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In episode 278 of the Defensive Security Podcast, Jerry Bell and Andrew Kalat discuss various recent cybersecurity topics. The episode starts with light-hearted banter about vacations before diving into the main topics. Key discussions include a new vulnerability in YubiKey that requires sophisticated physical attacks, resulting in a low overall risk but sparking debate about hardware firmware updates for security keys. Another key topic is Verkada being fined for CAN-SPAM Act violations and lack of proper security measures, including exposing 150,000 live camera feeds. The hosts also explore reports showing diverging trends in security budgets and spending, with some organizations reducing budgets while overall industry spending increases. They highlight the need for effective use of security products and potential over-reliance on third-party services. The episode also delves into the growing threat of deepfake scams targeting businesses, emphasizing the need for robust authentication policies and awareness training to mitigate risks. Finally, the hosts reflect on the broader challenges of balancing security needs with budget constraints in an evolving threat landscape.
Links:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-eucleak-attack-lets-threat-actors-clone-yubikey-fido-keys/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/verkada-to-pay-295-million-for-alleged-can-spam-act-violations/
https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/iran-cyberattacks-us-critical-infrastructure/725877/
https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/05/security_spending_boom_slowing/ vs https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/infosec-spending-surge-gartner/726081/ https://www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/deepfake-scam-businesses-finance-threat/726043/
Transcript
Jerry: All right, here we go. Today is Saturday, September 7th, 2024. And this is episode 278 of the defensive security podcast. And my name is Jerry Bell. And joining me today as always is Mr. Andrew Kalat.
Andrew: Good evening. Jerry, how are you? Kind sir.
Jerry: Doing fantastic. How are you?
Andrew: I’m great. Just got back from a little vacation, which was lovely. Saw a lot of Canada, saw some whales, saw some trains. It was
Jerry: Did you see any moose?
Andrew: Oddly we did not see a single moose, which was a bummer. We crossed from Toronto to Vancouver on a train and didn’t see a single moose.
I saw a metric crap ton of ducks though. I couldn’t believe literally in the thousands. I don’t know why.
Jerry: The geese are ducks. Cause
Andrew: We saw a
Jerry: geese are pretty scary.
Andrew: We were sealed away from them, so we were protected.
Jerry: I don’t know.
Andrew: hard to
Jerry: I don’t know. I w I wouldn’t I wouldn’t bet my life on that.
Andrew: But yeah, we saw a decent chunk of gooses, but mostly ducks.
Jerry: Good deal.
Andrew: Indeed. I’m good. Now, catching back up on work.
Jerry: And you’re back.
Andrew: And you are apparently the Southern Command Center.
Jerry: I am for another another day or two.
Andrew: Nice. Never sucks to be at the beach.
Jerry: It definitely does not. No, no bad days at the beach.
Andrew: Nice.
Jerry: All right. A reminder before we get started that the thoughts and opinions we express in the show are ours and do not represent those of our employers.
Andrew: Past, present, or future.
Jerry: That’s right. So our first topic or first story from today comes from bleeping computer. And this one was a bit of a, Oh, what’s the best, a bit controversial, best way to say it, controversial on on the social media sites over the past week. And the title is new leak. I’m not even going to try to pronounce that attack.
Let’s threat actors, clone, Yubikey, Fido keys.
Andrew: Shut down the internet. Shut
Jerry: Shut it down, just throw away your Yubikeys, it’s over.
Andrew: And apparently it can happen from 12 miles away with trivial equipment, right?
Jerry: No, actually, they the bad actor here actually has to steal it and it takes some pretty sophisticated knowledge and equipment. But apparently the equipment they allege are about, costs about 11, 000. However, the the YubiKey actually has to be disassembled, like they actually have to take the protective cover, protective covering off, and they have to instrument it and, and then they’re able to leverage a vulnerability in an Infineon chip that’s contained in these YubiKeys to extract the private key. And so it’s not a, it’s not a trivial attack. You have to lose physical possession of the token for some period of time. But if you were, The victim of this, it is possible for someone, some adversary, who was willing to put in the time and effort could clone your key unbeknownst to you, and then find a way to reconstitute Packaging and slide it back into your drawer, and you would be none the wiser.
Andrew: All seriousness, I think this has a very low likelihood of impacting the average listener to our show or the average person who cares about such things. But if you’re a very high profile target and, some sort of state intelligence service wanted to kidnap you and steal your YubiKey and then gain access to things before those sorts of permissions got revoked in some way, shape or form, I guess that could be viable, but this doesn’t seem like something that would happen to the average person.
Jerry: Oh, a hundred percent. And I still think, despite some of the the initial banter about this, you’re much better off using. I’m sure there are definitely certain use cases where you would be concerned about this, but for the average person, I think, like you said, it’s it’s really not a big deal.
