
Twitter shares explicit photos without users’ permission, one US company can look forward to a $1.4 billion payout seven years after an infamous cyberattack, and how might hackers target Eurovision?
All this and much much more is discussed in the latest edition of the “Smashing Security” podcast by cybersecurity veterans Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault, joined this week by cybersecurity reporter John Leyden.
Plus don’t miss our featured interview with Outpost24’s John Stock.
Warning: This podcast may contain nuts, adult themes, and rude language.
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This transcript was generated automatically, probably contains mistakes, and has not been manually verified.
You know, if there were photographs of me in my dressing gown with my smoking pipe and my slippers in my boudoir, not so risqué.
My name's Graham Cluley.
So unfortunately, in March I was made redundant from that job. So I've now embarked on the wild world of freelancing tech journalism.
You were with, was it CRN, I seem to remember?
I was with The Register for 17 years, so I had a lot of experience there.
It's their support that help us give you this show for free. Now coming up in today's show, Graham, what do you got?
Plus, we have a featured interview with John Stock from Outpost24, explaining that while you might not be able to get your attack risk down to zero, you can reduce it dramatically by taking the correct steps.
All this and much more coming up on this episode of Smashing Security.
I think they used to be called the WWF.
Anyway, I'm talking about the one which involves Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Hulk Hogan.
If you are into WWE and the world of entertainment wrestling, you would probably know of a chap called Vince McMahon. Have you heard of Vince McMahon?
He would be there in the ring in his suit. Sometimes there'd be a punch-up, he'd be in the middle of it.
He's probably in his 70s by now, but he was very much the big man of wrestling. He was running the show. He was the CEO.
If you were interested in the backstage goings-on at WWE, you may also be interested in a new book that's coming out all about Vince McMahon called Ringmaster.
So if you wanted to watch TV and that happened to be on, that's what you watched. And you know, even as a kid, you knew it was kind of fake.
The thing about WWE wrestlers, as we've ascertained, they don't wear very many clothes.
They're presumably comfortable being photographed in the ring wearing their skimpy spandex outfits. I wouldn't be. I wouldn't want that.
I wouldn't want people to photograph me in skimpy spandex stuff. Well, you know, I'm not giving my permission. Let me put that out there right now.
If anyone gets hold of photographs like that, I don't want to see pictures of you like that, Carole, or John.
So he puts his arms up, and it makes him look like a whole sun.
Anyway, back to authoress Abraham Josephine Reisman, who's written this book, right? As we're talking about not wearing very many clothes.
Now, as she told friend of the show, Chris Stoker-Walker, who appeared on the show a while back, he's been writing for BuzzFeed, she told him how she'd recently had a private photo shoot.
She said, "I did a boudoir shoot a few weeks ago." And I had some nice photographs of myself taken. One of them was risqué.
I was thinking, you know, if it was photographs of me in my dressing gown with my smoking pipe and my slippers, in my boudoir. Not so risqué.
Now, do you know what a Twitter Circle is? I didn't know what this was.
A Twitter Circle, this is a new feature which launched August last year, which promised users the flexibility to choose who can see and engage with your content on a tweet-by-tweet basis.
The thing is, with Twitter, you've always been able to have a completely private account. Right? Apart from the people outside Twitter could view it.
But you could have a locked-down account where you had to ask permission to follow somebody. And clearly, Twitter wasn't as keen on that.
So what they did was they introduced this Twitter Circle concept where you could have a regular account, but you could have a sort of almost subset of the account, which you just share with a select group of friends, and only they can see it, and only they can reply to it.
And, you know, the conversation remains intimate.
And they share pictures and messages with a small collection of friends rather than the entire universe, rather than posting it up on a public website. They use an app like that.
So it's fair enough.
And Twitter said, you can choose who's in your Twitter Circle. Only the individuals you've added can reply and interact with your tweets you share inside the Circle.
They didn't want outsiders chiming in or dogpiling on them or being unpleasant or picking on them or bullying them or anything like that.
So there is, for instance, an LGBTQ+ community on Twitter called Belong2 for young people across Ireland.
And they were using this just to talk amongst themselves, which, you know, is fine and dandy. And why should you not do that?
