Beers with Talos Podcast

The Beers with Talos Crew is back to a team of four this week, with special guest Nick Biasini joining the show to talk about Mercenary Groups and the spyware they're creating. This episode, we talk about the current spyware landscape, and how it encompasses "mercenary" groups like the NSO Group and Intellexa, and state-sponsored actors looking to track high-profile targets . Nick&a...

Mitch was out for this recording, so Hazel Burton, the newest addition to Team Talos, stepped in to host this episode! She, Lurene and Matt got together for Mental Health Awareness Month and share stories and advice with one another. Cybersecurity is a notoriously rough field for burnout and an imbalance between work and life, so they share some tips they use to decompress after a long day and how...

Our second of two episodes recorded live at the RSA Conference, Mitch and Lurene are joined by Nick Biasini from Talos Outreach and AJ Shipley, a vice president of product management for Cisco Secure. The four of them recap Nick and AJ's talk they gave at RSA and discuss the centralization of cybersecurity. AJ shares some important insights about the product side of cybersecurity, and how eve...

This is the first of two episodes we have coming out that we recorded live at the RSA Conference. In this edition of Beers with Talos, we welcome Mick Baccio, a security strategist for Splunk , to talk about all things RSA. At this point in the week, we had hit the halfway point of RSA and were pretty tired already, so bear with us — don't expect any hardcore security takes here. That being s...

This episode discusses network resilience, hardware hygiene, and the recently disclosed Jaguar Tooth campaign . J.J. joins the show and the usual cast to discuss the recent attacks against out-of-date and unpatched wireless routers from sophisticated, state-sponsored actors. J.J., Matt and Lurene detail the research around these campaigns and advice for anyone to improve their network hygiene. If...

Everyone fears the dreaded 10-out-of-10 CVSS severity score on a vulnerability with "critical" written somewhere on the advisory. But does that number even matter to an attacker or hypothetical defender? Matt, Mitch and Lurene discuss the various ways the security community classifies vulnerabilities and how potential targets can use that information to their advantage. They discuss patc...

(Recorded Jan. 27, 2023) No Matt this episode, so we have two guests in the rotating chair(s): Nick Biasini and David Liebenberg. Lurene, Mitch and our two esteemed companions talk about the human problem of ransomware. Lurene says getting rid of email altogether is the best option — but since that doesn't seem likely anytime soon, what are some other options for enterprises and companies to...

With this episode, we set out to discuss the first annual Cisco Talos Year in Review report - a look back at the major threats, trends, and topics from 2022 and what we should take forward into 2023.   Our guest Dave Liebenberg runs the team behind this report and joins us to discuss *why* his team undertook this effort, and some of the finer points of the report findings.  The Year in Review is b...

We are (finally) talking about the recent OpenSSL vulnerability as we had to redo this EP.  In our infinite podcasting wisdom, we took a stab at it roughly 2 hours before the embargo expired and coverage was released - which is obviously is a very silly idea in hindsight. After we cover the current issue at hand, Lurene leads us through the surface levels of how vulns can be exploited in the heap...

Mitch was trying to preserve his voice, so Matt is driving the bus during this episode — hang on! In this edition, we're talking about script kiddies (unfortunately, not "kitties.") These are basically adversaries with an extreme base level of computer knowledge who use basic scripts to carry out cyber attacks. How can we avoid these attacks, even if they'll look like benign ac...

At the onset of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, many experts and government officials expected there to be two fronts of the war — one on the ground in Ukraine and one in cyberspace. But all things considered, we haven't seen as much offensive cyber warfare come from either side of this conflict this year. J.J. Cummings from Talos Threat Intelligence and Interdiction joins the show again t...

We're excited to add to the growing Beers with Talos family with the addition of Lurene Grenier to the squad. Lurene joins her first episode and hits the ground running talking about her current role within Talos. She, Mitch and Matt talk about the major differences between exploit development and vulnerability discovery, and how Lurene started her career in exploit development. While exploit...

