Decipher Security Podcast

Decipher

Every week, Dennis Fisher and Lindsey O'Donnell-Welch, the editors of Decipher, bring you exclusive, in-depth conversations with security researchers, CISOs, founders, and security experts to hellp you understand the threat landscape and better protect your organizations.

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370 episodes
Updated Friday

Episodes370

Newest first

Jul 15, 2019 · 1 hr 6 min
Deciphering Spy Game
Spy Game isn't explicitly a sequel to Sneakers or Three Days of the Condor, but it's certainly a spiritual successor, with all of the high-stakes espionage, double-dealing, and shady characters that made those films classics. Also: Robert Redford. Spy Game serves as a master class in social engineering and influence operations and demonstrates exactly how powerful the art of persuasion can be. This is Deciphering Spy Game. Support the show
Jun 26, 2019 · 39 min
Michael Coates
Michael Coates, CEO and co-founder of cloud security startup Altitude Networks, has had a long and varied career. Beginning with a stint as a consultant breaking into banks and continuing through roles as head of security assurance at Mozilla and CISO at Twitter, he has helped protect hundreds of millions of users over the years. He spoke with Dennis Fisher about what he's learned about empowering teams, the importance of making users safe by default, and the value of solving problems one at a time. Support the show
Jun 7, 2019 · 59 min
Adam O'Donnell
The security community is full of interesting characters who have had meandering, random paths to success, and Adam O'Donnell fits that description quite nicely. A gifted student who studied engineering and went on to earn a Ph.D. in computer science, O'Donnell has been a staff engineer, a startup founder, a political fundraiser, and a member of the famous Cult of the Dead Cow hacking group for nearly 20 years. He joins Dennis Fisher to talk about his introduction to the hacking scene in the '90s, joining the cDc, Beto O'Rourke's influence on the group, and the new book about the cDc. Support the show
May 30, 2019 · 37 min
Decipher Podcast: Joseph Menn
Joseph Menn's new book The Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World dives deep into the history of not just the cDc, but also the hacking culture that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s and has produced some of the most influential hackers, executives, artists, and even politicians working today. Dennis Fisher talks with Joe about the cDc's founding, its members, its lasting influence on the tech industry and the world at large. Support the show
May 15, 2019 · 17 min
Decipher Podcast: Daniel Gruss
This week, several separate teams of researchers disclosed new speculative execution attacks against Intel processors. Dennis Fisher spoke with Daniel Gruss of TU Graz in Austria, one of the researchers who developed the Zombieload attack and helped work on some of the others, as well. Support the show
May 13, 2019 · 32 min
Decipher Podcast: Alex Pinto
The publication of the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report is an important event every year for the infosec community, and the 2019 version includes analysis of data from more than 41,000 incidents and more than 2,000 actual breaches. Dennis Fisher talks with Alex Pinto of Verizon Enterprise about the trends in this year's report, how the data is collected, synthesized and analyzed, and what surprises the report holds. Support the show
May 9, 2019 · 1 hr 21 min
Deciphering Swordfish and Three Days of the Condor
There are good movies, there are bad movies, and then there's Swordfish, a movie that exists in a world beyond your world. It has everything: John Travolta, Halle Berry, guns, an incoherent plot, 128-bit DES encryption, a multi-headed worm. Dennis Fisher, Zoe Lindsey, and Pete Baker break it all down and then we mercifully move on to Three Days of the Condor, a classic of the 1970s paranoia genre and early techno-thriller with an all-time great Robert Redford performance. Support the show
May 7, 2019 · 22 min
Decipher Podcast: Michael Bailey
The Carbanak backdoor has been in use for many years by the infamous FIN7 attack team, and researchers at FireEye discovered files containing the source code for the malware on VirusTotal two years ago, but only recently published a detailed analysis of it. Dennis Fisher talks with Michael Bailey, who did much of the source code analysis, about the discovery, the work of pulling the code apart, and what makes Carbanak unique. Read the FireEye analysis here. Support the show
