Beers with Talos Podcast

Recorded 11/16/18 - Cyber moonshot, baby! It’s just like that time the US raced everyone to the moon, except completely different and in-no-way related! Do we need a “cyber moonshot”? Is the plan that was just released the way to get there? …and holy crap if Craig didn’t actually prepare for this podcast with notes and everything. We genuinely hope that you enjoy our rants over the Thanksgiving holiday break (for our American friends) or just at work like usual for the rest of you that don’t have a four day weekend ahead. We are genuinely grateful for you, listeners, as the entire reason that we get to keep doing this podcast. We enjoy having fun spreading the word on security and calling out excellence where we find it.Full show notes on the Talos blog

Recorded 11/9/18 - We tried to make this episode last week, but thanks to some technical difficulties, we ended up calling that one a practice. Here is take two, focused on recent sextorition scams, the pending machine learning apocolyse (hint: it’s neither). We also review why vuln discovery and red teams are the most import line items in your security budget by looking a recent story where being breached cost dozens of lives. Full show notes on the Talos blog

Recorded 10/19/18 - In celebration of EP40 and hitting over 1 million downloads(!!!), we go XL. This EP is a little long, we go a bit deeper than usual to discuss a few things that are highly unusual - namely, the XL patches dropped by Oracle, and the XL questions surrounding the Bloomberg/SuperMicro story. We also talk about a few mobile threats we have seen and what we have brewing in the mobile threat space.Full show notes available on the Talos blog

Recorded 10/5/18 - Quick chat to get to know this week’s special guests from the Talos Outreach team - Paul Rascagneres, Vanja Svajcer, and Warren Mercer. We discuss everyone’s work being presented at Virus Bulletin, and Paul and Warren being nominated the Péter Szőr Award. We also cover a lot of vuln discovery work recently released around various PDF softwareFull show notes available on the Talos Blog

Recorded 9/21/18 - The whole crew is back together! On the agenda today - VPNFilter part III, now with more known third stage payloads! As much as we have talked about multi-part posts, you know we wouldn’t post if it wasn’t important (on the blog, that is. That rule obvs doesn’t apply here) We are also releasing a related open source tool - WInbox Protocol Dissector. Finally, delve into an AV avoiding DDE and jump off into defense in depth.Full show notes on the Talos blog.

Recorded 9/7/18 - We have Joel back this week (and he is very happy to have himself back), but we lost Matt and we’re still wishing Nigel a speedy recovery from becoming bionic. This EP, we cover the latest findings in Talos MDM research and go over the exciting changes in the newly released Snort 3 beta (your move, Valve.). Bill reprises his role from last week as sentient seat filler that makes good jokes. See the full show notes on the Talos blog.

Recorded 8/24/18 - We’re finally back in the studio after Hacker Summer Camp! Sadly, due to summer vacations and becoming bionic, we are missing Joel and Nigel respectively. We end up discussing most of our topics through the lens of Matt’s frequent Twitter polls. We also find out he bribes followers with free sporks. Craig brings the discussion on the details of Remcos, and go through some interesting points on the emerging grey markets in security software and vuln disco. The crew closes this episode discussing the hypothetical merits of perfect patching versus perfect visibility. Full show notes on the Talos Blog

Recorded 8/8/18 - We decided to broadcast while we were all together at Black Hat - and invited everyone over for lunch and beers. Since we had a room full of people, we made this EP “choose your own podcast” and tooks topics from the audience. Neil Jenkins from the Cyber Threat Alliance came by to bestow befitting superhero swag on Matt and Adam for their work on VPNFilter. Headlining this event is our very special guest - Dave Bittner from The CyberWire. Full show notes podcast blog post

Recorded 7/20/18 - This week, we touch on several topics, but we spend the lion’s share of the EP discussing MDM. We are joined by Aaron Woland and spend a great deal of time discussing how these attacks work and how these are attacks happen to users of all devices across platforms. We talk about the differences in how MDM is handled across different OS flavors, and the similarities in how the attacks happen (hint: users ignoring the warnings). Click here for the full show notes on the blog

Recorded 7/6/18 - This episode is a bit less technical than most as we take on how the security conversation is happening and who is a part of it. Coincidentally (we promise), that dovetails in with Matt’s contention that everybody just needs to stop acting with unending self-interest. Once again, Craig goes on vacation and all hell breaks loose, giving birth to a new concept in ransomware - Send us Bitcoin or we send Craig to a remote island for a month. Also - we are going to be doing a live EP from BalckHat! Registration link and full show notes available on the Talos blog.

Recorded 6/13/18 - Still live in Orlando, just this time from the lovely lobby bar at the convention center hotel. We are joined by Lurene Grenier to dig a bit deeper on her keynote from TTRS. Lurene is here to give you the offensive view of attacking your network. If you want a hot take on defense from someone who is pure offense, well… buckle up and break out your cord cutting scissors. You are already saying “We can’t do that!” Lurene is telling you that if you decide to take this seriously enough, you can and should. Full show notes on the Talos blog

Recorded 6/12/18 - Special episode for two reasons! To start, we are recording one-take live from CiscoTV Studio B at Cisco Live in Orlando, FL. - which leads to the second reason, there is video of this episode in the show notes blog post! Join us as we cover the VPNFilter update Talos released June 6th and we recap the inaugural Cisco Talos Threat Research Summit. Check out the full show notes Ed. Note - This is what no content editing looks like

Recorded 5/25/18 - As you can expect, this EP focuses on VPNFilter. We discuss how we got involved, why Talos made the decision to disclose when we did, and we cover many details of the malware itself. There is a lot of background to this ongoing discussion. Take a peek behind the curtain of the defense against this attack as we cover many different aspects of the malware, the attack, and the mitigation. Show notes on the Talos Blog

Recorded 5/11/18 - First and foremost, we recorded this EP one day before our “birthday”. We want to thank everyone, especially you (the listeners), who have let us do this for the last year racking up over half a million downloads! In this EP, we welcome special guest Nick Biasini from Talos Outreach - we set out to talk about several topics, but spend most of our time with Nick around the idea of building a stronger culture of cybersecurity and what it would take to raise the baseline. We are missing Matt this week, and hope he had an amazing time following the DMB tour up to Burlington or whatever he was doing.

Recorded 4/27/18 - Special guest intro this week from Chippah. We chat about what defines an “APT”, the recent BGP attacks, and the progress of GravityRAT. We also get an update on Vuln Discovery and the spate of recent releases. Matt has specific feelings about USB-C and his new computer.