GRC | Security Now! Episode Archive


Our weekly audio security column & podcast by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

TechTV's Leo Laporte and I spend somewhat shy of two hours each week to discuss important issues of personal computer security. Sometimes we'll discuss something that just happened. Sometimes we'll talk about long-standing problems, concerns, or solutions. Either way, every week we endeavor to produce something interesting and important for every personal computer user.

SteveAndLeoAsPicardAndRiker

(This was not our idea. It was created by a fan of the podcast using GIMP (similar to
Photoshop). But as a work of extreme image manipulation, it came out surprisingly well.)

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Episode Archive

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	A PDF file containing Steve's show notes
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Episode #914 | 14 Mar 2023 | 106 min.

Sony Sues Quad9 This week fewer questions required longer answers. What, if anything, can be done about the constant appearance of malicious Chrome extensions? What's the latest country to decide to pull Chinese telecommunications equipment from their country? What's the #1 way that bad guys penetrate networks, and how has that changed in the past year? What delicate and brittle crypto requirement is responsible for protecting nearly $1 trillion dollars in cryptocurrency and TLS connections, and how can we trust it? What's now known about the Plex Media Server defect that indirectly triggered the exodus from LastPass? And why in the world would Sony Entertainment Germany bring a lawsuit against the innocent non-profit do-gooder Quad9 DNS provider? Stay tuned! The answers to questions you didn't even know you had will be provided during this March 14th “PI day” 914th episode, of Security Now!
51 MB	13 MB	372 KB <-- Show Notes	142 KB	84 KB	350 KB

Episode #913 | 07 Mar 2023 | 87 min.

A Fowl Incident This week's answers are many: How has Fosstodon survived a sustained DDoS attack? Or has it? What luck have Europol and the FBI had with taking down DDoS-for-hire services and have they returned? What's the point of blocking TikTok, and is it even possible? What happens when government-backed surveillance goes rogue? What exactly is “Strategic Objective 3.3” and what, if anything, does it portend for future software? Should you enable GitHub's new secret scanning service and get scanned? What exactly did CISA's secretive red-team accomplish; and against whom? Which messenger apps have been banned by Russia, who's missing from that list, and why? What exactly is old, that's new again, what happens when everyone uses the same cryptographic library for their TPM code, what's the latest WordPress plug-in to threaten more than one million sites and why has Russia fined Wikipedia? And once we've put that collection of need-to-know questions to rest we're going to examine the surprising revelations that surface as we unearth the Fowlest of recent security incidents.
42 MB	10 MB	337 KB <-- Show Notes	112 KB	72 KB	305 KB

Episode #912 | 28 Feb 2023 | 86 min.

The NSA @ Home What mistake did Windows Update make last week? What if you don't want to paste with formatting? What browser is building-in a limited bandwidth VPN? What more did we just learn about LastPass' second breach? What did Signal say to the UK about scanning its user's messages? What was just discovered hiding inside the Python package Index repository? What proactive move has QNAP finally taken? What disastrous bug did SpinRite's testers uncover last weekend in motherboard BIOSes? And what amazingly useful “Best Practices” advice has the NSA just published for home users? Answers to all those questions and some additional thoughts will be yours – before you know it – on this week's 912th episode of Security Now!, titled: “The NSA @ Home”.
41 MB	10 MB	357 KB <-- Show Notes	96 KB	69 KB	272 KB

Episode #911 | 21 Feb 2023 | 87 min.

A Clever Regurgitator For how long were bad guys inside GoDaddy's networks? What important oral arguments is the US Supreme Court hearing today and tomorrow? What's Elon done now? What's Bitwarden's welcome news? What's Meta going to begin charging for? Should we abandon all hope for unattended IoT devices? Are all of our repositories infested with malware? How'd last Tuesday's monthly patchfest turn out? Why would anyone sandbox an image? What can you learn from TikTok that upsets Hyundai and KIA? And are there any limits to what ChatGPT can do, if any? We're going to find out by the end of today's 911 emergency podcast.
42 MB	10 MB	1157 KB <-- Show Notes	101 KB	70 KB	277 KB

Episode #910 | 14 Feb 2023 | 99 min.

Ascon What more has happened with the ESXi ransomware story? Is malicious use of ChatGPT going to continue to be a problem? What exactly is Google giving away? Why is the Brave browser changing the way it handles URLs? What bad idea has Russia just had about their own hackers? Why would Amazon change its S3 bucket defaults? Now who's worried about Chinese security camera spying? And who has just breathed new life into Adobe's PDF viewer? What's on our listeners' minds, and what the heck is Ascon, and why should you care? Those questions and more will be answered on today's 910th episode of Security Now!.
47 MB	12 MB	416 KB <-- Show Notes	97 KB	76 KB	279 KB

Episode #909 | 07 Feb 2023 | 112 min.