So this does impact the YubiKey 5 series. And I think also the HSM 2 up through that was released, I think it was in May of 2024. The challenge is that you can’t actually update firmware on Yubikeys. That was a security decision.
Andrew: yeah, that seems like a wise security decision if you ask me.
Jerry: Yeah, it’s, I have observed quite a few people who who are now trying to find alternate. Security keys because they’ve been that they feel a little dejected by the fact that you can’t update the firmware on them. But I think it’s important to understand that. That actually is a very important security function, right?
The ability to not muck with the firmware on these keys is very important.
Andrew: right, otherwise a piece of malware could be doing that too.
Jerry: Exactly.
Andrew: Which not be all that happy
Jerry: No. Sad in fact.
Andrew: get the sort of knee jerk reaction to, I want to be able to update this to patch for flaws and such, but keep in mind that everything like that can be used by a bad actor just as easily, if not more easily.
Be careful what you wish for.
Jerry: Yeah. Now what’s interesting is this All of the hoopla around this is about Yubikeys, but the chip, the Infineon chip is actually used by multiple different types of security products, including some EFI. So the secure boot which, I guess at this point, it’s got his own problems already.
And then I believe even after, since this particular article has been written, that there are some other. Actual security keys, similar to YubiKeys that have been identified as also using this Infineon chip. So almost certainly going to be vulnerable in the same way
Andrew: But I guess, nothing to really panic about. But boy, this got a lot of press. A lot of social media traction.
Jerry: it really did. So anyway, I thought it was important to discuss because again, for most people, this is really not a big deal. YubiKey themselves rated the vulnerability as a A CVSS score of 4. 9 to give you an idea. And I think that, that seems right to me.
Andrew: Did it get a mascot?
Jerry: It did not get a mascot. There was some attempts some valiant attempts made.
Andrew: What about a jingle?
Jerry: I haven’t seen a jingle yet either, but it did get a name
Andrew: All right
Jerry: and it has a website. So
Andrew: geez. Okay, so mild panic then. If it’s got a name and a website, that equals mild panic. But got a mascot and a jingle, I’m full on panic.
Jerry: that, what else are you going to, what are you going to do? If it’s got a jingle, you gotta panic.
Andrew: what the tough part is, this is probably like getting traction, perhaps at executive levels who may not have the time or the knowledge to dig into the details and that they’re probably freaking out in certain C suites, but
Jerry: Yeah.
Andrew: send them our show. Tell them these two random guys on the internet said not to freak out.
Jerry: Yeah. I can’t put anything on the internet. That’s not true. That’s right. But, I was I was thinking it’s been a while since YubiKey or UBI has released a new version of the YubiKey. So
Andrew: So maybe this is driving an upgrade cycle. Maybe
Jerry: maybe
Andrew: it themselves. get people to buy new keys. Is that what you’re saying? Jerry,
Jerry: it could be just like how the antivirus companies are releasing all the viruses. Yes. That’s right.
Andrew: that’s some smart thinking right there.
That is, know what? That’s the kind of cutting edge analysis you get on this
Jerry: Thought leadership right there.
Andrew: man. to get out on this. All right, here’s the plan. Let’s spend 20 years making a company and then break our main thing. So people to buy new things.
Jerry: It’s a good idea. It’s solid. I don’t see any any faults in this plan.
Andrew: Hey, how’s that working out for CrowdStrike?
Jerry: We’ll find out soon.
Andrew: Indeed.
Jerry: All right. The next story comes from bleeping computer and title is Verkada to pay 2. 95 million for alleged CAN SPAM Act violations. So for those of you, not in the U. S. CAN SPAM was a law passed a couple of years ago, probably more than a couple of years ago at this point, that Unlike you, what you might expect does actually a permit spam in under certain particular circumstances.
It requires, for example, an unsubscribe link, which this company didn’t do. Verkata, by the way, creates security cameras. There were two big issues, not related here. First one is that their marketing team did what marketing teams do. They went wild with the with their prospect, people who enter, who expressed interest in the cameras, they started spamming the crap out of them without any way to opt out.
And so that was actually the genesis of the 2. 95 million fine. But on the other side, the company had been running around saying that they’re. Cameras are super secure and they are HIPAA compliant and they meet privacy shield requirements and a few other things. And at the same time they got hacked and lost.
Quite a lot of data, some sensitive data, actually video feeds from sensitive places like mental institutions and whatnot things, the kinds of video that you would not want to to have exposed. So in addition to that roughly 3 million fine for spamming, they also have now to appoint a and pay for.
A security overseer for the next 30, sorry, 20 years. And I think they have to report any data breaches to the financial or the federal trade commission within 10 days or you face additional sanctions. So I thought this one was interesting because we’re starting to see a definite trend. At least in the U.