I'm finding you don't get much engagement on Twitter anymore unless you've got the blue tick. Those are the people who seem to be being promoted on Twitter at the moment.
But when Reisman woke up the following morning, she found people who she didn't follow back, let alone were inside her Twitter circle, had liked this, as she put it, little bit spicy photograph.
But she says, "The general public do not need to see me in my birthday suit," is what she's saying. But people did. And she has not been the only one.
Since last month, in the last few weeks, multiple Twitter users who've been using Twitter Circles have said that their private posts, their posts which they thought they were sharing just with a select group of trusted people, were in fact showing up in the feeds of complete strangers.
You know, they think they're doing all this safely, but they're not.
If you complain to Twitter, what do you think the response is likely to be?
So yeah, you would expect them to be silent, and they were silent for a long time when people were contacting them.
But they've just announced and acknowledged that a security incident did occur. They've emailed affected users.
But in the meantime, any journalists who've been contacting the press team or have asked more questions about this security breach, which caused these private messages to appear for anybody, have got the automatic response, which has been in place for months now at Twitter's press office.
Which is Twitter's press office, if you email them, they reply back with an emoji. And they send you a poop emoji is their response.
And there's no detail as to what caused the problem, why it took Twitter close to a month to acknowledge the problem existed, let alone fix it.
It's just radio silence on that as well. So not really very impressive.
And then these people replied and chaos ensued. So there was something in the algorithm that was promoting it to people.
And the whole thing seems reminiscent of when Facebook had a feature where you could restrict your communication to just friends and whatever.
And that's a barrier Facebook keep changing and wanting to push down all the time without really getting people's informed consent over it.
So the bigger lesson seems to be if you post stuff on social media, you can expect it to leak, frankly.
It was NotPetya, which is a strain of file-encrypting ransomware which affected Windows machines across the world. Many, many enterprises were affected by this.
But because it targeted anybody who had any business in Ukraine, lots of international companies as well as the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian businesses were affected.
One of the worst affected was Merck, which is a pharmaceuticals company. Huge one. Massive. Another was advertising company WPP.
And another big victim of this was, not to be confused with Merck, but Maersk Line, which is shipping.
So that's just three, but lots of other things were affected, including consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser, not sure if I've pronounced that correctly, and DHL logistics and parceling firm.
PR questions from journalists not being answered and having to resort to emojis instead, all kinds of things.
This wasn't really ransomware, it was designed to destroy systems, to encrypt things and just render them useless.
So all these companies were left without any information on how to do their work.
Nobody could talk to each other while the people involved on the sysadmin side were frantically trying to contain the outbreak and to restore systems.
If it happened now, I think people would be in a slightly better position, but this was something that was an almost unprecedented attack in its scale and its speed.
So that's why so many companies were caught on the hop. There were DHL parcels that couldn't send out. Maersk Line didn't know what was happening.
In the case of Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, it was left with systems that were completely unoperational. So that's the background to the story. What's the news, you ask?
Well, the news is—
And they said to them, well, we've suffered this damage, which we can document for you.
It affected 40,000 of our computers, shut down our production facilities, left us without any apps. It was terrible. We would like to be compensated, please.
And the insurers said, you know, this NotPetya thing. It's an act of war, a military action.
And if you read the small print of your insurance policy, it will say, "We don't cover wars."
And even though you've been giving us millions to pay for insurance, we're not going to give you a handout. It sounds pretty much par for the course for insurance companies to me.
So this, unsurprisingly, was placed in the hands of the lawyers. It went to court. And it wound its way very slowly through court.
In January 2022, a court in New Jersey awarded the pharma giant $1.4 billion. After deciding that the insurance companies had to pay up. So that's a lot of money.
So that more or less sets a precedent.
I think I heard it said that for it to be an act of war, there had to be some physical element to it, some sort of physical, violent, kinetic activity, which may well have saved the bacon of Maersk in this case for saying, well, it wasn't an act of war then.
But it does sound like that maybe we're not really considering the potential for a cyberattack to be an act of war.
So insurance companies got on the bandwagon about 5 years ago thinking, I'm sure this and other tiny little clauses would get them out of having to do any mega payouts.
I'm sure people are freaking right now in the insurance company because of this precedent being changed. I mean, the risk has changed.
