ConversingLabs Podcast

In this episode, host Paul Roberts chats with Naveen Srinivasan, an OpenSSF Scorecard Maintainer, about his talk at this year’s RSA Conference on how to better trust open source software. In their conversation, Naveen explains how the OpenSSF Scorecard tool can help developers understand the security posture of open source dependencies.

In this episode, we interview Chris Romeo, CEO of Kerr Ventures and long-time application security (app sec) practitioner on the sidelines of the 2023 RSA Conference. He gives a rundown on the state of app sec and comments on other software threats posed to organizations today. 

In this episode of ConversingLabs, host Paul Roberts chats with John Jackson, a security researcher, about the work he and research group Sakura Samurai did in looking at exposed secrets and other threats on Indian government websites. 

In this special Café edition of ConversingLabs, host Paul Roberts interviews Joshua Corman, the Vice President of Cyber Safety Strategy at Claroty and the Founder of I Am The Cavalry on the sidelines of the RSA Conference 2023 in San Francisco. Josh speaks with Paul about his RSAC track session, The Opposite of Transparency, which takes on skepticism of software bill of materials (SBOMs) and makes...

In this special edition episode of ConversingLabs, host Paul Roberts interviews ReversingLabs Director of Product Management, Charlie Jones, on the sidelines of the 2023 RSA Conference in San Francisco. Charlie speaks with Paul about his RSAC track session: The Rise of Malware Within the Software Supply Chain.

In this episode, host Paul Roberts chats with Devin Lynch, Director of Supply Chain and Technology Security for the Office of the National Cyber Director, about the National Cybersecurity Strategy released by the White House last month. They discuss the motivations behind this policy move, what its impact will be in the short and long term, as well as what else the federal government plans to prio...

In this episode, host Paul Roberts chats with Katie Mousourris, CEO and Founder of Luta Security. Mousourris has a robust background in creating and running bug bounty programs as well as professional hacking. In their conversation, she discusses the evolution of professional hacking and how important bug bounty programs have become to the cybersecurity field. She also highlights the problems thes...

In this episode, host Paul Roberts chats with Steve Lasker, a former Azure Program Manager with over 20 years of experience at Microsoft. Lasker touched on his industry experience to explain how the effort to secure software has evolved into what it is today. He then explained how government standards for software supply chain security globally will benefit the industry, and will cause a great shi...

Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) are a helpful first step for an organization looking to secure its software supply chain. SBOMs serve as an ingredients list, pointing out all of the components that make up a software product, such as open source software packages, third party software and more. Federal guidance in the U.S. now strongly recommends the use of an SBOM by both software publishers...

The U.S. Federal Government's Enduring Security Framework (ESF) Working Panel released a guidance on "Securing The Software Supply Chain" in September, 2022. The ESF is made up of both government officials and industry practitioners, and this guidance with the intention of it being a "practical guide" for software developers.  In this episode, host Paul Roberts chats with ReversingLabs Field CISO...

Supply chain attacks are not limited to SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications. Specific kinds of software, such as firmware, are also at risk of suffering supply chain attacks. Firmware is typically used to control hardware devices, and sits at a lower level, connecting high-level software with an operating system. It is important for the cybersecurity and application security industries to pa...

In September 2022, Microsoft released a report on a group they track as ZINC (also known as Lazarus), which is a state-sponsored group out of North Korea. The report details how ZINC has been using a set of trojanized, open source software implants dubbed ZetaNile (also known as BLINDINCAN) to attack a number of organizations since June 2022. The ReversingLabs Research Team decided to investigate...

Online fraud is among the most pernicious and devastating forms of cybercrime- measured by the financial and psychological toll it takes on victims. Phony tech support, online romance and business email compromise scams drain billions from our economy annually and take a huge toll on families, businesses and communities. And yet, it is often overlooked by cybersecurity experts and the larger infor...

