Error Code is a biweekly narrative podcast that provides you both context and conversation with some of the best minds working today toward code resilience and dependability.
The podcast Error Code is created by Robert Vamosi. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
Solar power systems are rapidly becoming essential elements of power grids throughout the world, especially in the US and EU. However, cybersecurity for these systems is often an afterthought, creating a growing risk to grid stability and availability. Daniel de Santos, Head of Research at Forescout, talks about his recent research into vulnerabilities associated with solar panel investors, how they might affect the power grid or the end-user, and what we can do about it.
Gone are the days when you could repair your own car. Even ICE cars have more electronics than ever before. Alexander Pick is an independent hardware hacker specializing in automotive systems. He says if you start off small, like looking at ECUs, there’s a lot of great research yet to be done by both hobbyists and professionals alike.
It’s becoming easier for criminals to use counterfeit or altered chips in common office products, such as printer toner cartridges, with the aim of espionage or simple financial gain. Tony Moor, Senior Director Of Silicon Lab Services For IOActive, explains how the hacking embedded silicon within common objects in our day to day lives is becoming more common, and what the consequences of this lack of security might mean.
Embedded devices need basic security measures like multi-factor authentication and unique credentials to reduce vulnerabilities and protect against cyber threats. Mauritz Botha, co-founder and CTO of XiO Inc., explains that cloud-based SCADA can update old systems and provide the visibility that’s currently missing.
As industrial enterprises lurch toward digital transformation and Industry 4.0, a new report looks at the security OT systems and finds it wanting. Grant Geyer, the Chief Strategy Officer for Claroty, talks about the findings from over one million devices in the field today, and what industries must do now to secure them.
I recently rode in a Waymo, Google’s self-driving taxi service, and it was fantastic. What if we took that vehicle off the safe roads of California and put it in a warzone like Ukraine? If it was captured, could the enemy get its data or its algorithms? Brent Hansen, Chief Growth Officer at Cigent, talks about the data risks associated with autonomous vehicles and remote servers, and how data security is essential in these in the field locations.
Imagine your best worst day during a cyber attack. Can you switch to manual systems in case of a failure? Has your team practiced for that? Dave Gunter, OT Cybersecurity Director at Armexa, discusses how a water and waste water utility in Kansas responded correctly to a cyberattack in 2024 by falling back to manual and issuing clear, and concise press releases to assure the public that their water was safe to drink.
This is the story of how the security of OT devices in the field can be modernized virtual isolation in the cloud, adding both authentication and encryption into the mix. Bill Moore, founder and CEO of Xona, explains how you can virtualize the OT network and interact with it, adding 2FA and encryption to legacy systems already in the field.
This is the story of the secret life of cellular chips and why we need to mitigate against the unintended access they provide. Deral Heiland, Principal Security Research for IoT at Rapid 7, describes a research project he presented at the IoT Village at DEF CON 32 where they compiled AT command manuals from various vendors, discovering unexpected functionalities, such as internal web services.
When we think of IoT, we first think of our smart light bulbs, our smart TVs, our smart baby monitors. However, we don't typically associate IoT with high-performance race cars, and yet they collect terabytes of data each race. Austin Allen, Director of Solutions Architecture at Airlock Digital, discusses the growing presence of smart devices and the responsibility of securing them—should it be the developers who write the code, or the individuals who implement it?
What would happen if your GPS signal were jammed? It would impact more than just navigation – you'd also lose access to financial data and power. Joe Marshall, Senior IoT Strategist and Threat Researcher at Cisco Talos, discusses an innovative solution to maintain the country's power grid operations in the event of GPS jamming, whether it's a precautionary measure or an act of war.
Cybercriminal tactics against ICS include direct threats against individuals for MFA credentials, sometimes escalating to physical violence if they won’t share. Jim Coyle, US Public Sector CTO for Lookout, warns about the increasing use of Android in critical Industrial Control Systems (ICS), such as HVAC systems, and how stealing MFA tokens from mobile devices could affect critical services like healthcare, finance, and water supply, depending on the goals of the attackers.
If smart buildings are vulnerable to hacking, what about smart offices? Even devices like printers and lighting systems could give an attacker a way in. John Terrill, CSO at Phosphorus, recalls a moment while working at a hedge fund when he found himself in a room filled with priceless art. He realized that the security cameras safeguarding these artworks were operating on outdated software, potentially containing known vulnerabilities.