What the appeal bench said, and this is the key point of it, is that the NotPetya attack is not sufficiently linked to a military action or objective, as it was a non-military cyberattack against an accountancy software provider.
And those in insurance have already seen this coming.
Last year, Lloyd's of London said insurance policies will exclude nation-state cyberattacks that happen during wars, declared or not, beginning in April.
So rather than relying on a general— Hang on. Yeah. Hang on.
Well, there are wars happening all the time.
Or are they just saying, if there's a war going on, no coverage for anybody.
Okay, okay, you're going to know more about this international contest than you ever thought possible by the end of my story. Are you guys fans of the show?
So listeners that don't know Eurovision, it really is. There's people that hate it and there's people that love it. I'm in the love camp.
And you'd get some cleaning lady on the other end. You know, it was always just a shambles. Katie Boyle. It still is.
What I used to do is, you know, have the show on and then not really be watching the acts, but be on social media laughing at people's observations about the acts.
Whereas I used to enjoy it when they had to sing in their own language, and then I would put the subtitles on for the translation.
And the lyrics on some of the songs were hilarious.
And I've made them fairly easy so you could try and make it, okay? So what decade did Eurovision first air? See, not what year, what decade.
And the contest was one of the earliest attempts to broadcast a live televised event to a large international market.
The song was called Stefania. It was a mashup of traditional Ukrainian folk music with a modern rap and hip-hop twist.
Okay, now for obvious reasons, Eurovision will not be held in the Ukraine, the actual, you know, the winners of last year, because, you know, there's fucking war going on.
So the show airing this weekend will be coming to you live from Liverpool, thanks to the BBC. It's the first Eurovision Song Contest to be held in how many years?
Now this brings me on to today's topic, because how does one keep Eurovision safe from cyber BS? Because there's a lot of moving parts here, right?
There's international cooperations without Russia, who was banned for its warmongering. Plus you have, you know, real-time digital voting.
You've got the whole physical security angle. You've got digital communication links across the entire planet. You know, near-live votes. I could say live, but I'd say near-live.
It's pretty amazing. And it's not always been smooth sailing.
Right, because last year, you might remember there were shenanigans where voting irregularities were identified in 6 countries taking part of Eurovision 2022.
This is according to the European Broadcasting Union. The EBU say that irregular voting patterns were spotted, and I think they mean voting manipulation.
Because that would, that would be irregular.
They didn't go into it and they didn't name any countries, but 6 countries subsequently lost their voting rights, which were Azerbaijan, Georgia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, and San Marino.
And earlier this year, as people were gearing up for the show in Liverpool, you know, booking up nearby hotel rooms for the sold-out show.
Here's another factoid, or another quiz question. How fast did the show, the Eurovision show 2023, sell out? A couple of hours.
Okay, this is according to the BBC.
The way it worked, the phishing scams used WhatsApp probably due to its end-to-end encryption capabilities. And the story goes like this.
So guy books a hotel for the event, then he gets contacted on WhatsApp by someone claiming to be the receptionist asking initially if he needed parking, and then claims that there was an issue with his payment.
And the guy said, "Oh, I thought this must be okay," he told BBC News.
"I got a text message from my bank and I then had a phone call from them saying that someone was trying to scam me out of money." So he thought it was all okay and it was the phone call, it's the bank stopped it happening.
So you've got these kind of things, you've got people who are attending, you have to watch out for phishing scams, but are there bigger concerns?
And seems there is, 'cause it was brought up in the House of Commons only last week. The golden-locked Conservative MP for Lichfield, Michael Fabricant. Oh, for God's sake.
Asked the Commons.
And he cites this correctly: Italian police thwarted hacker attacks by pro-Russian groups during the semi-final and final of Eurovision Song Contest in Turin 2022.
During voting and the performances, the police cybersecurity department blocked several cyberattacks on network infrastructure by the Killnet hacker group and its affiliate Legion, the police said.
And you remember, last year saw Ukraine win the contest, and early on they were pegged to do well. And there have been more digital disruptions with political overtones.
There was one in 2019 in Israel when the national broadcast online stream was replaced with footage of explosions I remember that. Right, so brings us to last week. Fabrikant, right?