Apr 17, 2019 · 21 min
Decipher Podcast: Craig Williams
DNS hijacking and manipulation is a serious ongoing threat and researchers at Cisco Talos Intelligence Group recently uncovered one such campaign called Sea Turtle that has been running for more than two years. The attackers are well-resourced and likely backed by a nation state, and have targeted intelligence agencies, military organizations, and a DNS registry, among others. Craig Williams of Talos joins Dennis Fisher to discuss the Sea Turtle attacks and the ramifications for the Internet as a whole. Read the Cisco Talos report here. Read the Decipher story on Sea Turtle here. Support the show
Apr 8, 2019 · 33 min
Decipher Podcast: Patrick Wardle
Dennis Fisher sits down with Mac security researcher Patrick Wardle to talk about his entry into entry, his development of the Objective See suite of Mac security tools, the state of Mac malware and his Objective By the Sea conference. Support the show
Mar 25, 2019 · 21 min
Decipher Podcast: Joe FitzPatrick
Dennis Fisher talks with hardware security researcher JoeFitzPatrick at the CanSecWest conference about the challenges of finding and verifying hardware implants and the questions people should ask when these stories emerge. Support the show
Mar 18, 2019 · 1 hr 10 min
Deciphering Ocean's Eleven
There are heist movies, there are hacker movies, and then there's Ocean's Eleven. Blessed with one of the all-time great ensemble casts and an airtight script, Ocean's Eleven combines brilliant social engineering tactics, clever hacking ideas, revenge, greed, and Julia Roberts. This is Deciphering Ocean's Eleven. Support the show
Mar 13, 2019 · 1 hr 10 min
Deciphering Mission Impossible
The first Mission: Impossible film gave us so many wonderful gifts: goofy Usenet searches, Apple PowerBook action shots, CIA mainframe hacking, and some great mid-career Tom Cruise running. Before the series turned into a high-stakes, high-budget action franchise, the original film was a fun, sometimes goofy heist story with a vein of technobabble running through it. This is Deciphering Mission: Impossible. Support the show
Mar 10, 2019 · 57 min
Decipher Podcast: RSA 2019
Dennis Fisher sits down with Fahmida Rashid, Mike Mimoso, and Jessy Irwin at the RSA Conference in San Francisco to talk about the major themes of the conference. Support the show
Feb 28, 2019 · 27 min
Decipher Podcast Ep. 16 - Yonathan Klijnsma
Dennis Fisher talks with Yonathan Klijnsma of RiskIQ about his new research into Magecart Group 4, the background and tactics of the web skimming group, and how the defender community responds through takedowns and other techniques. Read the RiskIQ report here. Read our coverage of Magecart here. Support the show
Feb 25, 2019 · 1 hr 33 min
Decipher Podcast Ep. 15 - Deciphering Sneakers
Sneakers isn't just one of the best hacker movies of all time, it's one of the best movies ever. Full stop. The tale of a crew of outcasts with sketchy pasts who break into companies for a living (not a very good one), Sneakers has an all-star cast, a killer script, and a terrifyingly prescient story about information and its control over our lives in the modern age. This is Deciphering Sneakers. Support the show
Feb 4, 2019 · 1 hr 20 min
Decipher Podcast Ep. 14 - Deciphering Live Free or Die Hard
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. This is Deciphering Live Free or Die Hard. Support the show
Jan 26, 2019 · 43 min
Decipher Podcast Ep. 13 - David Scott Lewis
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 story eventually evolved into the script for WarGames and David became the inspiration for Matthew Broderick's character, David Lightman. Dennis Fisher sat down with David to talk about his introduction to hacking, his involvement in WarGames, and how he's stayed involved in the scene throughout the years. If you'd like to contact David, send an email to decipher@threatcasting.net. Support the show
Jan 24, 2019 · 1 hr 4 min
Decipher Podcast Ep. 12 - Deciphering The Net
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 foreshadows much of what has come to pass in the nearly 25 years since. This is Deciphering The Net, with Fahmida Rashid, Melanie Ensign, and Dennis Fisher. Support the show
Jan 17, 2019 · 29 min
Decipher Podcast Ep. 11 - Nate Cardozo
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 access for law enforcement and Dennis and Nate discuss the risks of the ghost method as well as what it could portend for users in other countries. Read Nate's piece on the ghost proposal on the EFF Deeplinks blog. Support the show