Sophos Security

Chet and Duck analyse the latest security news to help you keep ahead of the bad guys. Find out about the recent and massive Target breach; get to grips with Microsoft's and Apple's latest updates; and learn how to respond to Google's recent changes to image rendering for Gmail users.

Sophos Security Threat Report 2014 by Sophos Security

Chet and Duck tell you what you need to know about the latest security stories. Turn bad news into good with "what you can do better" advice on the back of an XP zero-day, a spate of Bitcoin "bank robberies," the outcome of a European user security survey, and yet another cryptographic blunder, this time from Drupal.

Chet and Duck dig into the good and bad of the week's computer security news, from the amusing "Happy Hour Virus", through Twitter's implementation of "forward secrecy" to discourage government-type surveillance, to LG's data-grabbing TVs and the company's unamusingly casual attitude to what amounts to business-type surveillance.

Avoiding fake support calls by Sophos Security

Chester and John Shier take time out of the IANS Information Security Forum in Atlanta, Georgia, to talk about the key issues of the past week. There's the US police department that paid the CryptoLocker ransom; the company Loyaltybuild that took two weeks to tell its loyal customers that it hadn't even bothered to encrypt their PII that was stolen; and, to finish with some good news, high praise for Microsoft's public push for cryptographic progress.

Paul Ducklin and Chester Wisniewski investigate the what, the why and the how of dealing with the impending end of support for Windows XP in 2014. Don't worry: even if you have computers that you simply won't be able to update in time, for example because they run bespoke industrial control software, or a legacy financial application, Duck and Chet have some healthy suggestions for you. They also share some insights into why Microsoft hasn't simply packed all the improved security components from Windows 7 and 8 into the aging XP, leading to the 08 April 2014 deadline.

Chet and Duck deal with: November's Patch Tuesday, whether or not hacking attacks are getting worse, whether Anonymous defacements count as "hacking", an esoteric bug in OpenSSH, and the lessons to learn from Adobe's megabreach.

Chet and Duck discuss the latest Microsoft zero-day, the latest code verification flaw in Android (the third bug of the same sort in the same part of the code!), and whether version numbers are becoming an irrelevancy as products "just update" anyway.

Chet and Duck discuss WordPress autoupdating; OS X's giant new wave, Mavericks; iCloud and 2FA; smartphone tracking by retailers; and security in pacemakers and other medical devices.

Chet and Duck discuss Oracle's monster Java patch, Joel's backdoor in D-Link routers, Cryptolocker and WhatsApp's demonstration of why you shouldn't roll your own crypto.

Chet interviews Robert Slade a well known anti-virus expert for National Cyber Security Awareness Month #NCSAM. Rob shares his thoughts on how average folks can stay safer online.

Chet and Duck are back on the regular schedule and talked about the 10th anniversary of Patch Tuesday, Adobe going "open source" and the alleged demise of the Dread Pirate Roberts.

In the last third of Sophos Security Chet Chat 118 Chet interviews Vanja Svajcer from SophosLabs about his presentation on potentially unwanted Android apps. Many users are being inundated with advertising pop-ups and other pesky behaviours, leading security vendors toward providing tools to block these apps.

As a reminder to everyone that it is National Cyber Security Awareness Month #NCSAM, Chet and Duck remind our listeners to do the three things to help themselves and others stay safer online.