I shouldn't call him that. What should I call him?
And he's not alone in being concerned because soon after, experts from the National Cybersecurity Center were called in after the government and Eurovision organizers raised concerns that the competition could be a digital front for the Ukraine war.
Daily Mail reported that this year's contest held in Liverpool will have reinforced cybersecurity defenses by NCSC. This is the National Cybersecurity Center.
And a source told the Times, while it's possible to be confident that concertgoers will be safe, the cyber side is far more unpredictable.
So yeah, it's kind of a case of wait and see.
So the host nation— I don't even know why the UK is doing it this year because we've got this cost of living crisis going on.
Couldn't we have combined the Eurovision contest and the King's coronation? We could have made them the same event. I reckon we could have done it. That would have been easy.
They're close enough in time.
Anyway, back in the '80s, Ireland kept on winning the Eurovision Song Contest because everyone loves Ireland and, you know, they have a lovely brogue and the rest of it.
But Ireland couldn't afford to run the competition every year, so they deliberately chose a folk duo singing a rather sappy song.
They put it forward as their entry, thinking, we don't want to win this year because it'll cost us a fortune, we can't afford it.
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Could be a funny story, a book that they read, a TV show, a movie, a record, a podcast, a website, or an app, whatever they wish. It doesn't have to be security-related necessarily.
It better not be. Well, my Pick of the Week this week is not security-related. My Pick of the Week is a podcast.
It's actually a collection of podcasts because I support this particular chap on Patreon, which means I get to listen to all of his podcasts, including the episodes he doesn't release to the general public.
And I also get early listening to episodes months before they are released to the great unwashed. And the name of this chap is Toby Hadoke.
He's a stand-up comedian, he's an actor, he's a writer, and he's also a complete Doctor Who fanatic.
And he puts out several podcasts a week, all of which I listen to, which include episode commentaries, where people challenge him to find out something which they really liked about a particular episode.
So he watches it in real time and he knows an awful lot about every single actor in Doctor Who, including the third Cyberman on the left and other things that he may have done in the past.
And it's just wonderful, uplifting, positive stuff about Doctor Who.
And if, like me, you like him, then just for a few quid every month, you can support him as well and get the real hardcore stuff, the really geeky stuff, which he sometimes puts out as well.
Anyway, I love it. I love his dog Bernard as well. He also posts up a weekly photograph of his dog Bernard. And that is why it is my pick of the week.
John, what's your pick of the week?
Lots of builders, lots of disruption, lots of things going on. One of the things that really helped me navigate through this was a site called mybuilder.com.
So how that works is, it makes it easy to find local tradespeople. And what you do, it's free to use for homeowners, and you would post a job. You'd select the category of the job.
It could be anything from plumbing to kitchen fitting to a full renovation.
And then tradespeople in your area will respond to it, and you can check out their reviews, their profiles, see if you want them to come around and have a look at the job.
And once you meet, then you can agree a price.
You can get, you know, it's far easier to contact tradespeople this way, I found, than it would be just to rely on word of mouth or just to go through the Yellow Pages.
I found it a lot easier than Trusted Trader to work through, for example.
I mean, obviously this is only good for people in the UK, but I'm sure these kind of services exist in other countries.
And it's— I— yeah, this is really— I'm bookmarking this. So yeah, looks good.
Some jobs you get swamped with people looking to do them, others, you know, it's quite difficult to find people.
Yeah, it's not a complete panacea for home renovations, but it is really good.
And one of the biggest benefits I found was that you can write down and explain the work you want to do.
So when the builder comes, you can talk on that basis about the work you want to do, rather than having four or five ten or fifteen minute conversations with different people who may or not be interested.
Yeah, it saves a lot of time, much more efficient in that way.
So they have a sister site at homeadvisor.com if you're in America and homestars.com if you're in Canada. And here's my favorite in Germany, myhammer.de. Oh, well, that's wonderful.
And I was thinking, what do I choose? And I decided to choose the Oxfordshire Art Weeks as my pick of the week.
This is an open exhibition where artists from all over the county show their work from their studios or homes or wherever they do it.
And it started last weekend and it goes on for a month. And Oxford City, where I live, the exhibitions start this Saturday on May 20th, and yours truly is taking part once again.
