Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-27065 and CVE-2021-26858) in order to penetrate the network and install malware. Yonatan shares his

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14:44

Primitive Bear spearphishes for Ukrainian entities.

Research Saturday ·

2021/06/19

Guests Gage Mele and Yury Polozov join Dave to talk about Anomali's research "Primitive Bear (Gamaredon) Targets Ukraine with Timely Themes." Anomali Threat Research identified malicious samples that align with the Russia-sponsored cyberespionage group Primitive Bear’s (Gamaredon, Winterflounder) tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Primitive Bear, known primarily to focus on Ukraine, has been very active in 2021. However, the themes of the samples Anomali found, as well as those shared by

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431 results

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