Podcasts
Hosted by Paul Roberts, The Security Ledger podcast features interviews with leading minds in the area of cyber security, threats and attacks. The Security Ledger is an independent security news website that explores the intersection of cyber security with business, commerce, politics and everyday life. Security Ledger provides well-reported and context-rich news and opinion about computer security topics that matter in our IP-enabled homes, workplaces and daily lives.
Malicious software is nothing new. Computer viruses and worms have been around for decades, as have most other families of malware like remote access tools (RATs) and key loggers. But all our experience with malware hasn’t made the job of knowing when our organization has been hit by it any easier. In fact, recent news stories about breaches at Home Depot, Target, Staples and other organizations makes it clear that even sophisticated and wealthy corporations can easily overlook both the initial compromise and endemic malware infections – and at great cost. That may be why phrases like “dwell time” or “time to discovery” seem to pop up again and again in discussions of breach response. There’s no longer any shame in getting “popped.” The shame is in not knowing that it happened. Greg Hoglund says he has a fix for that latter problem. His new company, Outlier Security, isn’t “next generation […]
One of the challenges of talking about security in the context of Internet of Things is that the Internet of Things (IoT) isn’t a discrete technology, but an umbrella phrase that encompasses a lot of separate innovations: mobility, inexpensive sensors, wireless connectivity, Big Data and so on. One of the biggest moving parts in the IoT puzzle is cloud computing. Cloud infrastructure – whether its Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Google or any of the thousands (millions?) of private cloud – is the back end for almost every IoT product. That presents both opportunities and real challenge for companies that are looking to leverage IoT in their workplace. Next week, I’m going to moderate a panel at an event here in Boston where we’ll tackle some of these issues head-on. The event: The Connected Cloud Summit is taking place in Boston on Thursday, September 18 at The State Room in downtown Boston. […]
I had an opportunity to sit with Per Thorsheim, co-founder of PasswordsCon about next week’s Passwords14 Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. If you haven’t checked it out before, PasswordsCon is the world’s premiere technical conference that is just focused on the security of passwords and pin codes. PasswordsCon is a one-of-a-kind event: bringing together folks whose specialty is cracking and defeating password security with security experts whose interest is in shoring up protections for sensitive data. This year’s conference, which is sharing space with the B-Sides Las Vegas Conference on August 5 and 6. PasswordsCon has earned a reputation for being the launching pad for some eye-popping new tools for password cracking. Back in 2012, we reported on a 25 GPU device that radically lowered the bar to cracking even the strongest passwords protected with weaker encryption algorithms, like Microsoft’s LM and NTLM, obsolete. Among other things, the Conference will feature […]
The mercury is expected to top 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 C) in Las Vegas next week. And that could mean only one thing: it’s conference time for some of the world’s top computer hackers. Indeed, next week brings the 22nd installment of the DEFCON hacker conference in Las Vegas, and the 18th of Black Hat, DEFCON’s younger, more straight-lace sibling. But, while Black Hat and DEFCON are still the main attraction on the Las Vegas strip, they’re hardly the only shows in town. B-Sides Las Vegas, an alternative mini-con, is in its fifth year and is attracting many of the “cool kids” in the security community to do presentations and demos on Tuesday and Wednesday, August 5 and 6th over at the Tuscan Suites and Casino. Running alongside B-Sides is Passwords 14, a conference that started in Norway and is in its second year on U.S. soil. As its name would […]
It was another busy week in the security world. There was big news on the legal front, as The U.S. Supreme Court took steps to protect the data stored on mobile devices from warrantless searches by police. (That’s good news.) But the week also plenty of concerning stories about the security of data stored on mobile phones, tablets and the like. One of the stories that gained a lot of attention was DUO Security’s report on a flaw in PayPal’s two factor authentication feature that could expose the accounts of security-conscious PayPal users. As The Security Ledger reported, DUO researcher Zach Lanier discovered a flaw in mobile APIs published by PayPal that would allow anyone with a valid PayPal user name and password to sidestep two-factor authentication when accessing PayPal accounts that had that option enabled. After DUO went public with information on the flaw, PayPal disabled two factor authentication […]
