Decipher Security Podcast

All of the movies in the Die Hard franchise include more than their share of absurd stunts and ridiculous moments, and the fourth installment, Live Free or Die Hard, sets the standard. From throwing a car at a helicopter to hacking the power grid to Kevin Smith's basement lair to everything Justin Long does, this movie is 128 minutes of over the top stunts, stunt hacking, and stunted dialogue...

David Scott Lewis was part of the early generation of computer hobbyists who built their own machines, learned through trial-and-error, and paved the way for the hackers and tinkerers who would follow in their footsteps in the next few decades. As a college student in the late 1970s, David met two screenwriters who were working on a script about a brilliant scientist and his teen protege. That sto...

When The Net hit theaters in 1995, the World Wide Web was in its infancy, Internet access was spotty, slow, and unreliable, and the concepts of identity theft and database hacking were completely foreign to most people. Sandra Bullock's character Angela Bennett is a smart and resourceful but introverted systems analyst whose world is thrown into chaos by a shadowy hacking group, a story that...

Dennis Fisher talks with Nate Cardozo , senior information security counsel at the EFF, about a proposal from the UK's spy agency, GCHQ, that would insert a backdoor into encrypted communications by adding a "ghost", or invisible third party, to two-party conversations. The proposal is the latest in a long line of ideas to weaken or cripple encryption systems in the name of easier a...

Dennis Fisher talks with Stefan Tanase , a principal security researcher at Ixia, about the concept of Internet Balkanization, the consequences of large-scale censorship for users, and how technical and policy experts can help address the problem.  You can watch Stefan's TedX Bucharest talk on this topic here: https://youtu.be/liSD3lL_-Kw Support the show

For anyone who has worked a thankless job for a tyrannical, ineffectual boss, Office Space touches a nerve. The story of a trio of programmers--Peter Gibbons, Michael Bolton, and Samir Nagheenanajar--at the faceless Initech in the late 1990s, Office Space mixes the existential dread of dead-end jobs with the illicit thrill of deciding to get back at your boss and everyone else. In this case, the r...

Zero Cool. Acid Burn. Phantom Phreak. Cereal Killer. Lord Nikon. Twenty-three years after its release, the movie Hackers is still a touchstone for a generation that grew up with AOL disks in their mail, Jolt cola in their fridges, pagers on their belts, and Rollerblades on their feet. Hackers introduced us to Angelina Jolie and Matthew Lillard, brought hacking into the mainstream consciousness and...

Released in 1983 and starring '80s movie icons Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy, and Dabney Coleman, WarGames was a huge hit in theaters and remains a classic 35 years later. The movie helped shape the popular perception of hackers as mischievous teens with too much curiosity for their own good and illustrates many of the security mistakes people and organizations still make. Dennis Fisher is j...

Communicating the fundamentals of privacy and security is a difficult task, but no more so than helping security and privacy professionals with the fundamentals of communication. In her role at Uber, Melanie Ensign is responsible for both of those tasks, helping customers and journalists understand the company's security and privacy principles , while also working with executives, engineers,...

Hacker Katie Moussouris probably knows more about bug bounties, how companies use and misuse them, and the incentives that they create than just about anyone on the planet. She created Microsoft's first bounty program in 2013 and has spent the years since traveling the world advising companies on how to work with security researchers and whether a bounty program is the right move. She talks w...

Decipher Editor-in-Chief Dennis Fisher talks with Mikhail Davidov of Duo Labs about his new research paper on Apple's T2 security chip . The T2 is now included in all of the forthcoming MacBook Pro models and it handles a wide variety of security functions. Mikhail spent eight months on a technical deep dive on the T2 and found a lot of interesting things in that time. Red the technical paper...

Decipher Editor-in-Chief Dennis Fisher talks with Richard Bejtlich, a veteran security practitioner, consultant, and author, about his new role at Corelight, the evolution of network defense, and the difficulty of running complex incident response investigations. Support the show

Andy Greenberg of Wired magazine joins Decipher Editor-in-Chief Dennis Fisher to discuss his in-depth cover story on the NotPetya malware outbreak of 2017 that masqueraded as ransomware but actually destroyed the networks of a number of large corporations and caused billions of dollars in damages. Support the show

Decipher editors Dennis Fisher and Fahmida Rashid preview the talks at Black Hat USA 2018 and discuss the ways in which the conference has evolved in recent years. Support the show