It's my third year. Opening my studio and selling artworks and prints and all kinds of cool stuff.
And listeners, you can have a gawk at my new work because I spent the last month or so preparing and labeling and scanning and adjusting and getting them up on a website.
And it's been driving me insane, but I think I've managed to get most of it done for this episode.
So I cordially invite you to visit carole.wtf and see how I spend my time when I'm not podcasting. Sounds awesome. Yeah.
And if we were really lucky, by the time the show goes live, I am hoping that you will be able to vote on favorite artworks, which I would really love if you would do.
It's not that it goes anywhere, but it helps tell me which ones might be more popular than others, so I can just help me decide which ones are displayed for the exhibition.
So that's a little favor, but maybe you might enjoy it too. So there you go, Oxfordshire Art Weeks, my pick of the week.
And if you get a chance to come down and see our little corner of the UK, do it.
But if you can't make it, go to my website, so it's carole.wtf, C-A-R-O-L-E dot w-t-f, and go vote on some favorites.
You were at my house last year. I was indeed, and I look forward to checking out some of your art in the flesh as well, Carole, if I get the opportunity. Wow, sounds sincere. Okay.
Well, I try. Carole, you've been speaking to the folks at Outpost24 this week.
He is the Director of Product Management at Outpost24. Thank you so much for coming on Smashing Security. Thanks for having me.
You sound like you have a very busy and stressful job because, from what I understand, you're managing all the feature implementations, the timelines, the testing, and everything else for the suite of cybersecurity services that are offered by Outpost24?
This includes things like risk-based vulnerability scanning and application security testing and pen testing and red teaming and training, certification, managed service.
I mean, do you have time for family and hobbies?
The kids have a social life, I don't, so I'm busy taking them to football and cricket and everything, but no, I keep myself stress-free with Lego and photography.
And so there's a few very different things there, and none of them involve too much outside stuff.
But I'm quite lucky, I live in Devon, so I'm 20 minutes from the beach and have Dartmoor on my doorstep. So I get a lot of outside time and enjoy that.
I want to talk to you about being a director of product management.
So with that job, you must have some deep insight into what companies, in general, are good at securing and what things they tend to overlook.
And it's the common problem we see is they've got too much stuff. Everything is online and connected now.
So when they went back, if we say go back 3 or 4 years before we all started changing the way we work and they had a few offices and everybody was sat in an office, they knew where nearly everything was, was in a data center or it was in a cloud infrastructure.
And now their data centers are shutting down because less people are using them and things are moving into the cloud.
People aren't coming into the office, you know, they're in for 2 days a week rather than 5.
So they've got mothballed offices that are now shared offices because they need to get people in and they rent out space.
So suddenly they're looking at, you know, where we had— we knew where everything was.
We knew that it was in our data center or we had a specific cloud account or everyone was in an office.
Now, you know, someone like me works from home and the other laptops in my house, we don't know how good or bad they are.
So one of the challenges that they're coming across is their threats or the threats that are being presented to them have grown from just what's hitting their firewall coming at them from the internet to their organization to where their employees are actually sat doing their work.
And it just seems more and more customers that I'm talking to now are becoming really concerned about that.
You know, that I'm sat now at home with other infrastructure that is not within the organization's control, or I'm, you know, I'm traveling and sat in airport or sat in a coffee shop or something like that, and they suddenly realized that actually that problem already existed, but they're really concerned about it.
So that's one of the things that I'm hearing a lot about, is that they're seeing more threat coming at them from stuff they'd never considered.
Rather than, you know, they think of people attacking them over the internet on a global scale from, you know, big threat actors or national threat actors.
And actually, it's, you know, the bad things are happening from a piece of infrastructure that's not in their control that could have something bad.
My wife's company may not care about the malware that's installed on her laptop. They're not bothered by it.
And then that's trying to infect everything in my house, and my laptop sat there without antivirus that's out of date because I'm not connecting to the VPN I should be.
So yeah, they're just— the risks, they're seeing more risks opening up than they've thought that they had to struggle with.
So she was just, "Oh, I'll just bring over my USB and slap it in your machine." And I'm, "Whoa, no, no, no, no, no, no, no." You feel very— I don't know, I felt a bit awkward saying that, but there you go.
