Beers with Talos Podcast

Recorded 8/16/19 - The understatement of the day would be the guys were in some kind of mood today… There is no explaining the way they are sometimes. We ended up discussing a lot of the awesome things that went on at Blackhat and DEFCON… like the time Matt and Mitch got ejected from the Aviation Village for recognizing the prowess of the greatest plane ever built. BRRRRRRT. And also the time Joel...

Recorded 8/2/19 - Yes, I know what today’s date is. We got really busy last week and I am sorry that the podcast is late. Really, I wish I wasn’t writing these notes at 12:#0r4-j3pofw…. What? Anyway, we talk about malvertising and dig into that ecosystem a bit looking at some of the competing priorities (hint: none of them are your privacy). We also discuss BlueKeep making its debut in Canvas and...

Recorded 7/19/19 - Wow, we packed a lot in this one: election security, burner phones, social app ToS, and maybe the worst opsec of all time - of course, Nigel blames Canada for all of it. Fair warning, this EP set a new record for beeps and train horns, so you have been warned. We primarily take a look at how an attacker would see disrupting democracy (and not in the cool startup way) by looking...

Recorded 7/8/19 - Matt skipped today’s podcast in favor of a meeting - for real. The rest of the crew carried on to discuss a few of this week’s hot button issues - municipalities paying (or not paying) the ransom, NASA JPL reporting APT breached their network via a rouge Pi (in true Mr. Robot fashion), and looking at rouge devices in general. Next EP will be our last before Black Hat and DEFCON,...

Recorded 6/24/19 - Back in the studio for EP 56 and off the top, Matt got some new toy for his side hustle as a Twitch star - I still can’t figure out exactly how he did what he did, but it was not helpful from a producer’s perspective. It’s repaired, but still enough to apologize for. This is why we can’t have nice things. We discuss the issues around the AMCA data heist - a breach that caused a...

Recorded 6/12/19 - God knows why, but we bring you another live EP from the Talos Threat Research Summit at Cisco Live US in San Diego, CA. We are joined by TTRS keynote speaker (as is tradition) Liz Wharton. Catch the highlights of the show and stick around for hot takes from the live audience. Thanks to everyone who showed up to the recording, especially those brave enough to step up to the mic...

Recorded 5/24/19 - There is another Blue(x) to talk about and guess what? YES, YOU STILL NEED TO PATCH. We talk about RDP, the source of this vuln, and whether or not exploits exist for it (hint: they do). There is a quick look back at last year on the anniversary of VPNFilter, and we also tackle 0-days again through the lens of Project Zero’s timeline of 0-days found in the wild. Also, Craig hasn...

Recorded 5/10/19 - Election security has been a dominant headline for some time, so it’s high time we take a look at what that landscape looks like - where we are today, and how we got there in the first place (hint: there were deeper unintended consequences than Shiny Happy People on REM’s “Out of Time” album). We anticipate gathering some first-time listeners due to the topic of this podcast… to...

Recorded 4/26/19 - Since Craig decided to skip the podcast today, we decided to invite one of Austin’s top actual security experts, Wendy Nather, to stop by. After Mitch is done being a fanboy, Wendy breaks down zero-trust, beyond the marketing story of a world without a perimeter. We spend most of the time discussing what zero trust looks like as security model and how it can be implemented in th...

Recorded 4/12/19 - Today we rip through a few other things to spend most of our time discussing Sea Turtle - the latest DNS hijacking campaign uncovered by Talos. Also, Joel causes the biggest blockchain outburst in some time. Special thanks for today’s podcast goes to Danny Adamantis, Talos researcher on the Sea Turtle campaign. Danny was going to be with us today, but experienced some technical...

Recorded 3/29/19 - Matt and Joel are both on the road this week, and Omar Santos from Cisco PSIRT joins the crew to discuss malware posing as ransomware and defending against supply chain attacks. We go deeper on the Talos story exposing criminal groups operating in the open on social media platforms like Facebook - and the implications of criminal groups leveraging social networking. Facebook has...

Recorded 3/15/19 - We recorded this after coming back from RSA, with some on-location highlights included! This EP opens a bit more thought provoking than we typically do, and we move toward discussing POS malware, like Glitch. After the RSA highlights, we discuss OpSec fails, and Nigel becomes a Burning Man convert after learning there are people there on drugs with rockets that he watch for funs...

