The Sony Pictures hack in 2014 by the North Korean Lazarus Group was a seminal event both in Hollywood and in the security community, bringing to light the capabilities and ambitions of North Korean attackers and showing the damage a leak of sensitive data can be. Brian Raftery joins Dennis Fisher to discuss his new Ringer podcast, The Hollywood Hack, that digs deep into the incident, its repercussions in Hollywood, and how it helped set the tone for how companies handle public data leaks.

The focus was on Iranian APTs this week, both from private threat intelligence teams and CISA, exposing new operations from UNC757 and other groups targeting government, higher education, and private industry. We also check in on a new report from Google's Threat Analysis Group on APTs using the same exploits for zero days that were developed by private commercial surveillance vendors NSO Group and Intellexa.

Reddit's head of software security Matt Johansen joins Dennis Fisher to talk about the highlights of Black Hat USA, the challenges of sorting security priorities in a large enterprise, and how he's learned to take care of his mental health after many years in the security industry.

Rebekah Brown and John Scott-Railton of the Citizen Lab join Dennis Fisher to dive into their group's new report on highly targeted spear phishing campaigns by the Russian threat actor COLDRIVER and then discuss the emergence of a new, possibly related group called COLDWASTREL.

Dennis Fisher and Lindsey O'Donnell-Welch reflect on their week in Las Vegas at Black Hat and discuss the talks they liked, including Moxie Marlinspike's keynote and the Google Project Zero retrospective, and the other topics they found interesting, including vulnerability exploitation versus social engineering and the AI ecosystem.

At Black Hat USA this year, Josh Harguess and Chris Ward, with Cranium AI, talk about the security challenges that organizations are experiencing while implementing AI in their environments, what AI red teaming consists of and the backstory of how MITRE Labs’ AI Red Team came to be.

AI and machine learning security expert Gary McGraw joins Dennis Fisher to discuss the concept of data feudalism in LLM foundation models, what the security implications of it are, and whether narrowly focused models may help address these issues.

Decipher editors Dennis Fisher and Lindsey O"Donnell-Welch are joined by Brian Donohue to dissect the Black Hat talks they're looking forward to, including sessions with H D Moore, Sherrod DeGrippo, and Moxie Marlinspike, and some talks they can't quite figure out from the titles.

The fallout from the CrowdStrike outage continues more than a week after the faulty update, so Huntress security researcher John Hammond joins Dennis Fisher to talk about the lessons learned from the incident, our fragile software ecosystem, and what cybersecurity practitioners can do differently next time.

Tyler Healy, CISO of Digital Ocean, joins Dennis Fisher to discuss the unique challenges of defending a huge platform, how AI is changing things for defenders, and what new challenges AI might bring in the near future.

CrowdStrike said a problem with an update the company pushed to Falcon sensors on Windows hosts on July 18 caused a blue screen of death, an issue that coincided with a Microsoft Azure outage and widespread outages across airlines, banks, hospitals, and other services.Our story on this incident: https://duo.com/decipher/crowdstrike-windows-update-linked-to-global-outagesThe Windows monoculture paper: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2003/09/cyberinsecurity_the.html

FIN7 is a highly active and capable cybercrime group also known as Carbanak that has been evolving and using its own tools such as AVNeutralizer for many years. SentinelOne researchers Antonio Cocomazzi helps us dig into the group's tactics and tools.Read Antonio's new research here: https://www.sentinelone.com/labs/fin7-reboot-cybercrime-gang-enhances-ops-with-new-edr-bypasses-and-automated-attacks/

Former NSA Deputy Director George Barnes joins Dennis Fisher to talk about his 35-year career at the agency, how he came to be intrigued by the cybersecurity world, the emergence of Cyber Command as a force inside the government, and what he sees as the priorities for defenders now.

Chris Hughes, co-founder of Aquia and a Cyber Innovation Fellow at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, joins Dennis Fisher to talk about the challenges of supply chain security, working with the government to address systemic issues, and the importance of collaboration.

Dennis Fisher and Lindsey O'Donnell-Welch dig into the news of the TeamViewer corporate breach, attributed to APT29/Midnight Blizzard, and news of more victims from the Microsoft intrusion by the same group earlier this year.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a critical form of defense for organizations, and threat actors are recognizing that: According to the latest Cisco Talos Incident Response Quarterly Trends report, instances related to MFA were involved in some capacity in half of all security incidents that the Talos team responded to in the first quarter of 2024.Hazel Burton with Cisco Talos talks about how threat actors are using targeted social engineering techniques to try to skirt by MFA, how phishi...

Metin Kortak, CISO with Rhymetec, talks about how organizations are approaching data privacy and security compliance, and thinking about risk management policies, when it comes to generative AI in the workplace.

Michael Mann's 1995 thriller Heat is considered by many people to be the best crime movie ever made. And hidden inside the intricate plot is a story of a lone hacker with a background at DARPA who uses his skills to set up scores for the crews in LA's underworld. Meg Gardiner, the co-author of Heat 2, and Casey Ellis, cofounder of Bugcrowd, join Dennis Fisher to dig into the technological and psychological details of this modern masterpiece. This is Deciphering Heat.Check out Meg's newest thr...

Amy Bogac, a longtime security executive with a deep background in systems administration and networking, joins Dennis Fisher to talk about how she came to security, how her background in communications informed her career choices, and the difficult conversations that need to occur before someone has to push the button during an incident.

A few days after Microsoft announced the new AI-enabled Recall feature--generating tremendous concerns and pushback from the security and privacy communities--the company had decided to disable it by default, but many concerns still remain. A month after the company's CEO proclaimed that it would be "prioritizing security above all else", how did this happen?Satya Nadella's SFI blog.The Microsoft blog post on Recall updates.