Yeah, those of us who've worked in security for years and then someone says, "Oh, can I just stick my USB in?" And you're, "No." They're, "What?" I'm, "No, you're not going anywhere near my laptop with your USB."
And now, well, you'd need something massive because your network is no longer those cables and wires and routers and switches in your building.
It's everything else outside and probably most of the internet as well, including parts you didn't really know existed are probably now part of your, you know, you've got stuff there because I know from speaking to our marketing department a lot, things thrown up and pulled down.
You know, there's advertising campaigns and all these things where you go to a third party and they'll spin something up and then that's now yours and it's got your name plastered all over it and you're responsible for it.
But guess who's the first person to know? It's that security person who's responsible for it. So those things are, you know, it's got your name, it's your problem.
And one of the— it's the whole thing of the asset management used to be the job of an asset manager, and then suddenly everyone's turned around and gone, you're a security person, you need to know where everything is because if it gets hacked, that's your problem.
You know, CISOs need to know where everything is and they can't just say, oh, it's all in our CMDB, it's all in our IPAM, because it's not.
Absolutely.
You know, if you just rely on a CMDB, maybe you're 60% or 70% of the way there. That's quite a good step forward.
You know where the laptops that you've bought should be, you know, where the devices you've bought should be.
But that doesn't take into account and, you know, developers, I love them to bits because we couldn't do any of the stuff we do without a good team of developers.
However, you know, there's instances where they throw things up in the cloud, they just need to test it, and then, oh, it works, and they're so happy it works, they walk away and forget about it.
Or, you know, we've had quite a few customers we've been talking to where that's happened way too many times because things have been thrown up and they've forgotten about it, or they've thrown it up and it hasn't worked, so they've left it there and worked on it, and then they're running vulnerable services.
Places because they've just thrown it up to solve a problem without thinking, how is that secure?
And as a product manager, that's the kind of thing that I'm all about solving problems. How can I solve this problem? Sometimes it's really easy. I just need to document it.
Other times it's like, yeah, let's just throw this up and test it. And you throw something up in the cloud.
Now, if you're good, you go to your cloud people and go, hey, I need to do some testing on this. And they're like, okay, we'll provide you an instance.
They provide it and you get it for a set amount of time and then they kill it down and you know it was secure while you were testing it.
But yeah, there's nothing stopping me going into my own cloud account, throwing something up and putting it in, having Outpost24 all over it and forgetting about it and paying the bill every month and it being associated with the organization, which I would point out I would never do because too many people get angry at me.
I'm not saying everybody likes it. You know, no one does it by choice. You do it because the auditors have said you've got to do it.
There's a regulation that says you've got to do it or you need to check that your security, your base level security is pretty good.
But no one does it because they think it's an exciting thing to do. And you find out what your vulnerabilities are and you get a CVSS score.
Now, CVSS scores are great, but they don't have any context really in them. You know, you get a score from 0 to 10, 0 go, ignore it. 10, it's really bad.
But that's not really looking at the risk. It's just looking at, you know, what's the potential threat of that vulnerability?
Doesn't matter if no one's ever going to build an exploit for it.
If it's potentially really bad, then it will still have a high score, even though it could be almost impossible to build an exploit for it.
And it's probably not worth everybody working at the weekend to try and patch it.
So the idea of VPT is it uses our threat intelligence technology that we have and actually looks at what are the real-world threats of this vulnerability.
So rather than just, yeah, there's the CVSS score 10, we must fix it. It's like, okay, let's look. Are there any threat actors actually talking about this vulnerability itself?
Is it used in any malware? Yeah. How much is it being discussed on social media? Those kinds of things.
Because, you know, you often find that just the social, the social side of things is quite a good indicator of whether something's going to be big or small.
If I've got a million vulnerabilities, and to be honest, the size of some organizations, that's not unheard of, you know, it's not a bad thing. You just can't fix everything.
But if they've got a million and they're like, oh, we don't know where to start, there's a couple of ways to start.
It's, okay, what's the stuff that's most likely to be exploited and maybe is exposed, right?
So internally, we all talk about the internal threat, and I know it's still high, but if you look externally, there's billions of people externally and maybe hundreds to thousands internally.
