Beers with Talos Podcast

Recorded 7/20/18 - This week, we touch on several topics, but we spend the lion’s share of the EP discussing MDM. We are joined by Aaron Woland and spend a great deal of time discussing how these attacks work and how these are attacks happen to users of all devices across platforms. We talk about the differences in how MDM is handled across different OS flavors, and the similarities in how the att...

Recorded 6/13/18 - Still live in Orlando, just this time from the lovely lobby bar at the convention center hotel. We are joined by Lurene Grenier to dig a bit deeper on her keynote from TTRS. Lurene is here to give you the offensive view of attacking your network. If you want a hot take on defense from someone who is pure offense, well… buckle up and break out your cord cutting scissors. You are...

Recorded 6/12/18 - Special episode for two reasons! To start, we are recording one-take live from CiscoTV Studio B at Cisco Live in Orlando, FL. - which leads to the second reason, there is video of this episode in the show notes blog post! Join us as we cover the VPNFilter update Talos released June 6th and we recap the inaugural Cisco Talos Threat Research Summit. Check out the full show notes E...

Recorded 5/25/18 - As you can expect, this EP focuses on VPNFilter. We discuss how we got involved, why Talos made the decision to disclose when we did, and we cover many details of the malware itself. There is a lot of background to this ongoing discussion. Take a peek behind the curtain of the defense against this attack as we cover many different aspects of the malware, the attack, and the miti...

Recorded 5/11/18 - First and foremost, we recorded this EP one day before our “birthday”. We want to thank everyone, especially you (the listeners), who have let us do this for the last year racking up over half a million downloads! In this EP, we welcome special guest Nick Biasini from Talos Outreach - we set out to talk about several topics, but spend most of our time with Nick around the idea o...

Recorded 4/27/18 - Special guest intro this week from Chippah. We chat about what defines an “APT”, the recent BGP attacks, and the progress of GravityRAT. We also get an update on Vuln Discovery and the spate of recent releases. Matt has specific feelings about USB-C and his new computer.

Recorded 4/13/18 - We just upgraded all our gear, so naturally we had a straight tech meltdown this week and we saved it the best we could. Matt will sound way better next week. Promise. We cover Smart Installer. Again. But that leads down a discussion of security versus convenience that leads to us discussing the process of vuln disclosure - how vendor discussions, release dates, and policies wor...

Recorded 3/29/18 - Joel is sitting out this week and Bill Largent from the Outreach team fills in. We are pretty sure he was just wrong late trying to live on Joel Mean Time, which is now a GitHub project thanks to Moses (link below). We cover a wide range in this episode, so stay with us! We chat about the Talos Threat Research Summit coming in June, we wonder where the carrots to match the stick...

Recorded 3/13/18 - LIVE from San Jose, CA. First of all - we still have a podcast and jobs, so ostensibly, we did okay hosting the meeting event we talked about last time. There may have even been an award involved, just sayin’. Since we were all in one place together and we didn’t get fired, we decided to do our podcast live after the meeting for an audience. We are joined by Talos Sr. Director M...

Recorded 3/2/18 - Craig is out this week, but the rest of the crew goes through COINHORDER and Memcached and takes a deeper look at authentication and passwords. We cover an overview of reflection attacks and how some passwords schemes that are meant to protect, actually cause harm. We also bid you farewell, since our next episode is supposed to be live after the crew hosts a meeting that stands a...

Recorded 2/16/18 - This week, Mitch learns about starting a show without Matt with no other plans to control Craig in place. The team discusses Olympic Destroyer and then takes on attribution in light of recent developments with Nyetya. We look at what attribution actually takes and the ease and commonality of planting false flags.

Recorded 2/2/18 - Guests two EPs in a row! We are joined by Omar Santos from Cisco PSIRT to discuss CVE-2018-0101, the Cisco ASA Remote Code Execution and Denial of Service Vulnerability. See the PSIRT post below for latest updates. We also discuss Crypto miners overtaking ransomware, a Flash 0-day carrying a known ROKRAT payload (huh??), and we couldn’t escape discussing Autosploit because Rob Jo...