The exploit known as Follina resurfaced in late May 2022 as researchers discovered its use in a phishing document campaign. ReversingLabs Malware Researcher Joseph Edwards hunted for Follina exploitation samples to observe what final payloads are being delivered in-the-wild.  He joins host Paul Roberts for this episode of ConversingLabs to share his findings and key takeaways. He also shares how y...

YARA rules have been a proven tool for threat detection and hunting. Organizations who want to be mindful of today’s most serious threats, such as wiper malware and ransomware, should be leveraging this tool however they can.  For this episode of ConversingLabs, we invited ReversingLabs Malware Researcher Hrvoje Samardžić plus Roman Hüssy of Abuse.ch, who told us about his company’s platform: YARA...

In this special edition episode, ConversingLabs host Paul Roberts interviewed researchers Iain Smart and Viktor Gazdag of NCC Group from the showroom floor at Black Hat 2022. Paul chatted with the researchers about their Black Hat session on compromises to CI/CD pipelines, being an integral part of software supply chain security. 

A systemic issue impacting the cybersecurity community is the theft and unauthorized use of algorithms by corporate entities. This is an issue that Patrick Wardle, Founder of the Objective-See Foundation, has brought to the forefront as a speaker at this year’s Black Hat USA Conference.  His talk at Black Hat presented the techniques to spot unauthorized use, and he referenced these techniques in...

At this year’s Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas, software supply chain security was top of mind for the InfoSec community. One of the biggest obstacles to improving the security of organizations and critical infrastructure is the poor state of software security. Alas: training developers to produce secure code is expensive, and time intensive. Or is it?  At this year’s conference, Adam Shostack,...

ReversingLabs recently discovered a software supply chain attack known as IconBurst. This incident is a widespread campaign, consisting of the installation of malicious NPM modules that are harvesting sensitive data from forms embedded in mobile applications and websites.  Karlo Zanki, a Reverse Engineer at ReversingLabs, was the first to discover the attack. We invited him to join us for the seco...

AstraLocker is a fork of the Babuk ransomware family. Babuk is a past Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) threat group, selling ransomware tools to affiliate cybercriminals. AstraLocker 2.0 was first seen in March 2022, but new research has surfaced about its capabilities.  ReversingLabs Malware Researcher Joseph Edwards joined us for the first episode of ConversingLabs Season 2 to share his findings o...

Bryson Bort of Scythe.io spoke with host Paul Roberts about the May 2021 Colonial Pipeline hack that caused a fuel shortage on America's southeastern coast. Bort tackles the question: “What the hell happened?” He mentions that the incident truly was a “watershed moment” for the industry, since this ransomware attack directly impacted the lives of everyday Americans.  But the bigger picture on Colo...

In this conversation, Steve Lipner of SAFECODE explains what secure software is, and recounts his own experiences on Microsoft’s Software Security Development Lifecycle Team as the point of the spear in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Initiative. Lipner stresses that secure software must come from within (so to speak). Outside consultants may be able to promote best practices, but they will neve...

In this conversation, Robert Martin of MITRE talks about how the software supply chain is highly complicated, due to an increasing number of things in society becoming cyber-enabled. He and MITRE created the System of Trust (SoT) so that organizations can consider the most important aspects of the software supply chain, giving a more holistic context into the chain’s subsets. The SoT’s goal is to...

NPM dependency confusion has emerged as a potent software supply chain attack vector via platforms like npm, with malicious packages surreptitiously added to these repositories, maintained by leading firms.  In this episode, we're joined by ReversingLabs Reverse Engineer Karlo Zanki to dig into some of our recent findings that show dependency confusion attacks are being used to advance what appear...

Even small organizations are sitting on top of a wealth of threat intel: their own IT environment. It’s essential for enterprises of all kinds to understand how to tap into this intelligence to better protect their operations. In this episode, we chatted with ReversingLabs’ very own Hrvoje Samardžić and Independent Malware Hunter Luigi De Mori/JAMESWT ( @JAMESWT_MHT ) about what kinds of internal...