- of the government holding companies to account when they make what I’ll call false claims about the, in, in the aftermath, in retrospect, false claims about the security capabilities of their offerings. And so I thought this is interesting. It was really important for people to understand that, if you are going to make those claims, you better not have a problem like this because you’re going to end up in the crosshairs
Andrew: Yes, this wasn’t the SEC. So this didn’t matter if they were public or not. This was the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission. So that’s interesting. Some people would say if I’m not public, I don’t have to worry as much about this sort of liability, but guess what?
Jerry: you do.
Andrew: Looking at the details, 150, 000 live camera feeds were exposed. That’s impressive. And it looks like they didn’t know about the breach until AWS flags is a precious activity.
Jerry: Yeah.
Andrew: So kudos to AWS, but man,
Jerry: It’s not a good look.
Andrew: how would you like to be like that security overseer? How would you like that job? Just, working for the FTC, waiting for companies to come tell you stuff that they screwed up on.
Jerry: Don’t know. It. Could be could be good. Could be bad.
Andrew: Yeah. It’s. It’s interesting because the other thing that’s called out here is that Verkada did not implement basic security measures on its products, such as demanding the use of complex passwords, encrypting customer data at rest, implementing secure network control. So the complex passwords, it’s a little unclear to me if they mean this within their own environment or their customers. Requiring to use complex passwords, which gets back into that whole snowflake conversation we were having on previous episode of how much is a company liable for a customer’s poor use of their security features that are offered. Now, the other aspects here are obviously not, they’re very much for Cata’s choices and how they ran their environment and set up their, it and production environments and such, but doesn’t make me wonder are we going to see more things pushed on ensuring that. These companies are ensuring their customers are being somewhat safe with the use of the tooling.
Jerry: Yeah. I don’t know exactly where this particular issue sits, but I will say broadly speaking, I think the expectation is that as a, Technology provider, whether that’s a service provider or some kind of piece of technology, if you’re going to assert that it’s no quote secure, the expectation is that you have some sort of guardrails on them that feed, for example, mandatory multi factor authentication or mandatory password complexity, and if you don’t, and lots of customers, lots of your customers end up getting hosed because they’re using bad passwords, obviously they have a problem, but I think what.
And what we’re seeing increasingly is that you as the provider also have a problem, despite the fact that it’s based on the choices of the cost of your customers. Look, we can debate whether that’s the right approach or not, but I think that is in fact, what is happening.
Andrew: Yeah. Makes sense. Got to be careful with what you say. If you allege you’ve got good security, at least your marketing and sales people are. And you don’t, and you get bit, there are consequences.
Jerry: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. All right. The the next story comes from cyber security dive and the title here is Iran linked actors, ramping up cyber attacks on us critical infrastructure. And I, There’s not a whole lot of technical Gorpy detail in here, but they do make reference to a number of different threat actor names like Pioneer Kitten.
And I’m always fascinated by the names that emerge with these threat actors, but it was more that the targets of these attacks are actual security products. So they’re Cisco firewalls, F5s, Palo Altos that are being attacked by these threat actors in a couple of different ways.
This one particular threat actors asserted to be associated with Iran and what they’re doing is they’re facilitating initial compromise, and apparently one of the ways they’re doing this is through exploitation of vulnerabilities in the security products, and then they’re using that access to basically sell that access to ransomware actors, and then taking a cut of any proceeds that those.
Ransomware actors end up getting. I think it’s an interesting approach because again they’re asserting that this is, this threat actor is associated with the the Iran Republican Guard IRA or IRG Who apparently is really in it for the money and not for other, other uses like data destruction or intellectual property theft and whatnot.
Andrew: Iran is a heavily sanctioned country, much like North Korea. They’re probably seeking hard capital. it makes sense. I, as I’ve often stated on this program I’m very skeptical of the veracity of some of these attribution reports. It’s tough to know how accurate they are because there’s no way to check easily. Somebody says it’s so and okay, based on what and how do you know and how certain are you and how do you know it’s not another actor trying to look like that actor? So I’m always quite skeptical. I’m just cautious about buying into this, but boy, is this such a focus of the industry of trying to attribute a certain actor and it’s interesting.
It makes for good fodder for conversation. And, at the executive suite, I think they like to know that, but I’ve said a few times, and I’ll probably say a few more times. As a defender, I don’t know that I care. I think I care about the TTPs. I think I care about the typical tactics and the typical techniques and typical approaches, but it’s coming from Iran or Billy down the street, really change my job too much, I just need to know what they’re up to and what I need to defend against. That’s not the point of your story. I know I just went off on a rant.
Jerry: I will say, so back to why I thought this was interesting when I, back when I was working. I had observed quite a few especially smaller organizations getting compromised and ransomware as a result of running older, vulnerable the edge protection devices like Cisco’s and Palo Alto’s and whatnot.