Recorded 3/1/19 - This is a super short EP - we are trying to get it our for RSA and Matt is MIA today. We are covering the basics of loaders (and the difference between loaders and trojans). We also talk about some RSA activities we have coming at RSA!!Full show notes on the Talos blog.

Recorded 2/15/19 - We are joined by special guest Michelle Dennedy, VP and Chief Privacy Officer at Cisco. This is a long EP that is worth every minute - covering everything from the modern privacy landscape, privacy as a fundamental human right, and all the ways you didn’t know underwear can protect you. We were a bit concerned about having a VP on, but after Michelle knocked us around a bit we f...

Recorded 2/1/19 - Today we discuss threats that bridge the gap between violating privacy and classic cybersecurity threats - malware and systems that are tracking voices of dissent and using their own devices as recon tools against them. The two cases cited in this EP are ExileRAT, a trojan delivered via malicious Office docs targeting supporters of the Tibetan government-in-exile; and Karma, a ze...

Recorded 1/18/19 - We have a extended roundtable today (even more than usual) because we accidentally discussed some relevant security topics in the meantime. Eventually, we move on to talk about recent releases, primarily the Pylocky decryptor and more IoT vulnerabilities. We move on to discuss what’s going on in the SoHo device space, with some specific advice and a lot of rage. This EP closes o...

Recorded 1/7/18 - Most of the EP (after an extended Roundtable - we all had a lot to get out after time off), we look back at the 2018 Year-in-Malware Review – Olympic Destroyer, VPNFilter, MDM and other unique, large-scale, or otherwise interesting bits of malware that Talos encountered. We also discuss the things we would love to see conference talks about in the new year. Of course, we use that...

Recorded 12/7/18 - Several of us are under the weather, but the show must go on. We did our best, as always. After running through some recent research, we spend a good bit of this EP looking through the lens of a recent breach at the first things a new security leader should get a handle on - what questions need to be answered? What information and practices are day-1 vital? We wrap up taking a l...

Recorded 11/16/18 - Cyber moonshot, baby! It’s just like that time the US raced everyone to the moon, except completely different and in-no-way related! Do we need a “cyber moonshot”? Is the plan that was just released the way to get there? …and holy crap if Craig didn’t actually prepare for this podcast with notes and everything. We genuinely hope that you enjoy our rants over the Thanksgiving ho...

Recorded 10/19/18 - In celebration of EP40 and hitting over 1 million downloads(!!!), we go XL. This EP is a little long, we go a bit deeper than usual to discuss a few things that are highly unusual - namely, the XL patches dropped by Oracle, and the XL questions surrounding the Bloomberg/SuperMicro story. We also talk about a few mobile threats we have seen and what we have brewing in the mobile...

Recorded 10/5/18 - Quick chat to get to know this week’s special guests from the Talos Outreach team - Paul Rascagneres, Vanja Svajcer, and Warren Mercer. We discuss everyone’s work being presented at Virus Bulletin, and Paul and Warren being nominated the Péter Szőr Award. We also cover a lot of vuln discovery work recently released around various PDF softwareFull show notes available on the Talo...

Recorded 9/21/18 - The whole crew is back together! On the agenda today - VPNFilter part III, now with more known third stage payloads! As much as we have talked about multi-part posts, you know we wouldn’t post if it wasn’t important (on the blog, that is. That rule obvs doesn’t apply here) We are also releasing a related open source tool - WInbox Protocol Dissector. Finally, delve into an AV avo...

Recorded 9/7/18 - We have Joel back this week (and he is very happy to have himself back), but we lost Matt and we’re still wishing Nigel a speedy recovery from becoming bionic. This EP, we cover the latest findings in Talos MDM research and go over the exciting changes in the newly released Snort 3 beta (your move, Valve.). Bill reprises his role from last week as sentient seat filler that makes...

Recorded 8/24/18 - We’re finally back in the studio after Hacker Summer Camp! Sadly, due to summer vacations and becoming bionic, we are missing Joel and Nigel respectively. We end up discussing most of our topics through the lens of Matt’s frequent Twitter polls. We also find out he bribes followers with free sporks. Craig brings the discussion on the details of Remcos, and go through some intere...

Recorded 8/8/18 - We decided to broadcast while we were all together at Black Hat - and invited everyone over for lunch and beers. Since we had a room full of people, we made this EP “choose your own podcast” and tooks topics from the audience. Neil Jenkins from the Cyber Threat Alliance came by to bestow befitting superhero swag on Matt and Adam for their work on VPNFilter. Headlining this event...