Matt Polak is the Founder and CEO of Picnic, a Cybersecurity firm focused on helping companies stop social engineering attacks before they start. He is a subject matter expert in intelligence collection, having spent his career applying these skills to protect people from open-source intelligence gathering by hackers. In our conversation, Matt shares practical steps that SMBs can take to protect themselves from ransomware, including simulating social engineering attacks, safeguarding the human attack surface, and more. We also go over 5 threats that you should know about.
Threat Landscape (02:25)
Darien breaks down this week’s Threat Landscape, broadly examining the threats that emerged, started to trend, and became mainstream, as well as the threats that haven’t seen any activity in the past month.
Experts Detail New Zero-Click Windows Vulnerability for NTLM Credential Theft (03:47)
A zero-click vulnerability has been re-discovered in Windows that allows attackers to steal NTLM credentials without any user interaction. This issue was discovered and patched in April, but not fully fixed.
Cisco phone adapters vulnerable to RCE attacks, no fix available (05:12)
A set of vulnerabilities has been found affecting end-of-life Cisco VoIP devices, which won’t receive any patches, that are used by SMBs. If an attacker compromises a VoIP phone, they can record conversations and potentially expand the scope of the attack from there.
MSI Data Breach: Private Code Signing Keys Leaked on the Dark Web (06:20)
The Taiwanese computer hardware company MSI suffered a data breach in which private code-signing keys were leaked on the dark web. The leaked keys could be exploited by attackers to create malware that can remain in the BIOS of Windows systems.
Make them pay: Hackers devise new tactics to ensure ransomware payment (07:46)
The BlackCat ransomware group has adopted a new tactic to ensure ransomware payment: they threaten to launch a distributed DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack against the victim’s network.
Royal ransomware gang quickly expands reign (09:06)
The Royal ransomware group is targeting a variety of industry verticals, including manufacturing organizations and local governments. They get into organizations using compromised credentials, a relatively common mechanism.
Interview with Matt Polak (09:43)
Matt shares practical steps that SMBs can take to protect themselves from ransomware, including simulating social engineering attacks, safeguarding the human attack surface, and more.