And it. It seemed to help in the spirit of quickly identifying or investigating the breach to understand what they were likely doing. And so if example, if you’re you’re Palo Alto firewall gets compromised while they’re You know, the first thing to look for is evidence that somebody’s trying to move laterally and deploy ransomware because that’s probably what’s going on.
But I’m broadly speaking, I’m with you, like you’ve got a, you have to be threat actor agnostic. You need to defend your environment regardless of who’s trying to get in. But I think, what I am. Really trying to impart in here is that I think as an industry and maybe not more sophisticated companies, but broadly speaking I think as an industry, we do a pretty bad job of maintaining certain really Key pieces of our infrastructure, like those firewalls, like I for whatever reason, I don’t know why, like we’ve, I have observed small companies keeping like their workstations patched and, their servers patched, but for whatever reason, It’s really common for their firewalls to be end of life.
Andrew: Yeah, it’s, I think there’s a lot of costs or a lot of reasons. I think cost is one, I think interruption of business and downtime perceptions of patching network gear is another, I think in general, network gear is not thought about as something needs to be patched very often, unlike general purpose computers. But I agree it’s a problem and we’ve seen, it goes Absent flows, and we get troughs and peaks of how often we see these sorts of devices have problems like this. And it seems like lately we’ve had a big spike in remote access VPN type technologies having pretty serious vulnerabilities. And what’s always scares me, what I think about is, okay, you’re 28 patches behind and something serious pops. That’s so much more disruptive to patch up than if you were on a more current patch level and you’ve got to Deploy a patch to fix a serious vulnerability So it’s there’s a hygiene aspect of keeping up to date on this stuff that I think makes your life easier in a crisis
And but also to your point It’s also very interesting that These types of actors get initial access and then broker that out and sell that and we’re not catching them at the initial access phase They can dwell without much notice You So that’s another interesting problem that we should get better at.
Jerry: Yeah. I think in part, it’s because the, these even well instrumented organizations don’t. They’re instrumented, especially at the edge to look for how best to describe it, to look for malicious things that are transiting through the firewall and not necessarily attacking the firewall.
I’m not saying that well, but And that my, my experience was a lot of these technologies don’t have unto themselves, things like EDR type capabilities to tell you that something is going horribly wrong on the firewall itself.
Blind to that.
Andrew: Yeah. Or they have log events that are obscure enough that your SIM wouldn’t know how to make heads or tails of it without custom alerting and. Yeah, when somebody is breaching something through some sort of vulnerability, how it reacts is highly unpredictable, hence it’s a vulnerability, hence it’s doing something it wasn’t designed to do. So it’s not that simple. We usually have to look for some sort of second order impact or or movement, like you mentioned, lateral movement to deploy ransomware to detect that intrusion often, sadly.
Jerry: Yes, indeed. All right, moving on to our next story, this one comes from the register and the title is security boom is over with over a third of CISOs reporting flat or falling budgets.
Andrew: Back it up. Let’s go home.
Jerry: Yeah, it was fun while it lasted which, by the way, I normally we don’t talk about that sort of thing, but I thought it was very interesting because it’s contrasted with another story from cybersecurity dive, which is titled InfoSpec spending to hit a three year growth peak, reaching 212 billion next year.
So the registered story is based on a survey from INs and the cybersecurity dive story is based on a report from Gartner.
Andrew: Which I’m assuming is also based on a survey from Gartner
Jerry: Yes,
Andrew: list of customers and whatnot.
Jerry: Now, when I was first contemplating this, because look, I, I’m pretty involved socially and I see a lot of people struggling to get work in the security industry right now. And we don’t have a story about it, but the US government recently announced that it’s going to Put a bunch of money into training people up to be cybersecurity workers, because there’s this, dearth of unfilled security jobs.
At the same time, we got a lot of people who can’t find work in the security industry. So I think that’s a, it’s an interesting dichotomy. And then, which kind of aligns with. The story from the register, but is antithetical or in opposition to the Gardner report. Now it occurred to me though, that they’re actually maybe saying the same thing.
Or at least they’re not mutually exclusive. I think what the IANS report is saying is that in general security budgets, budget growth is slowing some places it started to stop. And in some places it’s even starting to go down, particularly as it Pertains to hiring new people. And the Gartner report is really talking about industry spending.
So how much are you, how much are companies spending on security products and services? And it occurs to me that when you put those two things together, you have less money to spend, but the money that you do have, you’re spending on third party services and software means that you have less money To grow your team.
Andrew: Oh, CapEx versus OpEx. Although, gone to SaaS, so it’s all OpEx now these
Jerry: It’s not a lot of packs. Yeah. But I think, I, so what, one
Andrew: I could be
Jerry: of the concerns I had is a, as a CISO is, when you buy a thing, whether it’s a SAS thing or on prem thing, You actually have to do stuff with it. Like you have to have, it’s it’s an obligation. You’ve adopted a puppy. You have to care for and feed that puppy. And in the worst case, look at what happened to Target like many years ago now, probably almost a decade ago,
When they got hacked and all of the logs that indicated they had been hacked was like sitting there, but nobody was looking at them.