It is a packed episode this time! We are joined by Edmund from the Talos Outreach Group to chat about Threat Modeling after we make our way through attribution and Group 123, hipster artisanal patching (hand flipped bits!), and spend a good bit of time talking about how Talos identifies the cream of the crop when we are hiring.

This is easily our best podcast of 2018 (so far). The crew discusses the recent spike in crypto-mania sweeping the globe and also goes in-depth on how vulnerability discovery plays a critical role in overall security. Plus, the crew all (shockingly) have different takes on Spectre/Meltdown and Craig decides to up the ante with the killer robots.

Quotes intended, we think you know why. Mitch takes control to present the best of the first (partial) year of the podcast. He covers some of our guests, some of our favorite non-security bits, and a look back at our in-the-moment view of some of the top stories of the year. Things you can look forward to: Mitch struggling through sailing solo with bad bits and unnecessary ukulele music, and a not...

It’s the last full episode of the year! Thanks to you and the diligent work of Matt’s loving mother, the first 17 EPs of Beers with Talos were downloaded over 200,000 times in 2017! To show our gratitude, we are giving you not one, but TWO roundtables this week and even a special bonus rant! Also, Mitch can’t say words good, and Craig reads us stories from the blog!

Matt hijacks the Roundtable to tell us which Spice Girl each host is, because where else does a PR gimmick from KFC lead? Also, what’s worse than clicking a search result and getting a slideshow listicle? Getting a trojan payload when searching for banking forms (but that is the only thing that is worse - ARE YOU LISTENING BUZZFEED?). We also discuss the misnaming of troll farms and how patching a...

The crew takes on Apache OpenOffice vulns and when you need one CVE versus one hundred. We spend a lot of time discussing signal to noise ratio and Twitter canaries getting things wrong. Of course, we also discuss Bad Rabbit, its relationship to Nyetya, and why OpenOffice vulns are a worry, even to businesses that are run like hippie communes. As per usual, we mostly just make bad jokes.

In this EP, we take on interviewing and finding a job with technical questions and tests (hint: don’t oversell yourself, and make sure your mute button actually works). We also talk about enabling users with security as opposed to hobbling them. When Craig brings up the Google Home Mini beta test issues, he ends up taking a ration over his choices in handling the situation. We also discuss some cl...

We haven’t gone around the table and introduced ourselves in some time (about 50k downloads ago), so we take the time we usually complain about things at the top of the show to do that. We have seen a massive amount of “top-tier” threats in the last six months or so. While it might seem like comparing apples and oranges (hint: it is), the crew takes a stab at ranking these recent threats/attacks:...

Struts - when to patch and when to patch with a vengeance. In light of the Equifax breach, we discuss how patching can make you live better days, Never look back and say, Could have been me. Naturally, that covo leads into the biggest story of the week around Pwning the Supply Chain - CCleaner, Python, and Nyetya style. Avast made some mistakes, but every tech company is susceptible to supply chai...

Matt runs the ship this week in Mitch’s absence. Craig and Nigel are joined by Bill Largent and Joel was… in a meeting? The crew discusses ambulance chasing and crying wolf in the security industry and also what the security press is doing to perpetuate questionable reporting. We also chat at length about what exactly goes into vulnerability discovery, chaining exploits, and the months of work to...

Off the top: Better late than never? On top of being distributed all around the planet this week, we had some technical issues with our recording platform. Matt’s audio remained a challenge; it is rough this week. Bear with us, the audio quality will be back to what you have come to expect next episode. If you would like to speak to the manager, please hold. The last several years have seen a cont...

The BlackHat/DEFCON recovery episode. This one may be a touch rough, with some great gems. We discuss why music in 1994 was so terrible, including a BWT rendition of some classic Ace of Bass. The FIRST tool is discussed in some detail, how using our IDA Pro plug-in saves time a reduces duplication of effort. A vital topic in this EP is Matt’s post “On Conveying Doubt” how can intel professionals c...

This is a special episode, we are joined by long-time friend of Talos, Dr. Adam J. O’Donnell, PhD. Adam is the founder/co-founder of many amazing technologies, including Immunet and had created the core technologies of many tools on the frontlines of cybe rwarfare. He gives us a candid look at his process in building security technologies, his interest in the arts, and why you should let him know...