In this episode...

• John discusses some of the foundational principles of Threat Modeling
• We talk about why threat modeling is like your time in high school
• We discuss why threat modeling is such an incredibly important tool to the enterprise
• John gives us some nuggets of his experience with threat modeling enterprise applications

Guest

• John Steven ( @m1splacedsoul ) - John Steven is the Internal CTO at Cigital with over a decade of hands-on experience in software security. John’s expertise runs the gamut of software security from threat modeling and architectural risk analysis, through static analysis (with an emphasis on automation), to security testing. As a consultant, John has provided strategic direction as a trusted advisor to many multi-national corporations. John’s keen interest in automation keeps Cigital technology at the cutting edge. He has served as co-editor of the Building Security In department of IEEE Security & Privacy magazine, speaks with regularity at conferences and trade shows, and is the leader of the Northern Virginia OWASP chapter. John holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science both from Case Western Reserve University.
  
  John is known for his in-depth work in software security, his expertise in the field of threat modeling, and his snarkcasm. If you don't follow John on Twitter or haven't attended one of the talks he's been known to give occasionally - I recommend you do so. 

Welcome to Monday, May 20th 2013 as James and I discuss the last 2 weeks' worth of Information Security news and relate it (attemptively) to your enterprise day-job. This week was a bit on the lighter side, with the quote of the year (as far as I'm concerned) winner going to the Washington State Administrative Office of the Court for ...well, you'll just have to read the rest of the show notes and listen to the podcast.

Also ... we are now on the Zune store. So ...to the 2 new Zune listeners - HELLO!

Topics Covered

• Researches at Trend Micro uncover new cyberespionage campaign call it SafeNet (in unrelated news SafeNet the security company had nothing to do with this...). Yet another cyberespionage campaign targeting users with revolutionary new technique called "phishing", and using a vulnerability in Microsoft software patched in April 2012, originating from ... <wait for it> China! -  http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239342/Researchers_uncover_SafeNet_a_new_global_cyberespionage_operation
• Domain registrar, Name.com hacked, customer information including potentially usernames, email addresses, encrypted passwords (just how encrypted are we talking here? ROT13? double-XOR?), and encrypted (same question as before) credit card information potentially stolen. Again, the vector of choice is this revolutionary new tequnique called ... <wait for it> phishing - http://www.pcworld.com/article/2038263/namecom-forces-customers-to-reset-passwords-following-security-breach.html
• Godzilla hacked EC-Council (this needs no explanation) - http://www.esecurityplanet.com/hackers/ec-council-hacked.html
• Four former LulzSec members (former?) sentenced for their roles in the 2011 attacks on companies such as Sony, Nintendo, News Corp, the CIA and many others. Sentences range from a 30-month prison term for "Kayla" to 200 hours of community services for T-Flow. Justice? Interested to hear what you think - http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9239302/Four_former_LulzSec_members_sentenced_to_prison_in_the_UK
• Washington State's court system has been compromised, exposing 160,000 social security numbers and a million drivers' license numbers - basically everything you'd ever need to steal someone's identity. Luckily officials have determined that only 94 of those were definitely obtained by the attacker (what?!). Also, ridiculous quote of the year honors go to the "officials" for this: ".. officials at first believed no confidential information was leaked even though a large amount of data was downloaded from the website, the Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts said." - http://tech2.in.com/news/general/up-to-160000-social-security-numbers-exposed-in-washington-state-court-hack/872700

In this episode...

• Kevin, James and I discuss why penetration testing reports are often so worthless
• Kevin and I disagree. Then we agree, sort of.
• We discuss the major differences between the 'builder' and 'breaker' mindset, and whether they're actually different people
• Kevin gives some fantastic examples of how context and experience is critical in penetration testing
• We provide guidance no how someone can 'break into' (no pun intended) penetration testing and be effective
• Kevin gives an example of how someone can be a great penetration tester, but be of little value beyond that
• We wrap by disussing how enterprises can gain value from penetration testing- and Kevin provides an interesting strategy

Guest

• Kevin Johnson ( @SecureIdeas ) - Kevin Johnson is the Chief Executive Officer of Secure Ideas. Kevin has a long history in the IT field including system administration, network architecture and application development. He has been involved in building incident response and forensic teams, architecting security solutions for large enterprises and penetration testing everything from government agencies to Fortune 100 companies. In addition, Kevin is an instructor and author for the SANS Institute and a faculty member at IANS. He is also a contributing blogger at TheMobilityHub.  Kevin is also very involved in the open source community. He runs a number of open source projects. These include SamuraiWTF; a web pen-testing environment, Laudanum; a collection of injectable web payloads, Yokoso; an infrastructure fingerprinting project and a number of others. Kevin is also involved in MobiSec and SH5ARK. Kevin was the founder and lead of the BASE project for Snort before transitioning that to another developer.

It's another beautiful Monday (somewhere) and we've got the news of the last 2 weeks covered, and we're breaking it down for you. The news this week is, well, quite frankly kind of dark. Everything tells us we're in for a rough ride for the rest of the year, and it's only getting worse.

If I sound a little funny, it's because I'm talking through a massive sinus infection and it's making me talk funny and stuffy.  Also the recording you hear is take 2 ... I had a major technology fail so we had to re-record, with less sadness.

Topics Covered

• We are happy to report that Justin Beiber is in fact, not coming out of the closet and E! Online was only hacked by those wacky military hackers from the Syrian Electronic Army. Apparently they've been on quite the hacking spree of media outlets and even put a major - albeit brief - dent in the stock market! - http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/e-online-twitter-account-hacked-article-1.1335214
• The US Department of Labor was hacked, in what appears to be a very targeted 'watering hole' attack aimed at Nuclear employees. The attackers, if the stories are true, burned an IE8 0-day on this one, and of course they are Chinese - http://www.eweek.com/security/zero-day-exploit-enabled-cyber-attack-on-us-labor-department/
• Anonymous is threatening a massive attack against the White House (the political entity not the ...nevermind), Bank of America, Citibank and other targets on May 7th. Are these folks just becoming part of the 'background noise' of the Internet? Are security professionals just starting to become numb to the DDoS attacks? - http://pastebin.com/TyvAK20F
• Chinese hackers have apparently ransacked QinetiQ, a defense contractor with ties to global cyber intelligence operations, spooks,and other interesting things. Bloomberg's write-up was not kind to these guys - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-01/china-cyberspies-outwit-u-s-stealing-military-secrets.html
• In the perfect illustration of the fact that insider threats are real a systems manager returned to the company he was no longer employed at and wreaked havok. Folks, there is no magic 1U box that will stop this sort of attack, be vigiland and have good auditing and processes! - http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238874/Systems_manager_arrested_for_hacking_former_employer_39_s_network