And so I’m concerned that as an industry, we’re becoming very enamored with technology and less so on the ability to actually use that technology. Now that’s a, maybe a naive and uninformed view, but that’s the benefit I give to the show.
Andrew: It’s fair. No, I, of my strong principles in the teams I run is try to develop mastery over your tools. to understand what’s normal, what isn’t normal, tinker with them, get to know them, play with them, know how to interpret what they’re saying. The challenge with that is you need a lot of free time and you need a lot of initiative and self starting mindset to go do that. And if you’re being pulled a thousand different directions, it’s hard. So you’re very reliant on the tool, raising the alarm, not sensing something is a little off based on familiarity with the tool or the environment or the situation. So I do think we’re also recovering still, or Adjusting to a higher interest rate environment.
I think when we were in zero interest rate environments, at least in the U. S., a lot of tech companies hired a ton of people. And so we’ve seen the slow motion layoff wave for the last year or so, or two years, as a lot of these companies. Probably overhired and with interest rates going up part of the goal those higher interest rates is basically slow down, industry growth and spending and make money more expensive and it’s working like companies slowing down. A little bit, and so they’re slowly laying off here and there and adjusting. And I wonder if that’s part of it to a lot of this is a number of companies with their budgets, taking a little bit of a pause as they’re adjusting, or their staffing levels come down a little bit, or. What not? The other thing that this reminded me of while I’m ranting on this is this consolidation push, which happens about every 5 to 10 years that I’m seeing. And then reference it a bit in one of these articles. Consolidation around certain tools or certain vendors and trying to do functionality in one, one particular solution for one particular vendor seems to be hot right now with executives. I don’t like about that is typically what will happen is a given solution or tool will be very good in one area. And then to gather and grab some of that consolidation money and increase their footprint, they’ll start expanding into other areas. But typically the offerings in those other areas are substandard.
They’re not great. They’re certainly not, of breed.
Jerry: Almost checkbox, right?
Andrew: Exactly. They are a checkbox coverage Of that other bit of functionality and usually sucks compared to the best of breed out there. But what is it’s enough to convince an executive. They don’t need a separate tool that they can gain efficiencies in that consolidation.
But I think we end up with of substandard tools. Then in these, offshoot areas that these other tools are growing into. Now they may get better over time, but typically I think that nuance is lost we are pushing to consolidate of, yeah, it says it does this, but how well does it do it in this other area?
That wasn’t the core purpose. We bought this particular tool or vendor to cover. I think some of that may be going on too. I see, I hear a lot of that push right now to consolidate and get down to less vendors and simpler platforms, but I think you risk losing some functionality and capability when you do that
Jerry: And I think that’s been a long term IT trend that is now crossing over into the security world. If you look at companies like HP and Oracle and IBM and others, they have a lot, they have a few best of breed things and they have a whole lot of checkbox crap and they’re, their sales tactic is to, convince company executives that look, you don’t have to go everywhere.
You can get everything here,
Andrew: and it works, which is helpful because our show has a couple of best read episodes and a bunch of checkbox episodes, so I’m. glad that’s acceptable to the industry. The other thing that I pulled out of one of these articles, I think it was the register one. I’m going to quote it. Quote, an encouraging sign also is that security spending as a proportion of the overall IT budget is on the rise up from 8.
6 percent in 2020 to 13. 2 percent this year. This trend looks set to continue, Kowalski opined, but still security spending was typically less than 1 percent of the revenue of those I always find that interesting. And I know what’s going to happen is a lot of CISOs and CFOs are going to look at that and go that’s what I should spend. 13. 2%. That’s my target.
Jerry: Yep.
Andrew: Regardless of their circumstance or their situation, companies love to try to measure against the averages around them and use, in theory, wisdom of crowds to measure what they should be spending on security.
Jerry: Yeah. That is the normal benchmark. That’s the normal playbook for you, whether you’re a CIO or CISO coming into a company, like that’s the gold standard is benchmarking your competition.
Andrew: It’s safest. It’s easiest. It’s an easy button. It’s, you can’t get criticized if you’re doing what’s average for the industry.
Jerry: Right,
Andrew: I think that’s a bit of a shortcut, a bit of a easy button, naive way to look at it. Like you don’t like your risk tolerance and your environment and your situation is very different from your competitor
Jerry: yeah, it
Andrew: got
Jerry: assumes text to text parity and lots of other
Andrew: Right.
Jerry: that are almost certainly not the case.