So, you know, obviously internet-facing stuff is the Wild West out there. So that's priority and stuff that, you know, likely has that exploit available.
That's the stuff you should prioritize. So it's where do you get the most bang for your buck in terms of remediation?
Where can you make the most difference without paying 6 months worth of overtime in a weekend? And that's all it is.
It's trying to bring the focus into your business risk rather than just saying, oh yes, this formula says that these are all really potentially high risk.
So, look, taking away from potential risk to actual risk.
You know, how do I do it? She goes, you bring it to your boss and you say you prioritize it and then just go and do it. And I thought, that's so genius.
So that's kind of what you guys are doing. You're kind of prioritizing it and giving the people that are responsible for security the chance to focus on the biggest fish.
And most organizations don't actually know what their risk appetite is because I always say, oh, you'd never catch me doing a bungee jump because my risk appetite is not that high.
It's way too dangerous. But actually many things I have done, like scuba diving and even driving every single day, are way more dangerous.
If you look at the deaths per million people, they are way more dangerous than a bungee jump. Driving to work is the most dangerous thing I can do.
Don't think, oh, I've got a million I've got to fix and I've got to do them all now. It's what can you fix and get the most value out of?
What's going to— what can you do to impact your business in terms of risk and reducing that risk as easy as possible? Brilliant.
So this will give you insights into things like domain and web applications exposed on the internet, staging applications in clear text form that may be putting you at risk, old and vulnerable components in use, leaked credentials, and you'll even get an attack surface risk rating and recommendations.
So you can sign up for your free attack surface assessment at smashingsecurity.com/outpost24.
And thank you so much, John Stock, Director of Product Management, for coming on the show and giving us a bit of your time.
John, I'm sure lots of listeners would like to follow you online, and maybe there are some folks who would like to hire your cybersecurity expertise if they need some content written.
What's the best way for folks to do that?
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You're too young, I think. She probably wasn't in the country when that was on. No. It's another ITV thing as well. It's probably on after the rest of it.
Hosts:
Graham Cluley:
Carole Theriault:
Guest:
John Leyden – @jleyden
Episode links:
- Introducing Twitter Circle, a new way to Tweet to a smaller crowd – Twitter.
- Twitter Circles Is Broken, Revealing Nudes Not Meant For The General Public – Buzzfeed News.
- Insurers can’t use ‘act of war’ excuse to avoid Merck’s $1.4B NotPetya payout – The Register.
- What is Hostile or Warlike?: An in-depth look at the Merck war exclusion decision and its shortfalls – Kennedys Law.
- Eurovision voting scandal: Six juries cheated and voted for each other – EuroVision World.
- Eurovision: MP seeks assurances contest voting will be protected from Russian threats – Sky News.
- Fears pro-Russian hackers could ruin Eurovision by disrupting broadcasts and silencing the song contest next week – Daily Mail.
- Cyber security experts hope to protect Eurovision voting from possible Russian threat – ITV News.
- The technology of the Eurovision Song Contest – Technology and Engineering.
- Cyber security experts hope to protect Eurovision voting from possible Russian threat – Eurovision News.
- Eurovision voting scandal: Six juries cheated and voted for each other – Eurovision News.
- Eurovision 2023: Tickets for Liverpool sell out after huge demand – BBC News.
- Eurovision 2023: Hotel phishing scam targets song contest fans – BBC News.
- “My Lovely Horse”, Father Ted’s Eurosong contest entry 1996 – YouTube.
- Doctor Who: Tony Hadoke’s Time Travels podcast.
- Toby Hadoke.
- MyBuilder.
- Carole Theriault art gallery – Carole Theriault’s art website.
- Carole Theriault and John Hawes exhibition – Oxfordshire Artweeks.
- Smashing Security merchandise (t-shirts, mugs, stickers and stuff)
Sponsored by:
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- Kolide – Kolide ensures that if your device isn’t secure it can’t access your cloud apps. It’s Zero Trust for Okta. Watch a demo today!
- Outpost24 – Understand your shadow IT risk with a free attack surface analysis.
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Thanks:
Theme tune: “Vinyl Memories” by Mikael Manvelyan.
Assorted sound effects: AudioBlocks.