If you are in IT, you are probably not thinking about the risks associated with the Otis Elevator or the Coke machine. Maybe you should. Chester Wisnieski, the director and global field CTO at Sophos, points out that IoT devices, big and small, create an outsized threat to any organization. And that’s why IoT vendors need to secure these devices, even if they only “phone home” for more Coke. If they’re on your network, they need to be secured.
Political hacktivism once mainly focused on website defacement. Now it has shifted to targeting physical devices, affecting critical infrastructure such as water treatment plants. At Black Hat USA 2024, Noam Moshe from Claroty highlighted how the HMIs in PLC devices from Israeli manufacturers may be susceptible to political attacks by nation-state actors using unknown vulnerabilities in the PComm protocol.
What if you could build your own embedded security tools, glitching devices for a fraction of the cost that you might expect. Like having a $150,000 laser setup for less than $500. A talk at Black Hat USA 2024 says you can. Sam Beaumont (Panth13r), Director of Transportation, mobility and cyber physical systems at NetSPI, and Larry Trowell (patch), Director of hardware embedded systems at NetSPI, along with a team of others, say that you can. Their talk, Laser Beams & Light Streams: Letting Hackers Go Pew Pew, Building Affordable Light-Based Hardware Security Tooling, should be a wake up call for all IoT and OT device vendors who should defend our IoT and OT devices, even against the unlikely attacks. Because soon enough, those attacks will become likely.
Too few vulnerabilities in industrial control systems (ICS) are assigned CVEs because of client non-disclosure agreements. This results in repeatedly discovering the same vulnerabilities for different clients, especially in critical infrastructure. Don C. Weber from IOActive shares his experiences as an ICS security professional and suggests improvements, including following the SANS best practices for ICS security..
At DEF CON 32, in the ICS village, researchers disclosed vulnerabilities in home and commercial solar panel systems that could potentially disrupt the grid. Dan Berte, Director of IoT security for Bitdefender, discusses his more than a decade in IoT, how the vendor maturity often isn’t there for our smart TVs or even for our solar panels, so reporting vulnerabilities sometimes goes nowhere. That doesn’t stop defenders like Dan, who, along with his team, work hard to change and to educate the industry.
The resources available at small utilities are scarce, and that’s a big problem because small water, gas, and electric facilities are increasingly under attack. Dawn Capelli of Dragos is the Director of OT-CERT, an independent organization that provides free resources to educate and even protect small and medium sized utilities from attack.
For the last twenty years we’ve invested in software security without parallel development in firmware security. Why is that? Tom Pace, co-founder and CEO of NetRise, returns to Error Code to discuss the need for firmware software bills of materials, and why Zero Trust is a great idea yet so poorly implemented. As in Episode 30, Tom is a straight shooter, imparting necessary truth bombs about our industry. Fortunately he’s optimistic about our future.
That camera above your head might not seem like a good foreign target, yet in the Ukraine there’s evidence of Russian-backed hackers passively counting the number of foreign aid workers at the local train stations. Andrew Hural of UnderDefense talks about the need to secure everything around a person, everything around an organization, and everything around a nation because every one can be a target.
A critical skills gap in Operational Technology security could have a real effect on your water supply and other areas of the critical infrastructures. Christopher Walcutt from DirectDefense explains how the IT OT convergence, and the lack of understanding of what OT systems are, might be contributing to the spate of water systems attacks in 2024.
When critical infrastructure is shut down due to ransomware or some other malicious attack, who gets notified and when? Chris Warner, from GuidePoint Security, discusses the upcoming Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act or CIRCIA and what it will mean for critical infrastructure organizations.
When an enterprise network goes down, you call in the Incident Response team and they do forensics. When your SCADA goes down, who do you call? Meet Lesley Carhart, technical director of incident response at Dragos, who focuses on products and services for the non standard part of cybersecurity. That means things like performing digital forensics on SCADA, industrial control systems, and critical infrastructure. There’s still some normal enterprise computing involved, but very often the stories told by practitioners are … well, just plain weird.