Andrew: So just something I pulled out just to riff on for a minute there that I worry about that being used as. Now the flip side is if you’re well below 13. 2 percent of your, your IT budget, you can go use this as evidence to, to fight for more budget.
Jerry: That’s certainly true. You’re not gonna get it in this market. It is I think if we take a big step back, The reality that we find ourselves in is that there’s a lot of pressure on spending, and I certainly felt it as a ciso. And I think that many people in that role feel the same and is born out in the in the ions report that, we’re being asked as an industry to do more.
With either the same or with less, the threat landscape is certainly not getting any better. It’s getting worse at a faster pace as we often talk about here. And from a, a personal liability standpoint, I think it’s also getting, At least in the U. S. getting more complex companies in their officers and their executives are now starting to be personally held liable in certain, edge case instances.
And so that’s there’s a lot of, I think, really fundamental changes afoot. But if you look at the big contour. There is an expectation of driving efficiency. And I think that what, just going back to my time as a CISO, it’s difficult for an organization to commit to hiring a person.
It’s easier for an organization to commit to spend, to signing a contract that lasts a year or two years, because, you can You know how much it’s going to cost. You can choose to not renew it. You can perhaps get out of the contract in, in the middle of it. And so that I think drives some of what has is being borne out in the Gartner report that we are starting to see companies trading off people for services, but as we’ve talked about in the past I still think that Especially if you talk, even like managed security services, I think it’s very difficult to take commodity services and have them be really effective in absence of some kind of an abstraction layer.
Like you, I think that. The place that we have to get to is in industries, figuring out how to optimally run vended services and our internal it I’m struggling with the right way to convey it, but I think we’ve got a long way to go, but my, Big concern is that we’re going to overshoot the mark, like that, that the, we’re going to cut too far
Andrew: Sure.
Jerry: and as security leaders, we’re going to end up getting exposed.
And as we started to see, that the employee, our employers are probably not going to have our backs.
Andrew: and the indicators you’ve cut too far are usually very lagging indicators that you’re not going to know right away. And it’s very difficult to know until you do a post mortem after a massive breach, why? And often those decisions make sense in the moment. And it’s a very tough job justifying a security ROI, which goes back to, Hey, what’s the average of the industry doing? Okay. That must be safe.
Jerry: I think even. I think even that is is a little perilous because, it’s, I guess it’s one thing if you feel like you’ve got all your bases covered and, you’re trying to decide if you want to, take the next step of maturity or what have you. But most companies have a big risk register.
And I always worry that those risk registers are gonna be exhibit A.
Andrew: Jerry, if it’s on the risk register, nobody can attack it.
Jerry: True.
Andrew: rule.
Jerry: I forgot about that. I’m sorry. You’re right.
Andrew: It’s out of bounds. If it’s.
Jerry: It’s out of bounds.
Andrew: No, you’re right. What’s worse having it on a risk register or not knowing your risk, I think is the first step.
Jerry: I completely agree. I guess my, my, my point was it’s hard. I think it’s very difficult, especially in some kind of a, litigation or regulatory situation to be able to justify having gnarly looking things on a risk register at the same time you’re cutting your budget. That’s my that was my point.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s fair. But just to play devil’s advocate as a CFO or a CEO. Hey, like I’m trying to keep my company afloat. I can’t just throw money at security.
Jerry: It’s certainly true. And I guess that kind of comes back to the risk tolerance, which, I guess I think one of the one of the things that’s really important. Problems that we have is what is, what does it mean to have a risk tolerance, right? Because
Andrew: Yeah.
Jerry: there seems to be like this
Andrew: And is it well understood and truly internalized by the executives making that decision?
Jerry: correct. And so in the past, okay like I, I’ve accepted a risk and no, gosh, something bad happened that. The thing that I accepted was exploited and we had a breach and, we got our hands slapped or we got some negative press. And then you move on, but now it’s okay.
And you’re going to get personally sued or perhaps go to jail or like that it’s the dynamics I think are changing. a bit. And so the, this concept of accepting the risk, I think is starting to take on a different flavor than it has in the past. And it’s probably candidly overdue. Because look, as society marches on and becomes more and more online and digital and reliant on, on on your Personal records and personal data, the sensitivity and the harm that can come from that information being stolen or maliciously used is it’s becoming much more perilous for the.
The people whose data that is exposed. And so it makes sense. But I’m not sure that we’ve broadly speaking, embraced that yet.
Andrew: No, it’s I agree. Problem. There’s always has been a tough problem and it’s constantly evolving and you go back to, okay, then what’s the framework I can use? What’s the standards I could measure against. How often are those finding the last set of problems? It’s. constantly see these sorts of approaches come into play that, whether it’s PCI, just as an example of, yeah, we’re completely PCI secure. Great. You still got hacked, right? We’re following the NIST cybersecurity framework. Okay, but how well? And there’s so much complexity.
