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Brian Egan hosts this episode of the podcast, as Stewart Baker is hiking the wilds of New Hampshire with family. Nick Weaver joins the podcast to discuss the week in ransomware, as DOJ gets serious, and the gangs do too. Justice has a new ransomware task force,  and the gangs have asked  for $50…

It’s a story that has everything, except a reporter able to tell it. A hostile state attacking the US power grid is a longstanding and quite plausible national security concern.

The Trump administration was galvanized by the threat, even seizing Chinese power equipment at the port to do a detailed breakdown and then issuing…

Our interview in this episode is with Glenn Gerstell, freed at last from some of the constraints that come with government service. We cover the Snowden leaks, how private and public legal work differs (hint: it’s the turf battles), Cyber Command, Russian election interference, reauthorization of FISA, and the daunting challenges the US (and its Intelligence Community) will face as China’s economy begins to reinforce its global security ambitions.…

Continue Reading Episode 304: Unfiltered: An interview with NSA’s former general counsel

This Week in the Great Decoupling: The Commerce Department has rolled out proposed telecom and supply chain security rules that never once mention China. More accurately, the Department has rolled out a sketch of its preliminary thinking about proposed rules. Brian Egan and I tackle the substance and history of the proposal and conclude that the government is still fighting about the content of a policy it’s already announced. And to show that decoupling can go both ways, a US-based chip-tech group is moving to Switzerland to reassure its Chinese participants. Nick Weaver and I conclude that there’s a little less here than Reuters seems to think.…

Continue Reading Episode 290: The Right to be Forgotten Shoots the Shark

Our interview guests are Dick Clarke and Rob Knake, who have just finished their second joint book on cybersecurity, The Fifth Domain. We talk about what they got right and wrong in their original book. There are surprising flashes of optimism from Clarke and Knake about the state of cybersecurity, and the book itself is an up-to-date survey of the policy environment. Best of all, they have the courage to propose actual policy solutions to problems that many others just admire. I disagree with about half of their proposals, so much light and some heat are shed in the interview, which I end by bringing back the McLaughlin Group tradition of rapid-fire questions and an opinionated “You’re wrong” whenever the moderator disagrees. C’mon, you know the arguments are really why you listen, so enjoy this one!…

Continue Reading Episode 269: A McLaughlin Group for cybersecurity

 

On Episode 261, blockchain takes over the podcast again. We dive right into the recent activity from the SEC, namely, the Framework for “Investment Contract” Analysis of Digital Assets and the No-Action Letter issued to TurnKey Jet, Inc. (TurnKey) for a digital token. Gary Goldsholle noted this guidance has been eagerly anticipated since July…

In our interview, Elsa Kania and Sam Bendett explain what China and Russia have learned from the American way of warfighting – and from Russia’s success in Syria. The short answer: everything. But instead of leaving us smug, I argue it ought to leave us worried about surprise. Elsa and Sam both try to predict where the surprises might come from. Yogi Berra makes an appearance.…

Continue Reading Episode 255: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery: Russia and China revamp their military technologies

If you get SMS messages on your phone and think you have two-factor authentication, you’re kidding yourself. That’s the message Nick Weaver and David Kris extract from two stories we cover in this week’s episode of The Cyberlaw Podcast – DOJ’s indictment of a couple of kids whose hacker chops are modest but whose social engineering skillz are remarkable. They used those skills to bribe or bamboozle phone companies into changing the phone numbers of their victims, allowing them to intercept all the two-factor authentication they needed to steal boatloads of cryptocurrency. For those with better hacking chops than social skills, there’s always exploitation of SS7 vulnerabilities, which allow interception of text messages without all the muss and fuss of changing SIM cards.…

Continue Reading Episode 250: We give you Weaver