Particle Data Platform
Darknet Diaries

Pacific Rim

5/5/20261 hr 31 min

For six years, Sophos fought a secret cyber war against a state-backed hacking group targeting its firewalls. This forced Sophos to drastically change tactics to properly secure their firewalls.

Was it ethical? Was it effective? They disrupted nine zero-day attacks, exposed who was hacking them, and forced the hackers to change tactics. But at what cost?

You have to listen to one of the most audacious corporate cyber defenses ever conducted.

Sponsors

Support for this show comes from ThreatLocker®. ThreatLocker® is a Zero Trust Endpoint Protection Platform that strengthens your infrastructure fr...

Clips

Showing 10 of 12
Sophos Pushes Unprecedented Hotfix
Admitting Ethical Gray Area
Seizing Hacker Domains
Radical Transparency Decision
Source Code Heist Pays Off
Others In The Crosshairs
Awkward Calls To Rivals
Killing A Product Line
The UEFI Bootkit Scare
Round Two Lights Up

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Jack Rhysider· Host0:00

    Hi, I'm Jack Rhysider, host of the show. Back in two thousand eighteen, an interesting cyber attack took place.

  2. Andrew Brandt· Guest0:06

    It's kind of a funny thing. I mean, it was, it basically came onto my radar the second month I was working at Sophos.

  3. Jack Rhysider· Host0:14

    Oh, I should introduce you to Andrew.

  4. Andrew Brandt· Guest0:16

    Yeah, so I'm Andrew Brandt. And throughout the time that the research was going on for this story, I was a principal researcher for Sophos. But I am now a principal threat researcher for a company called Netcraft.

  5. Jack Rhysider· Host0:31

    So one of the things Sophos wanted Andrew to do was research novel threats and write about them on their newly established Sophos blog.

  6. Andrew Brandt· Guest0:39

    The team that I was on eventually didn't exist. I was the only person on it. And one of the analysts reached out to me through the company chat and said, hey, I've got a great story for some really cool research. I'd like to write it up and have you publish it on the blog and do some edits on it. I said, great. Tell me more. And he told me the story. But the one thing he didn't tell or what he said he couldn't tell me was who the target was.

  7. Jack Rhysider· Host1:09

    So he's like, okay, fine. Send me what you got. Let me research it and I'll write about it.

  8. Andrew Brandt· Guest1:12

    It started with a TV set. So there was a sales office and they had a bullpen like you have a lot of, you know, in a lot of sales offices where people are on the phone, you know, trying to sell the product. And so they had like this leaderboard that was on a computer screen that was running

We value your privacy

We use cookies to understand how you use our platform and to improve your experience. Click "Accept All" to consent, or "Decline non-essential" to opt out of non-essential cookies. Read our Privacy Policy.