Transcript
A (0:02)
Are we having the right conversation when it comes to resilience? Let's talk about it on this episode of Safe Mode. Welcome to Safe Mode. I'm Greg Otto, editor in chief at cyberscoop. Every week we break down the most pressing security issues in technology, providing you the knowledge and the tools to stay ahead of the latest threats, while also taking you behind the scenes of the biggest stories in cyber security. An attack is coming. It's about keeping us safe. He's just a disgruntled hacker.
B (0:27)
She's a super hacker.
A (0:28)
Stay alert, stay safe, stay saf is Safe Mode. Welcome to this episode of Safe Mode. I am your host, Greg Otto. In our interview segment this week, we're going to be talking with Ben Harris, the CEO of Watchtower. You've been reading all of our reporting on the wide array of vulnerabilities that we've covered over the past month. You've probably seen Ben's name, and we talked to Ben. We go a little bit more in depth on some of those vulnerabilities, whether or not he thinks some of these companies should be cut a little slack. If we should be a little bit more. What's the right word? If we should be a little bit meaner, I guess you could say to them, and whether enterprises are having the right conversations when it comes to how they fix all the vulnerabilities that we see out there on the Internet. But first, talking with Derek Johnson, speaking of the Internet, you know, all of the networks that we talk about, very, very land based. For the story that you did this week, we had some academic researchers take to the skies. Why did they do so?
B (1:40)
Yeah, so this study, which was done by researchers at the University of Maryland and the University of California, San Diego, was really designed to explore this sort of one question, which is, you know, how much private and sensitive data can you get by pointing just commercial equipment at the sky at a single fixed point and seeing how much unencrypted private information you can collect from around the globe. And they did, I think, 39 different satellites that they passively scanned from. And they found everything from unencrypted SMS text messages and phone calls and things like that, from telecoms like T Mobile and Mexican telecoms like Telmex. They found signals from US Military vessels and artifacts and information that shed light on internal military administrative operations. They found so much information that in one nine hour listening period where they just point pointed basically a $600 satellite dish at the sky and they picked up phone metadata for 2700 people so it's sort of an example of this really kind of niche weakness in our information pipelines that organizations, military and, and private sector just are not thinking of and paying attention to when they shoot information around the globe.