It’s not easy. It’s really tough. getting the basics right is really tough. So it’s, I don’t know. It’s a tough problem. I, probably we should start caveating this show with the advice in the show is for entertainment purposes only so we don’t get sued.
Jerry: That’s a good point. It’s a very good point. Anyhow, but time marches on technically, the risk marches on and then the next story is a good example Of that. And this one also comes from cybersecurity dive. And the title is deep, fake scams, escalate hitting more than half of businesses.
Andrew: That was an amazing segue, by the way.
Jerry: I’m trying like I’m
Andrew: was, that’s years of work
Jerry: Right there. I’m done. Like I,
Andrew: Almost professional.
Jerry: yeah, a couple, like I say, just a few hundred more episodes and I’ll actually know what I’m doing here.
Andrew: Anyway
Jerry: It’s not been all that long that the CEO, the CFO, CEO, business email compromise concept has emerged. It started off probably 10, 10 ish, 15 years ago where, the CFO would send an urgent email to their accounting team saying I need you to wire a bunch of money to to this business email.
Bank because we’re buying a company and super secret. You can’t talk to anybody about it, but you know what, you got to do it immediately. And those for a period of time were pretty effective. And we it’s a community we adapted a bit. We built some processes and it still happens by the way, like companies are still falling victim to fairly unsophisticated attacks.
But, one of the things we said was like, you got to make sure that you know who you’re talking to. Is that email really from your CFO? And then that, that morphed into deepfake audio calls where the CEO, somebody would alter their voice. So it sounded like the CFO and for a period of time that was that was somewhat effective.
And now the next iteration of that is deepfake video where the CFO is getting onto a Webex or a zoom meeting with you. And. They’re face to face asking you to to transfer money and
Andrew: interactive video.
Jerry: right.
Andrew: Yeah, wild.
Jerry: And that’s what this is about. They’re saying that they interviewed a bunch of not IT or security people, they interviewed finance people.
And they said that of the 1500 people they interviewed, they said 85 percent view, this is an existential threat. They identified that about Roughly half of companies have I’ve been targeted and then of those that have been targeted, about 43 percent have fallen victim, which is a big number.
I don’t know how well that extrapolates out. Obviously they didn’t interview every company in the world, but still that seems like a big number. And when you tie that, by the way the Gartner report that we just talked about, the headline on that report was actually quite interesting. Because it, it said Gartner forecasts, I’m sorry, wrong headline.
Gartner predicts that by 27, 2027, so Three years from now, 70 percent of cyberattacks will involve generative AI.
Andrew: That’s wild. My toothbrush now has gender of AI, so sure, but
Jerry: I think what they’re, I think what they’re, I think what they’re saying is, it’s going to be things like this where they’re they’re using generative AI to create phishing lures and to create deep fakes and whatnot. So I don’t know that,
Andrew: sense.
Jerry: I don’t know that like they’re going to, I don’t think that they’re predicting that LLMs are going to start coming up with novel ways of hacking into your pal about the firewall, though, maybe that happens.
I don’t know. I think it’s more like coming up with creative ways to execute kind of old style attacks.
Andrew: You won’t have the badly translated poor English messages any longer.
Jerry: That’s true.
Andrew: in proper American English. It’ll sound normal and appropriate and you won’t have that trigger of, weird verbiage that sounds like a non native English speaker, which is usually a good tell. So that’s one thing that’ll make it a little harder for sure.
Jerry: So there was a report published in May. Yeah. By the, in this article makes reference to this report by the big four accounting firms, including Deloitte, that said that by 2027 fraud losses from generative AI, they expect to reach 40 billion. It’s
Andrew: That’s wild. And honestly don’t know the answer to this, and I probably should, and I feel bad that I don’t know this, but in a personal Fraud case. Let’s say somebody scams you into transferring money with Zelle, for instance, like a personal fraud, your personal homeowner’s insurance and your bank.
I’m like, no, sorry, we’re not covering that. You authorized that transaction. Yeah, you were scammed. It was and for us in the industry, we’re looking at that was a, that was basically stealing money. But right now Those banks and vendors and such are like, no, sorry, you were, you authorized it.
It’s an authorized transaction. We don’t own the liability. I wonder if that’s the case with cyber insurance. If you fell for, or were a victim, I shouldn’t say fall for, because that makes it sound like you’re at fault. If you were a victim of this sort of scam. Would there be coverage or would it be the same sort of story of no, you authorized it.
This is an authorized transaction. I don’t know. I really don’t.
Jerry: a good question. I I wonder if it would fall into I’m not a, not an insurance expert. But I do wonder if it would fall into more like errors and omission,
Andrew: Could be.
Jerry: Than cyber insurance, but I don’t know. That’s a, it’s a good question. Very good question.
Andrew: dozen or so listeners might know.
