Transatlantic Cable Podcast

With Dave on vacation, our APAC head of social media joins Ahmed and me for this week’s edition of the Kaspersky <em>Transatlantic Cable</em> podcast. A warm welcome to Jag Sharma.

To kick off the conversation, we revisit the topic of REvil — again. This week, we look at the FBI’s infiltration of the ransomware gang and how the new approach differs from the usual. Although of course we discuss the news, we also debate the merits of the live-blogging the gang has been doing as well. From there, Jag gets his indoctrination by fire in one of Ahmed’s famous quizzes.

Moving along, we discuss the need to secure space’s infrastructure. If everyone’s heading that way anyway, best to make it safe. Our third story takes a look at the Squid Game phenomenon and the rise of Joker-infested unofficial apps on the Play Store.

The podcast closes with a story of how AI and a T-shirt led to a man getting a ticket for his automobile. No, you didn’t read that wrong – the AI really thought a woman’s T-shirt was a license plate. But hey, AI is the future, right?

If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends. For more information on the stories we covered, see the links below:

Direct download: KL_Podcast_225.mp3
Category:technology -- posted at: 8:50am EDT

To open the 224th episode of the Kaspersky Transatlantic Cable podcast, Ahmed, Dave, and Jeff discuss the targeting of researchers by some state-backed hackers.

We first mentioned this story a few months back, but this week we’re rekindling the debate on researchers being targeted after Twitter banned some phishing accounts. From there, we head into our first quiz — spoiler alert, Dave and I fall victim to Ahmed’s trickery.

We then welcome Maria Namestnikova, head of GReAT Russia, to discuss how parents can educate their kids on using social media securely.

From there, we move on to some REvil weirdness. The gang has seen the keys for its Tor sites stolen and some signs of instability. It’s since gone offline — again!

For our third story, we stay with ransomware, for which US financial institutions report having paid about $600 million in the first six months of 2020.

Then, it’s on to another quiz. We just can’t get enough.

The next item on the docket is a teaser to a podcast coming this weekend with Allison Pytlak of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) to discuss the need for more gender diversity in infosec. To close out our podcast, we discuss a Wales school system that is enabling facial recognition for kids buying lunch.

Direct download: KL_Podcast_224.mp3
Category:technology -- posted at: 6:08am EDT

We kick off the Transatlantic Cable podcast this week with the recent Twitch data breach. Details are still scarce, but the topic is on the collective lips of the infosec community.

From there, Jeff, Ahmed, and Dave move on to Facebook’s decision to crack down on its marketplace sales of Amazonian rainforest plots. How that will work in practice remains to be seen. Moving on, we talk about Google’s recent decision to send out authenticator keys to more than 10,000 people it identified as hacking risks. Our final story involves the FBI, submarine plans, and cryptocurrency.

Direct download: KL_Podcast_223.mp3
Category:technology -- posted at: 7:34am EDT

We kick off episode 222 of the Transatlantic Cable podcast with a discussion of the recent Facebook outage, including possible causes. Sticking with Facebook, we delve into the whistle-blower story and details being leaked about the social media behemoth.

From there, we move on to concerning news about a recent CoinBase hack involving some 6,000 accounts. Details are scarce, but if you use CoinBase for your crypto, it might be wise to check your account.

Following that, we look at a story about leveraging iCloud to spy on Britney Spears, and a troubling one about hackers hitting a hospital with ransomware and the death of a baby.

Direct download: KL_Podcast_222.mp3
Category:technology -- posted at: 8:00am EDT

Welcome back to the Community Podcasts, a mini-series on the Kaspersky Transatlantic Cable podcast. As always, my co-host for this series is Anastasiya Kazakova, a Senior Public Affairs Manager who coordinates global cyber diplomacy projects at Kaspersky.

As a reminder, the Community Podcasts is a short series of podcasts featuring frank cyber diplomacy conversations with cyber-heroes who unite people despite everything – growing fragmentation, confrontation, and cyber threats – there are people who build communities and unite people to work together for the common good. Why are they doing this? And are their efforts working?

Our third episode includes a chat with Kate Stewart - co-chair of one of the working groups within of National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s cyber-security multi-stakeholder process for Software Component Transparency.

NTIA has years of experience in conducting open, multi-stakeholder processes to help make progress on issues such as finding common ground on cyber-security vulnerability disclosure, developing clear policy guidance on the secure update of IoT devices, and providing more transparency about data collected by mobile apps. But today we will focus on this multi-stakeholder process for Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) or software component transparency.

During our extended conversation, we discuss a wide array of topics from the need for collaboration between the public/private sector, what working with governments has been like, what the future holds for FIRST and incident respondent in general, how to make sure that they remain neutral in cyber ‘firefighting’, and more.

Direct download: KL_Podcast_Mini_2021-08-13_mini_2.mp3
Category:technology -- posted at: 9:08am EDT

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