In this week’s podcast (#124): we speak with French security researcher Baptiste Robert about research on the social media accounts pushing the french “Yellow Vest” protests. Surprise, surprise: they’re not french. Also: Brian Fox of the firm Sonatype joins us to talk about the recent compromise of the Github event-stream project and why social engineering poses a real risk to the security of the software supply chain.
In this week’s podcast: Facebook revealed that a breach affected 50 million accounts and as many as 90 million users. Is complexity at the root of the social media giant’s troubles? We speak with Gary McGraw of the firm Synopsys about it. Also: BIOS-based malware has been demonstrated at security conferences for years. Last week, the security firm ESET warned that it identified a sample in the wild. Even worse: the Russian Hacking Group Fancy Bear was believed to be responsible. We’ll talk to firmware security expert Giovanni Vigna of the firm Lastline about the truth and hype around LoJax and other firmware based attacks.
Facebook forced a reset of more than 50 million user accounts on Thursday and would force another 40 million account resets in the coming days, citing a major breach of the site’s security that allowed unknown attackers to take over people’s accounts.
Data-management Veeam found itself in need of some self-help after mismanaging its own data with a misconfigured server that exposed more than 440 million e-mail addresses and other types of customer information.
In this week’s episode (#110): the second major flaw in Apache Struts 2 in as many years and has put the information security community on alert. But is this vulnerability as serious as the last, which resulted in the hack of the firm Equifax? We talk with an expert from the firm Synopsys. And: we’ve heard a lot about the risk of cyber attacks on the critical infrastructure used to generate and distribute electricity. But what would happen if someone figured out to how to hack electricity demand? The Internet of Things just might make that possible. We talk to a Princeton University researcher behind a paper that discusses how even small changes in demand can have big consequences for the grid.