This is a story about how organizations are moving their SCADA systems to the cloud and how they need to secure them or they’ll be attacked. Chris Doman, co-founder and CTO of Cado Security discusses the new NSC guidelines on SCADA in the Cloud and whether the guidelines are prescriptive enough.
If you knock down an email server, you could stand up a parallel server or you could find workarounds. If you knock down a factory floor, there is no real parallel, alternative to a factory floor. Dane Grace, product manager at Brinqa talks about how the risks to OT carries with it an outsized kinetic response in the real world. For example, what would happen if someone managed to put a botnet on a defibrillator?
One of the problems with security is ROI. If I put in next gen this and next gen that and no security events happen, am I justified in making those expenditures? How do you quantify a risk like that? Padraic O’Reilly, founder and Chief Innovation Officer at CyberSaint, walks us through the risk analysis for IoT and OT systems, and why it’s important to understand this as we secure our critical infrastructure.
This is the story of how a researcher turns commercial and commonly used EDRs and Cloud-based backup systems into wipers against the very data they’re designed to protect. Or Yair, security research team lead at Safe Breach, talks about his two presentations at SecTor 2023 that consider how to turn common security tools into potentially malicious weapons.
There’s a lot of talk about using AI and LLM in security. For example, could ChatGPT detect the vulnerable spots for power for analysis in particular pieces of code using Advanced Encryption Standard? Witold Waligora, CEO of CloudVA, talks about his Black Hat Europe presentation, How We Taught ChatGPT-4 to Break mbedTLS AES With Side-Channel Attacks.
You might think that internet connected cameras would be limited in use by a bad actor. Actually such devices can be an entry point into an organization, providing yet another means of accessing the internal network. Mohammad Waqas, a field CTO at Armis, spoke at SecTor 2023 about the threat posed by IoT and OT devices in future cyberwarfare and discusses here why we need to broaden our attack surface defenses to include them.
There’s a fake news report about three million internet-enabled toothbrushes contributing to a botnet. Unfortunately the mainstream media ran with the story before questioning its basic assumptions. This is a story about IoT devices and the fact that we still don’t understand how they are vulnerable. Tom Pace, co-founder and CEO of NetRise, talks about vulnerabilities inherent in the IoT space that are often misconstrued and how we need to ask more questions about the software and the hardware being used if we want to secure critical infrastructure tomorrow.
Ransomware groups have bifurcated with some doing pure ransomware and others going straight to extortion; it's whether the data is ransomed on your network or theirs. Nick Biasini from Cisco Talos talks about the threats he’s seeing, in particular, SapphireStealer which is open source and using GitHub to crowdsource new features.
The Purdue Model used in OT is essentially network security from the 1990s. New threats and new tech however required us to rethink that on the network side so how do we bring that new thinking to work with legacy OT systems? John Taylor of Versa Networks explains how there's a lot of implicit trust in the IoT and OT devices themselves, yet they don't have antivirus. Or firewalls. Worse, you're basically depending on the manufacturer of that device to provide security updates if necessary, and oftentimes they don't. Perhaps it’s time for a new approach such as SASE or secure access service edge.
Flaws within the chips in our laptops, in our homes, and in our critical infrastructure could become the access one needs to steal data if not just shut down an assembly line, or hold up production of a vital resource like power or water. Josh Salmanson, senior vice president at Telos, discusses why we’re seeing more and more pre-compromised routers in critical environments today and what we might do to mitigate that in the near future.
Can your OT function if the IT system goes down? OT self-sufficiency is critical for infrastructure such as rail systems. Christopher Warner, from GuidePoint Security, discusses how this infrastructure resilience is important not only for the rail industry but for most of the other critical infrastructures in general.
Quantum computers will change and even break the cryptography we have today. To defeat a "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" strategy by bad actors (even nation states), Denis Mandich, CTO and co-founder of Qrypt, is proposing a type of crypto agility that compiles the keys on your laptop instead of distributing them across the internet. He also talks about how you won’t need a quantum computer in your home; you’ll be able to access one in the cloud the way you can access AWS today.
When we think of massive compute power, we think of the Cloud when we really should consider the millions of unprotected OT devices with even greater slack computer power than all our current Cloud services combined. Sonu Shankar, Vice President of Product at Phosphorus Cybersecurity, talks about the challenge of communicating with PLCs and other devices, the risks from newer OT devices, and how all password-less OT devices really need to be protected. He says attacks aren’t just DDoS; today OT attacks can exfiltrate data as well.
