DISCARDED: Tales From the Threat Research Trenches

Send us fan mail! Hello to all our cyber party pals! This week, Selena is joined by co-host Sarah Sabotka (and several very persistent, very uninvited pod crashers) to talk about a threat that's landed in a lot of listeners' personal inboxes lately: malicious event invitations. Selena and Sarah walk through what these lures actually look like — polished, Evite- or Paperless Post-style invitations for birthdays, weddings, baby showers, housewarmings, and even generic "Celebrate with Me"...

Send us fan mail! Hello to all our cybernauts! This week Selena is joined by not one, not two, but three guests — Mark Kelly, Julia Paluch, and Dave Galazin — to unpack Proofpoint's latest research. Mark walks through how it started: on August 28, the China-aligned actor TA412 (aka Violet Typhoon), previously known mostly for device registration phishing, suddenly began delivering a Chrome exploit — kicking off a frantic cross-team investigation involving partners at Google and Microsoft. Wit...

Send us fan mail! Hello to our Cyber Pals! This week, Selena hands the mic over to a recording of Proofpoint's Intercepted webinar — a monthly video series she co-hosts with Sarah Sabotka — for a deep dive into how cloud brute force attacks are quietly getting more sophisticated. Joining Sarah and webinar host Jason is Rachel Rabin, a threat researcher on Proofpoint's Cloud Threat Research Team, to unpack two spoofing techniques she's seen increasingly weaponized against Microsoft Entra...

Send us fan mail! Hello to all our cyber stars! Host Selena Larson is joined by co-host Sarah Sabotka, along with returning guest Greg Lesnewich, Principal Threat Research Engineer, and Staff Threat Researcher Mark Kelly, for a follow-up to last episode's half-click deep dive — this time tracking how the technique is spreading beyond TA458 and TA488 into a brand-new Chinese cluster. Greg picks up where last week left off with TA488 (aka Void Blizzard, aka Laundry Bear): after going quiet in F...

Send us fan mail! Hello to all our cyber roosters! Host Selena Larson is joined by co-host Sarah Sabatka and returning guest Greg Lesnewich, Principal Threat Researcher at Proofpoint, to unpack two new reports on Russian aligned espionage actors abusing “half-click” exploits, which are vulnerabilities that compromise a target the moment they open an email in a vulnerable webmail viewer, no link or attachment required. Greg breaks down the two distinct actors covered in Proofpoint's research: ...