Beers with Talos Podcast

Kaitlin Acharya joins the Beers with Talos crew to take us inside the world of threat intelligence: what happens when Talos spots something that could become a major threat, how her team tracks changes in threat actor behavior, and how intelligence moves from an investigation into detection content. She also faces some tougher questions involving tennis, Derry Girls and an evil genie. We also attempt to extract some information about Kaitlin’s former life at a certain intelligence agency. Res...

In this episode of Beers with Talos, Hazel, Bill, Dave and Joe are joined by Kendall McKay to dive into the soap opera of modern cybercrime. From rival gangs launching smear campaigns against one another to reputation systems, trusted intermediaries and dark web "customer reviews". Turns out, every ransomware operation is one passive-aggressive group chat message away from falling apart. Kendall chats to us about how AI is changing the economics of cybercrime, why it's helping inexperienced a...

With Mitch, Matt and Lurene currently stuck in the void, the Beers with Talos B team duly elect themselves to reopen the sacred BWT airwaves with their own brand of nonsense. Hazel, Joe, Bill and Dave each share the security rabbit hole they went down this week - from analyst in-jokes about AI, oligarchs and bad actors refusing to learn good op sec, the songs you'd play to send a message mid-hack, and the long awaited return of Turkey Lurkey Man, TM. Dave's insane creation is back with...

Power grid security expert Joe Marshall joins the crew today to talk all things, well, power grid security. But not before he gets an impromptu pop quiz from Matt in the roundtable. Joe then tells some stories from his days working in electric utility, deploying new systems and his experiences with pentesting teams ("Wow, y'all need to stop!"). Plus, the team ask Joe about the risks with both aging infrastructure versus newer, smarter based infrastructure. And what happens when t...

You will no doubt have seen the advisories published over the last few weeks concerning Volt Typhoon's malicious activities. In this episode, JJ Cummings joins the crew to discuss the background to this threat actor, their impact on the threat landscape, and the covertly strategic (and specific) nature of their operations. The team also discusses their recommendations for defenders, particularly for critical infrastructure organizations. The CISA statement on Volt Typhoon can be found here h...

Mitch, Matt and Lurene were almost about to be in the same physical space at the same time to record an episode, and then Lurene couldn't make it...so we made this instead! Mitch is joined by Azim Khodjibaev from the Talos Threat Intelligence and Interdiction team to rapid-fire interview a bunch of Talos employees who happened to be around the Maryland office. Hear from teammates from all walks of life and areas of expertise about what they've loved working on in 2023 and how they feel their ...