There’s much of the electromagnetic spectrum that we cannot see. Like how LED wristbands are triggered at concerts or how to identify someone at DEF CON in a crowd of cellphones and electrical devices. Eric Escobar of SecureWorks provides some really clear analogies to help anyone visualize the differences between NFC, Bluetooth, and Wi Fi such as how your router and your microwave are both 2.4GHz - the difference is the number of watts behind each signal.
How might we mitigate the risk to millions of unauthenticated devices already out in the field? Ron Fabela, Field CTO at XONA Systems, has some ideas about how to achieve zero trust in either legacy or new OT systems. Really, it’s just a matter of reducing the attack surface.
In a talk at Black Hat USA 2023, Sharon Brizinov and Noam Moshe from Claroty Team82, disclosed a significant vulnerability in the Open Platform Communications Universal Architecture or OPC-UA, a univsersal protocol used to synchronize different OT devices. In this episode they also discuss a new open source OPC exploit framework designed to help OT vendors check their devices in development.
What would happen if someone stole the encryption keys for a major satellite? Well, it’d be game over. Unless the satellite used quantum cryptography. Skip Sanzeri from QuSecure explains how using “quantum tunnels” will allow even legacy satellites in orbit today to become secure in a rapidly approaching post-quantum world.
This is a story of what's needed for the Capture The Flag competition at DEF CON 31 to be hosted for the first time on a live satellite orbiting 400 kilometers above the Earth. Mike Walker continues his conversation, focusing more on the game to be played in Hack-A-Sat 4.
Moonlighter is the world’s first and only hacking sandbox in space. Currently orbiting the earth near the International Space Station, the satellite is the playground for this year’s Hack-A-Sat 4 competition at DEF CON 31. Mike Walker, from Cromulence, discusses the difference between hacking a live satellite in orbit vs the previous Hack-A-Sat CTFs which only simulated the experience. We discuss limited contact windows, latency, and other aspects of orbital mechanics which will surely influence how Hack-a-Sat 4 will be played.
Could a personal medical device be a threat for an organization? Turns out it’s similar to protecting against an attack on a mobile device. Except a denial of service here could prove fatal. Todd Brasel, the author of Security Issues of Personal Medical Devices: Concerns, Characteristics, and Controls, discusses with Error Code the research he’s done on devices either inside the body or just outside, the vulnerabilities in communications they sometimes have, and the mitigations available today.
Josh Corman, VP of Cyber Safety Strategy at Claroty, is a hacker who knows U.S. public policy well. Ten years ago he created a volunteer organization, I Am The Cavalry, to help educate sitting legislators on active cybersecurity issues. In this episode of Error Code, Josh talks about the recently passed PATCH ACT and how it addresses some of the issues around patching medical devices over the lifetime of the device rather than just at the time of FDA certification. He also talks about his experience working for CISA during COVID-19 and how that helped inform issues within the PATCH ACT.
This is the story about researchers who monitor the threats against IoT and OT systems, and the steps being taken to mitigate them. Ishmael Valenzuela, Vice President of the threat research and Intelligence Team at BlackBerry, shares the latest insights from his company’s Cybersecurity Global Threat Intelligence Report. We talk about threats from Latin America and elsewhere, how firewalls alone won’t necessarily protect OT devices, how attackers and defenders are using AI technology, and how hospitals are seeing perhaps the most increase in threats.
There’s a lot of FUD around hacking the power grid. Most often, there’s a more common cause: Soot. Even Squirrels. Jori VanAntwerp, CEO of SynSaber. talks about the realities of the US power grid vs the myths. While there’s room to improve, there’s also a great amount of resilience already in the electrical system today.
How the rapid proliferation of EV charging stations is already leading to attacks on the stations and the vehicles themselves, and what we should do about it. Charles Eagan, CTO of BlackBerry, talks about the rush to create these charging stations and the traditional problems with IoT – vulnerable versions of the OS, of the open source, and even some of the protocols being used. He also talks about how we can improve the security of software defined vehicles and their ecosystems.
