The Hacker Mind

EP 80: Ghost Token

What if an GPC project OAUTH access token wasn’t deleted? This could expose databases to bad actors. Tal Skverer from Astrix discusses his DEF CON 31 presentation GhostToken: Exploiting Google Cloud Platform App Infrastructure to Create Unremovable Trojan Apps. Transcript here.

EP 79: Conducting Incident Response in Costa Rica Post Conti Ransomware

How do you conduct an incident response for an entire country? When it’s 27 different life-critical government ministries each with up to 850 individual devices -- that’s uncharted territory. Esteban Jimenez of ATTI Cyber talks about his experience with the reconstruction of the cybersecurity system following Conti, how the country handled a second ransomware attack from the Hive ransomware group, and we'll discuss what yet remains to be done to secure Costa Rica -- and other Latin American countries from future attacks. Transcript here.

EP 78: Defending Costa Rica From Conti Ransomware

What is is like to hack an entire country, to take it’s government services offline, to deny a government an ability to function? Costa Rica knows. Esteban Jimenez of ATTI Cyber has been helping Costa Rica improve its cybersecurity posture for more than 16 years, and he has been helping them recently recover from a crippling ransomware attack in April 2022 that hit 28 ministries of the government. Central and Latin America appear to be a new playground for bad actors testing new malware. But Central and Latin America are learning how to fight back. Transcript here.

EP 77: Security Chaos Engineering with Kelly Shortridge

Speaking at Black Hat 2023, Kelly Shortridge is bringing cybersecurity out of the dark ages by infusing security by design to create secure patterns and practices. It’s a subject of her new book on Security Chaos Computing, and it’s a topic that’s long overdue to be discussed in the field. Transcript.

EP 76: Hacking Medical Systems

Are we doing enough to secure our health delivery organizations? Given the rise of ransomware attacks, one could day we are not. Karl Sigler from Trustwave SpiderLabs, talks about a new report that his team has written that is focused on the threat landscape for medical devices and the healthcare industry in general.  Transcript here.

EP 75: Hacking .Mil And Other TLD Domains (Ethically)

Internet domains are brittle. One could hack into a military, a foreign government, or even global commercial web services domain using flaws in the underlying architecture. Fredrik Nordberg Almroth, co-founder of Detectify, talks about how he did just that -- hack .mil, hack the top level domain of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and even Gmail or Wordpress -- just by looking for basic misconfigurations. Transcript.

EP 74: Disarming Document Threats

Phishing is everywhere. Who among us has not seen phish in their inbox? Aviv Grafi, from Votiro, gets into the weeds about how malicious documents are formed and how they might (despite good secure posture) still end up in your inbox or browser. He’s created a rather novel method to strip out the good content from the bad without affecting your overall productivity. And maybe, just maybe, stop phishing as a viable attack vector.

EP 73: Hacking Human Behavior

Could the nudges and prompts like those from our Fitbits and Apple watches be effective in enforcing good security behavior as well? Oz Alashe, CEO and founder of CybSafe, brings his experience in the UK Intelligence Community to the commercial world along with some solid science around what motivates us to make changes in our lives. It’s not just one-off phishing examples, it’s also about providing positive feedback, even gamification, to make things stick in future insider trust programs.

Transcript here.

EP 72: Tales From A Ransomware Negotiator

Say you’re an organization that’s been hit with ransomware. At what point do you need to bring in a ransomware negotiator? Should you pay, should you not?  Mark Lance, the VP of DFIR and Threat Intelligence for GuidePoint Security, provides The Hacker Mind with stories of ransomware cases he’s handled and best practices for how to handle such an event.

EP 71: The Internet As A Pen Test

Small to Medium Business are increasingly the target of APTs and ransomware. Often they lack the visibility of a SOC. Or even basic low level threat analysis. Chris Gray of Deepwatch talks about the view from the inside of a virtual SOC, the ability to see threats against a large number of SMB organizations, and the changes to cyber insurance we’re seeing as a result.