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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

24:27

Taking a look behind the Science of Security.

Research Saturday ·

2021/06/12

Guest Adam Tagert is a Science of Security (SoS) Researcher in the National Security Agency Research Directorate. The National Security Agency (NSA) sponsors the Science of Security (SoS) Initiative for the promotion of a foundational cybersecurity science that is needed to mature the cybersecurity discipline and to underpin advances in cyberdefense. Adam works in all aspects of SoS particularly in the promotion of collaboration and use of foundational cybersecurity research. He promotes rigorous

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19:23

Bad building blocks: a new and unusual phishing...

Research Saturday ·

2021/06/05

Guest Karl Sigler of Trustwave's SpiderLabs joins Dave Bittner to talk about their research: "Hidden Phishing at Free JavaScript Site". The research describes an interesting phishing campaign SpiderLabs encountered recently. In this campaign, the email subject pertains to a price revision, followed by some numbers. There is no email body, but there is an attachment about an ”investment.” The attachment’s convoluted filename contains characters the file-naming convention doesn’t allow, notably the

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19:53

EtterSilent: a popular, versatile maldoc builder.

Research Saturday ·

2021/05/29

Guest Brandon Hoffman of Intel 471 joins Dave Bittner to share his team's research "EtterSilent: the underground’s new favorite maldoc builder". The cybercrime underground often mimics behaviors that we see in everyday facets of life. Intel 471’s latest discovery is an example of one of these patterns: when a product takes off in the marketplace, users will rush to obtain it and find unique ways to use it in order to fit their needs. The latest “product” is a malicious document builder, known in the

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24:47

Leveraging COVID-19 themes for malicious purposes.

Research Saturday ·

2021/05/22

Guest Joe Slowik joins us from DomainTools to discuss his team's research "COVID-19 Phishing With a Side of Cobalt Strike." Multiple adversaries, from criminal groups to state-directed entities, engaged in malicious cyber activity using COVID-19 pandemic themes since March 2020. Adversaries continue to leverage the pandemic, arguably the most significant issue globally as of this writing, in various ways. Yet the most persistent avenue remains using COVID-19 themes for building malicious document

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28:50

Jack Voltaic: critical infrastructure resiliency...

Research Saturday ·

2021/05/15

Guest LTC Erica Mitchell from Army Cyber Institute joins us to talk about their infrastructure resiliency research project called Jack Voltaic. The Army Cyber Institute’s (ACI’s) Jack Voltaic (JV) project enables the institute to study incident response gaps alongside assembled partners to identify interdependencies among critical infrastructure and provide recommendations. JV provides an innovative, bottom‐up approach to critical infrastructure resilience in two unique ways. Whereas most federal

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20:08

SUPERNOVA activity and its possible connection to...

Research Saturday ·

2021/05/08

Guest Mike McLellan from Secureworks joins us to share his team's insights about SUPERNOVA and threat group attribution. Similarities between the SUPERNOVA activity and a previous compromise of the network suggest that SPIRAL was responsible for both intrusions and reveal information about the threat group. In late 2020, Secureworks® Counter Threat Unit™ (CTU) researchers observed a threat actor exploiting an internet-facing SolarWinds server to deploy the SUPERNOVA web shell. Additional analysis

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23:49

A snapshot of the ransomware threat landscape.

Research Saturday ·

2021/05/01

Guest Jen Miller-Osborn from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 joins Dave to discuss their 2021 Unit 42 Ransomware Threat Report, which highlights a surge in ransomware demands based on a global analysis of the threat landscape in 2020. To evaluate the current state of the ransomware threat landscape, the Unit 42 threat intelligence team and the Crypsis incident response team collaborated to analyze the ransomware threat landscape in 2020, with global data from Unit 42 as well as US, Canada, and Europe

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17:32

Bulletproof hosting (BPH) and how it powers cybercrime.

Research Saturday ·

2021/04/24

Guest Jason Passwaters of Intel 471 joins us to discuss his team's research into bulletproof hosting (BPH). The research team at Intel 471 defined what a typical BPH service offers and how these services can be stopped in order to limit the damage they have on enterprises, businesses and digital society itself. They examined some popular malware families that actors host or leverage via BPH services. While much more goes into a cybercriminal’s full operation, it would be vastly more difficult to

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17:18

Social engineering: MINEBRIDGE RAT embedded to look...

Research Saturday ·

2021/04/17

Guest Deepen Desai joins Dave to talk about Zsaler's research "Return of the MINEBRIDGE RAT With New TTPs and Social Engineering Lures." In Jan 2021, Zscaler ThreatLabZ discovered new instances of the MINEBRIDGE remote-access Trojan (RAT) embedded in macro-based Word document files crafted to look like valid job resumes (CVs). Such lures are often used as social engineering schemes by threat actors. MINEBRIDGE buries itself into the vulnerable remote desktop software TeamViewer, enabling the threat

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22:41

Strategic titles point to something more than a...