The Biden-Harris 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy breaks with Cold War thinking and offers a bold new approach to today’s online offense and defense. Danielle Jablanski from Nozomi Networks breaks down the ambitious new policy which includes explicit mention of ICS and OT technologies for the first time.
We’ve already seen botnets composed of compromised devices like routers and security cameras. So how do we secure them and our smart lightbulbs too? Window Snyder, CEO of Thistle Technologies, explains how new devices can be partitioned with failovers and then serviced with regular updates all monitored from a central dashboard. Even devices already in the field today can also be upgraded and secured in some cases.
This is the story of Cris Thomas aka Space Rogue, who’s written perhaps the best book about the early days of hacking, Space Rogue: How the Hackers Known as the Loft Changed The World. Unlike a journalist merely chronicling events in Boston in the 1990s from the outside, Cris was on the inside. This is not only the story of the L0pht but it's also the story of his life, so he seamlessly provides the often missing context of the time with countless asides and anecdotes woven in instead of tacked on. In this episode of Error Code, Cris also drops a lot of names.
This is the story of Zhadnost, of how an IoT-based botnet was conscripted into an online war in the days immediately before the kinetic Ukraine invasion. Ryan Slaney of SecurityScorecard walks us through the timeline of these attacks and the evidence of attribution he found linking it to Russia’s GRU.
What if a vulnerability exists in popular ICS devices, yet the only fix is to re-issue the hardware? This is true with some embedded security flaws. Ang Cui, founder and CEO of Red Balloon Security, talks about his company’s discovery of CVE-2022-38773, which affects the secure boot process in Siemens S7 1500 PLCs, and what the mitigations for devices using that might look like.
IoT can make patient care easier.. But how do we introduce new IoT medical devices into an ecosystem where we can’t even keep tabs on our legacy devices? Mohammad Waqas discusses conversations he’s had with hospitals about the device profiles they don’t necessarily know about – the over-the-counter glucose monitor app on an iPad that hasn’t gone through IT provisioning - and what they can do about it.
The Vastaamo data breach stands as one of the most heinous of internet crimes because of the 30,000 psychiatric records that were exposed and the lives it ruined. Antti Kurittu discusses his presentation at SecTor 2022, what we know thus far from the public record, and the news of the Finnish arrest warrant for the individual only previously known as “Ransomware_Man”.
IoT and Machine Learning can help farmers provide more food with fewer resources, so long as the devices in the field and the backend systems are secure. Seth Hardy, co-founder and CTO of Bug Mars, a precision agtech company for insect farms, discusses his SecTor 2022 presentation, drawing upon his more than 20 years of security experience in his new role in sustainable food production.
Quantum computing will make great advances in science; it will also have the ability to decrypt banking, healthcare, and other industries' stolen data. Skip Sanzeri of QuSecure explains how quantum computing is advancing rapidly, how it has the power to crack RSA 2048 and other encryption that we know take for granted today, and why his and other companies are talking about our post-quantum encryption world today. Dn3NZumn4pPpnVhpt6GH
This is the history of hardware hacking and the story of Joe Grand. From testifying before Congress to creating badgelife at DEF CON, Joe has done it all. And he’s darn humble about it, too. Joe just wants to share through his classes, website, and YouTube channel all that he’s learned since his days with the L0pht, the tools he’s created, and the work he’s currently doing with Right to Repair. He just wants to make the art of hardware hacking more accessible to others.
What happens now to the digital test environment built for Hack-A-Sat 3? Well, it becomes a rich testing and training environment for all on GitHub. Login Finch and Frank Pound continue sharing some of the behind-the-scenes challenges presented by hosting a Hack-A-Sat capture the flag competition, this time drilling down details behind the Digital Twins environment that needed to be built in advance of next year’s hack of an actual satellite in orbit.
Satellites today lack basic security controls. With as little as $300, you, too, can hack into commercial satellites. So that’s an emerging IoT problem.
Frank Pound and Login Finch share in this episode their work with Hack-A-Sat. It’s a unique Capture the Flag challenge that’s never been tried before. Here’s the background story of how the project got started … and where it’s going.
Error Code is a biweekly narrative podcast that provides you both context and conversation with some of the best minds working today toward code reliance and dependability. Work that can lead to autonomous vehicles and smart cities. It's your window in the research solving tomorrow's code problems today
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.