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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

22:52

Encore: Using global events as lures for malicious...

Research Saturday ·

2020/11/28

The goal of malicious activity is to compromise the system to install some unauthorized software. Increasingly that goal is tied to one thing: the user. Over the past several years, we as an industry improved exploit mitigation and the value of working exploits has increased accordingly. Together, these changes have had an impact on the threat landscape. We still see large amounts of active exploitation, but enterprises are getting better at defending against them. This has left adversaries with a

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19:41

Misconfigured identity and access management (IAM) is...

Research Saturday ·

2020/11/21

Identity and access are intrinsically connected when providing security to cloud platforms. But security is only effective when environments are properly configured and maintained. In the 2H 2020 edition of the biannual Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report, researchers conducted Red Team exercises, scanned public cloud data and pulled proprietary Palo Alto Networks data to explore the threat landscape of identity and access management (IAM) and identify where organizations can improve their IAM

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27:36

That first CVE was a fun find, for sure.

Research Saturday ·

2020/11/14

In the late 90s, hackers who discovered vulnerabilities would sometimes send an email to Bugtraq with details. Bugtraq was a notification system used by people with an interest in network security. It was also a place that might have been monitored by employees of software companies looking for reports of vulnerabilities pertaining to their software. The problem was - there wasn't an easy way to track specific vulnerabilities in specific products. It was May 1999. Larry Cashdollar was working as a

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21:00

PoetRAT: a complete lack of operational security.

Research Saturday ·

2020/11/07

Cisco Talos discovered PoetRAT earlier this year. Since then, they observed multiple new campaigns indicating a change in the actor's capabilities and showing their maturity toward better operational security. They assess with medium confidence this actor continues to use spear-phishing attacks to lure a user to download a malicious document from temporary hosting providers. They currently believe the malware comes from malicious URLs included in the email, resulting in the user clicking and

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24:44

Leveraging for a bigger objective.

Research Saturday ·

2020/10/31

The U.S. government has charged seven men in relation to hundreds of cyber attacks against organizations in the U.S. and multiple other countries in Asia and Europe. Two of the men, who were based in Malaysia, were arrested and their extradition to the U.S. has been requested. The other five are based in China and remain at large. The attacks were attributed to a China-linked organization dubbed APT41 and involved a combination of intellectual property theft and financially motivated cyber crime

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3:05

The Malware Mash!

Research Saturday ·

2020/10/30

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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26:38

Just saying there are attacks is not enough.

Research Saturday ·

2020/10/24

Ben-Gurion University researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence technique that will protect medical devices from malicious operating instructions in a cyberattack as well as other human and system errors. Complex medical devices such as CT (computed tomography), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and ultrasound machines are controlled by instructions sent from a host PC. Abnormal or anomalous instructions introduce many potentially harmful threats to patients, such as radiation

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24:39

Intentionally not drawing attention.

Research Saturday ·

2020/10/17

Bitdefender researchers recently uncovered a sophisticated APT-style attack targeting an international architectural and video production company. The attack shows signs of industrial espionage, similar to another of Bitdefender’s recent investigations of the StrongPity APT group. The real-estate industry is highly competitive, and information exfiltrated by APT mercenary group can give negotiation advantages to other players in high-profile real-estate contracts. While APT groups traditionally

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18:59

It's still possible to find ways to break out.

Research Saturday ·

2020/10/10

Containers offer speed, performance, and portability, but do they actually contain? While they try their best, the shared kernel is a disturbing attack surface: a mere kernel vulnerability may allow containerized processes to escape and compromise the host. This issue prompted a new wave of sandboxing tools that use either unikernels, lightweight VMs or userspace-kernels to separate the host OS from the container's OS. One of these solutions is Kata Containers, a container runtime that spawns each

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22:37

Smaug: Ransomware-as-a-service drag(s)on.

Research Saturday ·

2020/10/03

Threat actors and cybercriminals that don’t have the ability to develop their own ransomware for malicious campaigns can turn to the Smaug Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) offering, which is available via a Dark Web Onion site. At least two threat actors are operating the site, providing ransomware that can be used to target Windows, macOS, and Linux machines. The site is built with ease of use in mind. To launch an attack, threat actors simply need to sign up, create a campaign, and then start

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18:36

What came first, the Golden Chickens or more_eggs?

