Talos Takes

It’s National Cyber Security Awareness Month! And you know what that means? It’s time to make everyone more aware! Since we all have that special someone in our lives who could use a refresher on internet hygenie, we figured it was time to talk about bringing up the topic of security to your friends and family who may not be as computer literate as you are. Jon Munshaw and Nick Biasini talk about basic tips to give even your oldest family members and user-friendly programs and services that can improve everyone’s security.

Jon doesn’t have any children. So he found someone who does — Beers with Talos’ own Craig Williams — to talk about remote learning. Children are back to school, and many of them are doing so online. Craig and Jon talk about DNS filters, parental controls, meeting passwords and more that are sure to help parents and teachers adjust to this new normal.

Talos intakes a ridiculous amount of information every day. So how do we parse what is and isn’t important enough to share? In this episode of Talos Takes, Amy Henderson from our Threat Intelligence and Interdiction team talks about our information-sharing partnerships with both private and public entities. How do we disseminate important information to our friends in the field? And why are security organizations like the Cyber Threat Alliance so important?

On this episode of Talos Takes, we talk all about attribution. Our guest, Martin Lee, recently co-authored a post on the hurdles government agencies and private researchers alike face when trying to place blame for a cyber attack. Martin talks about why we’re so obsessed with placing the blame, what false flags are and what helpful things can actually come from attributing a threat.

There are so many options now for basic web browsing. There are ad-blocking plugins, privacy browsers, incognito mode, password managers — but for the average user, this can be a lot to keep up with. In this episode of Talos Takes, we dissect all these options and talk about what your best options are to keep your information safe while doing some everyday web browsing.

This week’s Talos Takes episode is another malware deep dive. Edmund Brumaghin joins the show to talk about WastedLocker, a recent ransomware family he and some other Talos researchers reverse-engineered. Here’s everything you need to know about what makes this threat unique and how it uses LoLBins to survive.

Honeypots are an important part of threat research and detection. In this episode of Talos Takes, we talk to Christopher Evans, who is our resident honeypot expert at Talos. Chris talks about how he uses them every day, why they’re important to Talos’ overall mission and balancing the use of them with the potential for making attackers smarter.

LoLBins sound like they’d be funny, but they’re anything but. These “living-off-the-land binaries” make it so that attackers can more easily hide on your system as they disguise themselves as legitimate processes. On this episode of Talos Takes, Nick Biasini talks about what LoLBins are, exactly, how adversaries use them and how you can spot them on your environment.

This week’s episode is actually an excerpt from our recently released roundtable on disinformation and American election security. This is a small part of our larger discussion on fake news, state-sponsored actors using fake social media accounts, and what can be done to combat the spread of disinformation. To see the whole thing, click here.

The quick and dirty beginner’s guide to what Snort is and how to use. This the podcast accompaniment to the rest of our Snort 101 materials, which can be found on Snort.org/Resources.