Jerry: Yeah. Hit us up. Let us know if you know the answer to that. So in any event, I. Now, this is certainly a rapidly evolving area. I know that there are a lot of people who are very bearish on generative AI, and there’s some valid ish reasons for that, but I don’t think it’s going away. The fact that you may not think it has a lot of utility and then it is unsustainable from a ecological perspective.
All that stuff can be true and it doesn’t go away. So I think that’s probably where we’re at and certainly from a, from the perspective of adversaries, I think we’re on what is likely to be a dramatic uptick in using this technology in adversarial fashion.
Andrew: Have some decent advice, which is the same thing I would ask you, which is educate your finance teams, your executive teams about the risk. Show them examples. Show, give them If there’s one thing to take away, it’s look for that sense of urgency. That’s what’s usually very common in these scams and it’s very effective psychologically, but if you can get them to understand, if someone is pushing you for a sense of urgency, be suspicious. the other thing is have processes that cannot be deviated from, which inquire, require. people to authorize and following a process. So if somebody is asking you to deviate from the process, that should be a red flag. And I think those are very common techniques that happen with these scams. So I think that’s a key. And I do think because there’s only a small number of people who can control finances in a company, can go a long way. It’s not like you’re trying to broadly target your entire population against, phishing attacks. You’re trying to get a few people control the purse strings know about this and be wary of this and be wise.
Now the flip side is it adds. It adds friction, right? You’re saying, if you have your boss legitimately coming to you and saying, I need you to do this. And you say, no, because our policy is X, Y, Z. That’s a little uncomfortable. That’s probably going to slow business down, but it’s one of the only ways probably to protect yourself against these types of scams.
Jerry: absolutely. Absolutely. I’m concerned about what other ways we’ll see this materialize.
Andrew: I actually am not here. This has been a deep scam
Jerry: You’re just an, you’re just an LLM.
Andrew: This is actually one of my cats and probably doing a better job than I can do.
Jerry: I I think. I was about to say that
Andrew: Look, hey, results, I’m results oriented. The show got done. Speaking of, where’s Betty? Stop hopping up on my desk. We’re not in video yet. But soon, we might be.
Jerry: getting close.
Andrew: random cats wandering through the shot.
Jerry: Yeah, it’ll be deep fake video.
We’ll be like we’ll pick different celebrities to portray us, but it’ll be okay.
Andrew: Ugh. What is happening? have no idea.
Jerry: Anyway I think this is one area to watch. I, I. I certainly think this particular area, like you said, there are some definite ways that we can avoid losses, but I am also concerned about ways that we maybe haven’t even thought of or seen exploited yet, for more broad consumption in, in, in other types of roles, for example, a lot of Organizations, even the ones, by the way, that work in person meet virtually.
And how long will it be before we start reading about you people sliding in adversary, sliding in and portraying someone and, stealing intellectual property or,
Andrew: And
Before the Zooms, the Google Meets, and the WebExes of the world offer an enhanced package with anti deepfake for a small, multi thousand dollar per month fee?
Jerry: Hey, there you go. We should patent that.
Andrew: We should.
Jerry: Brilliant.
Andrew: You know it’s coming. You know it is. It’s gotta be. It’s inevitable.
Jerry: Yeah. And it’ll be it’ll be LLM, generative AI based. Yeah. Two. So
Probably with some blockchain and cloud thrown in, I’m guessing.
Andrew: How could it not be?
Jerry: I don’t know.
Andrew: It’s a table stakes.
Jerry: We’ve I think we’ve hit terminal altitude and now we’re headed back down. So I I think that’s it for today. I certainly appreciate everybody’s time and attention.
Hopefully you found this interesting. If you like the show, give us some love on your favorite podcast app. We definitely like that. It helps other people find the show. If you. didn’t like it, you can also give us a positive rating because that still works. Like you, you don’t have to give us a bad rating.
You could give us a good rating and then just not listen again. That works too.
Andrew: It’ll encourage us to get even better.
Jerry: That’s right. Absolutely.
Andrew: We’re
Jerry: So you,
Andrew: positive reinforcement here.
Jerry: Not negative reinforcement, positive. All right. You can follow the show on our website at www. defensivesecurity. org. You can follow us on, you can download the podcast on just about every podcast platform there is out there now. I don’t know that we’ve missed any, although if we had, love to hear about it.
You can follow Mr. Callot on the social media at where
Andrew: I’m both on X, formerly known as Twitter, and InfoSec. Exchange, Jerry’s fine Mastodon service at LERG, L E R G, which someday I will explain, but not today.
Jerry: which is by the way, the best the very best in social media. So you can find, follow me on infosecular. exchange at. At Jerry at InfoSec that exchange. And with that, we bid you adieu. Have a great week, everybody.
Andrew: See you later. Bye bye.