Adversary Universe Podcast CrowdStrike

How do adversaries react when they know they’re being tracked? How do they respond to organizations that are on to them — and how do they know what the defenders know?
In this episode, Adam and Cristian explore how adversary behavior shifts as their activity is discovered and tracked. Today’s adversaries carefully research their victims. They read corporate blog posts and craft their techniques based on the information defenders share. As this intelligence becomes more detailed, organizations like CrowdStrike are forced to consider an important question: How much information can they share when they know adversaries are looking for it? Helping potential victims often comes at the cost of adversaries knowing we can see them and shifting their behavior accordingly.
How does their behavior change? As always, it depends on the group. Tune in for this fascinating conversation and real-world examples of adversaries responding to defenders’ actions.

In this episode, Adam and Cristian examine the dynamics between the two nations, the drivers of their evolving cyber activity and the key adversaries involved in this growing conflict.

Social engineering is not a new threat — adversaries have long used psychological manipulation to gain access, money, information and more. But as we learn in this episode from Shelly Giesbrecht, Director of Professional Services at CrowdStrike, it remains a top cybersecurity challenge for all organizations.
Today’s social engineers are more convincing than ever. Gone are the days of clunky phishing emails rife with spelling errors. Modern social engineering attacks arrive as convincing and well-crafted text messages, emails and voice calls. They prey on human emotion and instinct, creating situations where technology can’t always help.
“It really comes down to that human factor,” says Shelly. “We talk a lot about technology, and obviously CrowdStrike is a technology company, but we are fallible still at the human level — and that’s where social engineering is targeted.”
In a conversation that starts with impostor syndrome and quickly pivots to the impostors who are emailing employees and calling help desks, Adam, Cristian and Shelly explore the modern social engineering landscape. Shelly describes what her team is seeing on the front lines of incident response, how social engineering campaigns are evolving with the rise of AI, and guidance for organizations worried about this prolific technique.

The rise of hacktivism — the use of hacking techniques to make a statement supporting a political or social cause — is often associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Anonymous hacktivist collective. But the practice of hacking as a form of civil disobedience goes back to the 1990s. It has taken many forms in the years since, driven by a wide range of hacktivists around the world.
In this episode, Adam and Cristian trace the history of hacktivism to its early days, dive into high-profile examples and explain the practice of “faketivism” often used among nation-states. They share why hacktivism is top of mind during a year in which 55 countries have held, or will hold, elections. And they disclose the meaning behind JACKAL, the name CrowdStrike broadly uses to track activists who operate online. Tune in for an engaging explanation of a complex and oft overlooked topic.

Andrew Munchbach, CrowdStrike’s VP of Global Enterprise Sales Engineering, joins Adam and Cristian in this week’s episode to explore what threat hunting is, how it works, and what makes a good threat hunting program.

Today’s conversation explores a common question around adversary activity: Why does attribution matter? When a cyberattack hits, why go to the trouble of learning who is behind it?