How ESXi Fell Leo used to say at the top of our Q&A episodes: “You have questions, we have answers.” Now we tease most of the questions and provide their answers. This week we wonder: What is about to happen with the EU's legislation to monitor its citizen's communications? Why would a French psychotherapy clinic be keeping 30,000 old patient records online, and who stole them? What top level domains insist upon, and enforce, HTTPS? How is Chrome's release pace about to change? When you say that Russia shoots the messenger is that only an expression? Were a fool and his crypto soon parted... or should that be “was”? Exactly why is QNAP back in the news, and what do I really think about Synology? Would companies actually claim unreasonably low CVSS scores for their own vulnerabilities? Nooooo! What questions have our listeners been asking after all this recent talk about passwords? What's the whole unvarnished story behind this weekend's massive global attack on VMware's ESXi servers, and who's really at fault? These questions and more will probably be answered before you fall asleep... but no guarantees.
54 MB	13 MB	519 KB <-- Show Notes	120 KB	88 KB	329 KB

Episode #908 | 31 Jan 2023 | 88 min.

Data Operand Independent Timing This week we embark upon another two hour tour to answer some pressing questions: What happens if the vendor of the largest mobile platform begins blocking old and unsafe APIs, and can anything be done to prevent that? What new add-on is now being blocked by the dreaded Mark of the Web? Would you have the courage to say no after your gaming source code was stolen? Is any crypto asset safe, and what trap did our friend Kevin Rose fall victim to last week? How can Meta incrementally move to end-to-end encryption? Isn't it all or nothing? What other new feature did iOS 16.3 bring to the world, what's the latest government to begin scanning its own citizenry, and why aren't they all? Or are they? What spectacular success gives the FBI bragging rights, and why is Russia less than thrilled? What questions have our listeners posed? What's the possible value of making up your own words? How's SpinRite coming? What, is your favorite color? What have Intel and AMD just done to break the world's crypto? And what exactly did ChatGPT reply when it was asked by one of our listeners to explain an SSL certificate chain in the voice of a stoned surfer bro? Leo will present the answer to that in his dramatic reading once the answers to all of the preceding questions have been revealed during this week's gripping episode of Security Now!.
42 MB	11 MB	530 KB <-- Show Notes	116 KB	72 KB	312 KB

Episode #907 | 24 Jan 2023 | 85 min.

Credential Reuse This week we again address a host of pressing questions. What other major player fell victim to a credential reuse attack? What does Apple's update to iOS 16.3 mean for the world? And why may it not actually mean what they say? It was bound to happen. To what evil purpose has ChatGPT recently been employed? And are any of our jobs safe? Why was Meta fined by the EU for the third time this year? And which European company did Bitwarden just acquire, and why? PBKDF iteration counts are on the rise and are changing daily. What the latest news there? What other burning questions have our listeners posed this past week? What has Gibson been doing and where the hell is SpinRite? And what does the terrain for credential reuse look like, what can be done to thwart these attacks, and what two simple measures look to have the greatest traction with the least user annoyance? All those questions and more will be answered, hopefully before your podcast player's battery runs dry.
41 MB	10 MB	477 KB <-- Show Notes	97 KB	68 KB	273 KB

Episode #906 | 17 Jan 2023 | 95 min.

The Rule of Two This week we're back to answering some questions that you didn't even know were burning. First, is the LastPass iteration count problem much less severe than we thought because they are doing additional PBKDF2 rounds at their end? What sort of breach has Norton LifeLock protected its user's from? And have they really? What did Chrome just do which followed Microsoft and Firefox? And is the Chromium beginning to Rust? Will Microsoft ever actually protect us from exploitation by old known vulnerable kernel drivers? What does it mean that real words almost never appear in random character strings? And what is Google's “Rule of Two” and why does our entire future depend upon it? The answers to those questions and more will be revealed during this next gripping episode of Security Now!
45 MB	11 MB	335 KB <-- Show Notes	106 KB	73 KB	277 KB

Episode #905 | 10 Jan 2023 | 94 min.

1 This week, in a necessary follow-up to last week's “Leaving LastPass” episode, we'll share the news of the creation of a terrific PowerShell script, complete with a friendly user interface, which quickly de-obfuscates any LastPass user's XML format vault data. What it reveals is what we expected, but seeing is believing. Then we're going to examine the conclusions drawn and consequences of the massive amount of avid (and in some cases rabid) listener feedback received since last week, and some of the truly startling things that listeners of this podcast discovered when they went looking.
45 MB	11 MB	335 KB <-- Show Notes	145 KB	78 KB	347 KB

Episode #904 | 03 Jan 2023 | 103 min.

Leaving LastPass This week, since a single topic dominated the security industry and by far the majority of my Twitter feed and DMs, after a brief update on my SpinRite progress we're going to spend the entire podcast looking at a single topic: LastPass.
50 MB	12 MB	263 KB <-- Show Notes	156 KB	88 KB	360 KB

Past Years Archives

• Current Podcast Page
• Security Now 2022
• Security Now 2021
• Security Now 2020
• Security Now 2019
• Security Now 2018
• Security Now 2017
• Security Now 2016
• Security Now 2015
• Security Now 2014
• Security Now 2013
• Security Now 2012
• Security Now 2011
• Security Now 2010
• Security Now 2009
• Security Now 2008
• Security Now 2007
• Security Now 2006
• Security Now 2005

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