April 6, 2021
You’d think that having an amazing resume, a couple of bug bounties, or a CTF win would land you that dream infosec job. For many, though, that isn’t true.
That’s why Tennisha Martin founded Black Girls Hack, an organization designed to help the next generation receive the skills and experience they need to land jobs in the C-suites, and perhaps begin to address the acute shortage of infosec professionals with qualified people of color.
March 23, 2021
Shortly after OpenSSL’s Heartbleed, Shellshock was discovered lurking in Bash code two decades old. How could open source software be vulnerable for so long?
This episode looks at how fuzz testing has evolved over the years, how open source projects have for the most part gone untested over time, and how new efforts to match fuzzing to software development are today helping to discover dangerous new vulnerabilities before they become the next Shellshock.
March 9, 2021
What is the allure of lockpicking at hacker conferences? In this episode Deviant Ollam explains why these mechanical puzzles remain popular with hackers.
Ollam, who was an early member of Toool, The Open Organization of Lockpickers, discusses his career as a physical pen tester and also shares some basic lockpicking hacks.
February 23, 2021
To help more people become penetration testers, Kim Crawley and Phillip L. Wylie wrote The Pentester BluePrint: Starting A Career As An Ethical Hacker.
In this episode of The Hacker Mind, Kim talks about the practical steps anyone can take to gain the skills and confidence necessary to become a successful pentester -- from gaining certifications, to building your own lab, to participating in bug bounties and even CTFs.
February 9, 2021
How do the current DMCA laws impact those who hack digital devices? And why doesn’t the basic right to repair our devices extend into the digital world?
To answer these questions, Paul Roberts, Editor-in-Chief of The Security Ledger, has founded securepairs.org, a group of infosec experts who are volunteering their free time to fight for the digital right to repair in local legislation. In this episode of The Hacker Mind, Paul talks about the consequences of not paying enough attention today.
January 26, 2021
Capture the Flag is a game, a community, and a really cool hacker culture. But will we one day stream CTFs like we do World of Warcraft or League of Legends?
Whether it’s designing or just playing CTFs, John Hammond knows a lot about the gamification of infosec. He even has his own YouTube channel where he shares what he’s learned from different challenges. In this episode of The Hacker Mind John shares his experiences building and executing his own CTFs.
January 12, 2021
After breaches like SolarWinds, companies pledge to improve their digital hygiene. What if they don’t? And what parallels might infosec learn from COVID-19?
In this episode, Mike Ahmadi draws on his years of experience in infosec, his years hacking medical devices. Mike notes how some basic rules of physical hygiene that can slow the spread of COVID-19 can also map into the digital world.
December 8, 2020
For three years OpenWRT had a severe validation problem with its download package manager, until a fuzz tester found and reported the vulnerability.
In this episode, Guido Vranken talks about his approach to hacking, about the differences between memory safe and unsafe languages, his use of fuzz testing as a preferred tool, and how he came to discover the validation error in OpenWRT, as well as a serialization error in Cereal, and other vulnerabilities.
November 24, 2020
For two years Heartbleed was a zero-day in OpenSSL until fuzz testing exposed it. How many others are in the wild now? And how will we find the next one?
In this episode I talk about how Heartbleed (CVE 2014-0160) was found and also interview Rauli Kaksonen, someone who was at Codenomicon at the time of its discovery and is now a senior security specialist at the University of Oulu in Finland, about how new security tools are still needed to find the next big zero day.
November 10, 2020
You’ve probably heard of bug bounties. But did you know there’s an elite group of bug bounty hunters that travel the world? Meet Stok; he’s one of them.
In this episode, Stok talks about his beginnings in enterprise security and his transition into the top tier of bug bounty hunters. Star of his own YouTube channel, Stok believes in community and in giving back what he’s learned along the way.