Most of the Beers with Talos folks are refreshed after a summer vacation. But don’t assume that means they actually prepared for this episode. This is more of a free-flowing episode, where we discuss cyber conflict between nations — one of the many things that keep Matt up at night. They go back and forth discussing what a “cyber war” could actually look like, and what crosses the line into confli...

Summer hacking, happened so fast…. We’ve been trying to enjoy our summer, but supply chain attacks just had to go and ruin the fun. So Mitch got back from fishing and decided to pull the guys together to discuss the Kaseya supply chain attack . We cover this major event BWT-style, and talk phony patches, mitigation strategies, and unsolicited advice for Kaseya’s CISO. For more, you can also watch...

We mainly spend this episode doing some catching up because it’s been a while since we recorded. But on the actual, helpful, front, we discuss a recently released list of the vulnerabilities that are most often exploited in the wild , according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. It’s particularly interesting to compare the lists from 2020 and 2021 to see how threat actor...

[Re-uploaded to fix an audio gap.] Yes, we’ve been sitting on this one for a while. But it’s worth it, we promise! We wanted to wait until we had more news to share, so it’s finally time to announce that Craig has left us. We will absolutely miss Craig, but look forward to the next act of Beers with Talos now that 2/5ths of the original crew is gone. We take the time to reminisce with Craig about...

We wanted to start off the new year by reflecting on 2021 with Talos Incident Response. The one thing many cyber attacks had in common? People. There are issues that arise any time humans are involved, whether it’s being tempted by a phish or someone making simple human errors. So, Matt, Mitch and Liz discuss how logs are crucial during the worst-case scenario and look at how to remove human error...

This is our first episode sans-Craig, but we didn’t wait long to find his replacement! Tune in as we add a new host to the crew. Then, we talk about drama on the ransomware landscape among as-a-service groups. Please note, we recorded this episode before everything dropped on Log4J. We are recording an emergency episode as we speak on this and will be releasing it later this week.

Log4j was a big enough deal that we finally decided to host a live show. Mitch, Matt, Liz and special guest JJ Cummings from our Threat Intel team got together to update everyone on where things stand with this critical vulnerabilities. It’s not all doom and gloom though, Matt at least brought some memes!

We’re dropping two episodes today. This is undoubtedly the less serious of the two, as it was recorded prior to the invasion of Ukraine. Check out Ep. #118 for more on that situation. In this episode, though, we got to talk about Talos’ involvement at the Super Bowl. Mitch welcomes on Brett Ellis, who was at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles to help defend “The Big Game,” of Talos Incident Response to d...

We’re all still pretty exhausted from our work in Ukraine. But that hasn’t slowed down any of the threat actors, unfortunately. So we enlisted special guest Nick Biasini to dive into the BlackCat ransomware group to discuss how it potentially is or isn’t connected to BlackMatter/DarkSide. These ransomware-as-a-service groups surprisingly run like regular companies, and even have the same problems...

(Uploaded again, this time with the correct music!) The OG Beers with Talos folks are dropping like flies, because now we also have to say goodbye to Joel! We know this has been quite the roller coaster for listeners, but we appreciate you all sticking with us through all these changes. We take some time in Joel’s farewell to discuss “Rent,” as only BWT could, and burnout in cybersecurity.

This was admittedly a tough one to record. In the middle of us trying to respond to the situation in Ukraine, we felt it was important to let our listeners in a bit. Matt, JJ and Liz discuss the work they and their teams are doing in Ukraine to protect critical systems there and keep users online. We also talk about the human side of things, and why it’s important for folks in cybersecurity to thi...

Our rotation of special guests continues on with Nate Pors from Talos Incident Response. Nate has been following several different attacks in which attackers bypassed multi-factor authentication with “prompt bombing” and other techniques. The crew discusses what the security community can do to make MFA safer and how to improve user education about using the technology. Plus, Matt gets an opportun...

We recorded this special episode live and actually in person last week at the RSA Conference, and we have a special treat for the listeners. The ever-elusive Matt Watchinski, Talos’ fearless leader, joins the show. We mainly spend some time talking about Talos’ work defending Ukraine during the invasion of Russia. Tomorrow, be on the lookout for a more laid-back podcast in the Security Stories fee...