Error Code

There’s a lot of FUD around hacking the power grid. Most often, there’s a more common cause: Soot. Even Squirrels. Jori VanAntwerp, CEO of SynSaber . talks about the realities of the US power grid vs the myths. While there’s room to improve, there’s also a great amount of resilience already in the electrical system today.

How the rapid proliferation of EV charging stations is already leading to attacks on the stations and the vehicles themselves, and what we should do about it.  Charles Eagan, CTO of BlackBerry, talks about the rush to create these charging stations and the traditional problems with IoT – vulnerable versions of the OS, of the open source, and even some of the protocols being used. He also talks abo...

The Biden-Harris 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy breaks with Cold War thinking and offers a bold new approach to today’s online offense and defense. Danielle Jablanski from Nozomi Networks breaks down the ambitious new policy which includes explicit mention of ICS and OT technologies for the first time.

We’ve already seen botnets composed of compromised devices like routers and security cameras. So how do we secure them and our smart lightbulbs too? Window Snyder, CEO of Thistle Technologies , explains how new devices can be partitioned with failovers and then serviced with regular updates all monitored from a central dashboard. Even devices already in the field today can also be upgraded and sec...

This is the story of Cris Thomas aka Space Rogue, who’s written perhaps the best book about the early days of hacking, Space Rogue: How the Hackers Known as the Loft Changed The World . Unlike a journalist merely chronicling events in Boston in the 1990s from the outside, Cris was on the inside. This is not only the story of the L0pht but it's also the story of his life, so he seamlessly provides...

This is the story of Zhadnost, of how an IoT-based botnet was conscripted into an online war in the days immediately before the kinetic Ukraine invasion. Ryan Slaney of SecurityScorecard walks us through the timeline of these attacks and the evidence of attribution he found linking it to Russia’s GRU.

What if a vulnerability exists in popular ICS devices, yet the only fix is to re-issue the hardware? This is true with some embedded security flaws. Ang Cui, founder and CEO of Red Balloon Security, talks about his company’s discovery of CVE-2022-38773, which affects the secure boot process in Siemens S7 1500 PLCs, and what the mitigations for devices using that might look like.

IoT can make patient care easier.. But how do we introduce new IoT medical devices into an ecosystem where we can’t even keep tabs on our legacy devices? Mohammad Waqas discusses conversations he’s had with hospitals about the device profiles they don’t necessarily know about – the over-the-counter glucose monitor app on an iPad that hasn’t gone through IT provisioning - and what they can do about...

The Vastaamo data breach stands as one of the most heinous of internet crimes because of the 30,000 psychiatric records that were exposed and the lives it ruined. Antti Kurittu discusses his presentation at SecTor 2022, what we know thus far from the public record, and the news of the Finnish arrest warrant for the individual only previously known as “Ransomware_Man”. 

IoT and Machine Learning can help farmers provide more food with fewer resources, so long as the devices in the field and the backend systems are secure. Seth Hardy, co-founder and CTO of Bug Mars , a precision agtech company for insect farms, discusses his SecTor 2022 presentation, drawing upon his more than 20 years of security experience in his new role in sustainable food production.

Quantum computing will make great advances in science; it will also have the ability to decrypt banking, healthcare, and other industries' stolen data. Skip Sanzeri of QuSecure explains how quantum computing is advancing rapidly, how it has the power to crack RSA 2048 and other encryption that we know take for granted today, and why his and other companies are talking about our post-quantum encryp...

This is the history of hardware hacking and the story of Joe Grand. From testifying before Congress to creating badgelife at DEF CON, Joe has done it all. And he’s darn humble about it, too. Joe just wants to share through his classes, website, and YouTube channel all that he’s learned since his days with the L0pht, the tools he’s created, and the work he’s currently doing with Right to Repair. He...

What happens now to the digital test environment built for Hack-A-Sat 3? Well, it becomes a rich testing and training environment for all on GitHub. Login Finch and Frank Pound continue sharing some of the behind-the-scenes challenges presented by hosting a Hack-A-Sat capture the flag competition, this time drilling down details behind the Digital Twins environment that needed to be built in advan...

Satellites today lack basic security controls. With as little as $300, you, too, can hack into commercial satellites. So that’s an emerging IoT problem.  Frank Pound and Login Finch share in this episode their work with Hack-A-Sat . It’s a unique Capture the Flag challenge that’s never been tried before. Here’s the background story of how the project got started … and where it’s going.

Error Code is a biweekly narrative podcast that provides you both context and conversation with some of the best minds working today toward code reliance and dependability. Work that can lead to autonomous vehicles and smart cities. It's your window in the research solving tomorrow's code problems today