Research Saturday ·

2020/09/26

Throughout March and April, QuoIntelligence (QuoINT) observed four attacks (i.e. sightings) utilizing various tools from the Golden Chickens (GC) Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) portfolio – they recently declassified their findings, after first notifying their clients. Further, during their analysis of the sightings, QuoIntelligence confirmed the GC MaaS Operator, Badbullzvenom, released improved variants with code updates to three tools in the service portfolio. Joining us in this week's Research

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23:48

Election 2020: What to expect when we are electing.

Research Saturday ·

2020/09/19

After the 2016 General Election, the talk was all around foreign meddling. Rumors swirled that some votes may have been changed or influenced by state-sponsored actors. Sanctions and accusations followed. Four years later, is the U.S. any more prepared to protect the results of its largest elections? More than you may realize. Talos researchers take a deep dive into election security after spending the past four years talking to local, state and national officials, performing their own independent

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31:08

Leveraging legitimate tools.

Research Saturday ·

2020/09/12

Researchers at Symantec spotted a Sodinokibi targeted ransomware campaign in which the attackers are also scanning the networks of some victims for credit card or point of sale (PoS) software. It is not clear if the attackers are targeting this software for encryption or because they want to scrape this information as a way to make even more money from this attack. Joining us in this week's Research Saturday to discuss the report is Jon DiMaggio of Symantec. The research can be found

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25:21

Going after the most valuable data.

Research Saturday ·

2020/09/05

A look at the realities of ransomware from Sophos, including an industry-first detailed look at new detection evasion techniques in WastedLocker ransomware attacks that leverage the Windows Cache Manager and memory-mapped I/O to encrypt files. A complementary article examines the evasion-centric arms race of ransomware, providing a months-long review of how cybercriminals have been escalating and markedly changing evasion techniques, tactics and procedures (TTPs) since Snatch ransomware in December

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14:12

They fooled a lot of people.

Research Saturday ·

2020/08/29

Docker containers have been gaining popularity over the past few years as an effective way of packaging software applications. Docker Hub provides a strong community-based model for users and companies to share their software applications. This is also attracting the attention of malicious actors intending to make money by cryptojacking within Docker containers and using Docker Hub to distribute these images. Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 researchers identified a malicious Docker Hub account,

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21:37

Using global events as lures.

Research Saturday ·

2020/08/22

The goal of malicious activity is to compromise the system to install some unauthorized software. Increasingly that goal is tied to one thing: the user. Over the past several years, we as an industry improved exploit mitigation and the value of working exploits has increased accordingly. Together, these changes have had an impact on the threat landscape. We still see large amounts of active exploitation, but enterprises are getting better at defending against them. This has left adversaries with a

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23:22

Waiting for their victims.

Research Saturday ·

2020/08/15

Bitdefender researchers have recently found the APT group StrongPity has been targeting victims in Turkey and Syria. Using watering hole tactics to selectively infect victims and deploying a three-tier C&C infrastructure to thwart forensic investigations, the APT group leveraged Trojanized popular tools, such as archivers, file recovery applications, remote connections applications, utilities, and even security software, to cover a wide range of options that targeted victims might be

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26:10

Like anything these days, you have to disinfect it...

Research Saturday ·

2020/08/08

“Cyberbunker” refers to a criminal group that operated a “bulletproof” hosting facility out of an actual military bunker. “Bullet Proof” hosting usually refers to hosting locations in countries with little or corrupt law enforcement, making shutting down criminal activity difficult. Cyberbunker, which is also known as “ZYZtm” and “Calibour”, was a bit different in that it actually operated out of a bulletproof bunker. In September of last year, German police raided this actual Cyberbunker and

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23:40

Detecting Twitter bots in real time.

Research Saturday ·

2020/08/01

NortonLifeLock Research Group (NRG) released a prototype browser extension called BotSight that leverages machine learning to detect Twitter bots in real-time. The tool is intended to help users understand the prevalence of bots and disinformation campaigns within their Twitter feeds, particularly with the increase in disinformation of COVID-19. Joining us on this week's Research Saturday to discuss this tool is Daniel Kats from NortonLifeLock Research Group. You can find the research here:

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14:58

It was only a matter of time.

Research Saturday ·

2020/07/25

On April 29, 2020, the Salt management framework, authored by the IT automation company SaltStack, received a patch concerning two CVEs; CVE-2020-11651, an authentication bypass vulnerability, and CVE-2020-11652, a directory-traversal vulnerability. On April 30, 2020, researchers at F-Secure disclosed their vulnerability findings to the public, with an urgent warning for Salt users - patch now. Before the weekend was out, criminals were deploying malware and targeting vulnerable Salt installations,

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423 results

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