Research Saturday ·

2021/04/10

Guests Gage Mele, Winston Marydasan, and Yury Polozov from Anomali join Dave to discuss their research into Static Kitten targeting government agencies in the UAE and Kuwait. Anomali Threat Research uncovered malicious activity very likely attributed to the Iran-nexus cyberespionage group, Static Kitten (Seedworm, MERCURY, Temp.Zagros, POWERSTATS, NTSTATS, MuddyWater), which is known to target numerous sectors primarily located in the Middle East This new campaign, which uses tactics, techniques,

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19:16

Ezuri: Regenerating a different kind of target.

Research Saturday ·

2021/04/03

Guests Fernando Martinez and Tom Hegel from AT&T Alien Labs join Dave to discuss their team's research "Malware using new Ezuri memory loader." Multiple threat actors have recently started using a Go language (Golang) tool to act as a packer and avoid Antivirus detection. Additionally, the Ezuri memory loader tool acts as a malware loader and executes its payload in memory, without writing the file to disk. While this technique is known and commonly used by Windows malware, it is less popular in

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21:50

How are we doing in the industrial sector?

Research Saturday ·

2021/03/27

Guest Sergio Caltagirone from Dragos joins us to take us through their 2020 ICS Cybersecurity Year in Review report. Dragos's annual ICS Year in Review provides an overview and analysis of ICS vulnerabilities, global threat activity targeting industrial environments, and industry trends and observations gathered from customer engagements worldwide. The goal of the report is to give asset owners and operators proactive, actionable information and defensive recommendations in order to prepare for and

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15:52

BendyBear: difficult to detect and downloader of...

Research Saturday ·

2021/03/20

Guest Jen Miller-Osborn from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 joins us to discuss their research into BendyBear. Highly malleable, highly sophisticated and over 10,000 bytes of machine code. The code behavior and features strongly correlate with that of the WaterBear malware family, which has been active since as early as 2009. The malware is associated with the cyber espionage group BlackTech, which many in the broader threat research community have assessed to have ties to the Chinese government, and

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23:38

Keeping data confidential with fully homomorphic...

Research Saturday ·

2021/03/13

Guest Dr. Rosario Cammarota from Intel Labs joins us to discuss confidential computing. Confidential computing provides a secure platform for multiple parties to combine, analyze and learn from sensitive data without exposing their data or machine learning algorithms to the other party. This technique goes by several names — multiparty computing, federated learning and privacy-preserving analytics, among them. Confidential computing can enable this type of collaboration while preserving privacy and

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18:18

Diving deep into North Korea's APT37 tool kit.

Research Saturday ·

2021/03/06

Guest Hossein Jazi of Malwarebytes joins us to take a deep dive into North Korea's APT37 (aka ScarCruft, Reaper and Group123) toolkit. On December 7 2020 the Malwarebytes Labs threat team identified a malicious document uploaded to Virus Total which was purporting to be a meeting request likely used to target the government of South Korea. The meeting date mentioned in the document was 23 Jan 2020, which aligns with the document compilation time of 27 Jan 2020, indicating that this attack took place

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23:56

Shining a light on China's cyber underground.

Research Saturday ·

2021/02/27

Guest Maurits Lucas from Intel471 joins us to discuss his team's research into cybercrime in China. Data from Intel 471 show that the Chinese cybercrime underground proliferates through use of common methods or platforms, but behaves differently in large part due to the caution that actors take with regard to their identity. While the average citizen must follow the heavy handed nature of the government’s surveillance of cyberspace, Chinese threat actors take special precautions to protect their

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19:32

Attackers (ab)using Google Chrome.

Research Saturday ·

2021/02/20

Guest Bojan Zdrnja of Infigo IS and a certified instructor at SANS Institute shares an incident he discovered where attackers were using a pretty novel way of exfiltrating data and using that channel for C&C communication. The code that was acquired was only partially recovered, but enough to indicate powerful features that the attackers were (ab)using in Google Chrome. The basis for this attack were malicious extensions that the attacker dropped on the compromised system. The research can be found

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19:59

Using the human body as a wire-like communication...

Research Saturday ·

2021/02/13

Guest Dr. Shreyas Sen, a Perdue University associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, joins us to discuss the following scenario:. Instead of inserting a card or scanning a smartphone to make a payment, what if you could simply touch the machine with your finger? A prototype developed by Purdue University engineers would essentially let your body act as the link between your card or smartphone and the reader or scanner, making it possible for you to transmit information just by

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27:17

"Follow the money" the cybersecurity way.

Research Saturday ·

2021/02/06

Guest Joe Slowik joins us from Domain Tools to share their research "Current Events to Widespread Campaigns: Pivoting from Samples to Identify Activity" where they examined technical artifacts emerging around the 2020 conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus region. Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) practitioners can gain insight into adversary operations by tracking conflicts or geopolitical tensions. Similar to a “follow the money” approach in criminal investigations, looking at

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17:24

The Kimsuky group from North Korea expands spyware,...

Research Saturday ·

2021/01/30

Guest Yonatan Striem-Amit joins us from Cybereason to share their Nocturnus Team research into Kimsuky. The Cybereason Nocturnus Team has been tracking various North Korean threat actors, among them the cyber espionage group known as Kimsuky, (aka: Velvet Chollima, Black Banshee and Thallium), which has been active since at least 2012 and is believed to be operating on behalf of the North Korean regime. The group has a rich and notorious history of offensive cyber operations around the world,

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431 results

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