On Nov. 19, 2024, Adam testified in front of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law on Chinese cyber threats to critical infrastructure. This was the first time he publicly spoke about LIMINAL PANDA, a China-nexus state-sponsored threat actor that has been targeting telecommunications organizations since at least 2020. LIMINAL PANDA is a newly named adversary, but CrowdStrike has been tracking its activity for over three years. It uses custom tools and...

If a business wants to know what an adversary might be capable of, they can seek the help of a red team. These cybersecurity professionals are tasked with emulating adversary activity to achieve specific objectives in their clients’ environments. Their goal is to find an organization’s weaknesses — before a real adversary does — so it can strengthen its security posture. But what does a red team actually do, and who are the people on these teams? In this episode, Cristian is joined by...

China and Taiwan have a long history of geopolitical tension that has evolved from land and sea to cyberspace. Relations between the two recently took an interesting turn when the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) claimed hacktivist entity Anonymous 64 targeted China and its territories with attempted disinformation and public communication disruption. The Chinese government further alleged the activity was directed by the Taiwanese government, whose officials are investigating the...

On Oct. 1, 2024, an international law enforcement coalition announced the disruption of a senior member of INDRIK SPIDER, who was also an affiliate of the BITWISE SPIDER ransomware as a service operation. CrowdStrike often works with law enforcement to identify, track and stop cyber threats, and we played a key role in this operation. In this episode, Adam and Cristian are joined by a member of CrowdStrike’s intelligence collection team to dive into the takedown, the years of cybercrime...

The kernel is the brain of the operating system. It controls everything that happens on a computer and has full access to the hardware and all system resources. Though it has a small code base, the kernel plays a critical role in how systems and applications operate, interact and stay secure. Due to the current architecture and design of Windows systems, cybersecurity products running in the platform — particularly those involved in endpoint protection — require kernel access to provide the...

Next week marks the start of Fal.Con 2024. CrowdStrike’s annual conference brings together cybersecurity leaders and practitioners, as well as our customers and partners, in Las Vegas for four days of keynotes, breakout sessions, workshops and demos. Adam and Cristian will both be speaking at this year’s show. In this episode, they share the talks they’re most excited about and how they tie into the broader threat landscape. Some sessions will dive into insights from the CrowdStrike Counter...

For students aspiring to work in cybersecurity, sitting in a classroom isn’t enough to gain the skills and experience they need to succeed. Industry internships are invaluable opportunities to learn how security pros operate in the real world and understand the responsibilities each role requires. CrowdStrike’s University Program welcomes interns across virtually every field to gain this real-world experience. This summer, David Feldman and Chandler McClellan interned for the CrowdStrike...

FAMOUS CHOLLIMA, a new adversary CrowdStrike is tracking, has recently made headlines for its insider threat activity. In April 2024, CrowdStrike Services responded to the first of several incidents in which FAMOUS CHOLLIMA threat actors targeted 30+ US-based companies. The insiders claimed to be US residents and were hired for remote IT positions, which granted them access they exploited to attempt data exfiltration, install malware and conduct other malicious activity. CrowdStrike has now...

Where in the world are Adam and Cristian? In this episode, they’re coming to you live from São Paulo, Brazil, where they sat down with a special guest: Fernando Madureira. Fernando is the Global CISO of Cosan, a Brazilian conglomerate of several businesses spanning energy, transportation and logistics, and other sectors that operates around the world. Given Cosan’s size and the nature of its business, Fernando has a broad range of threats at top of mind. Operational technology (OT) security...

What happens when there is a takedown of a major cybercriminal group or law enforcement activity has a major impact on its leadership? In this episode, Adam and Cristian unpack what happens in the aftermath of a takedown, including how some groups splinter, reemerge and even rebrand.

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...

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...

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...

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?

In this special episode of the Adversary Universe podcast, Adam and Cristian are joined by Morgan Adamski, Chief of the CCC and government security expert, onstage at CrowdStrike’s Gov Threat Summit in Washington, D.C.

CrowdStrike Chief Security Officer Shawn Henry joined CrowdStrike as employee number 19 after a 24-year career at the FBI, where he retired as the Bureau’s Executive Assistant Director. Today, he joins Adam and Cristian for a wide-ranging conversation exploring his early days at CrowdStrike and transition to the private sector, his perspective on the 2016 DNC breach and the risks modern elections face.

In this episode, Adam and Cristian reflect on the early days of the Global Threat Report and examine the key findings of this year’s report, which was released this week.

CrowdStrike has long said, “You don’t have a malware problem — you have an adversary problem.” Much like we analyze the malware and tools used in cyberattacks, we must also learn about the people who orchestrate them.Adam and Cristian are joined by Cameron Malin, a behavioral profiler who specializes in understanding adversaries and the “why” behind their activity. Cameron built the FBI’s Cyber Behavioral Analysis Unit, which works to understand the motivations for cybercrime across different...

Though the inner workings of North Korea remain a mystery to much of the world, its global cyber activity has been tracked and analyzed for years. CrowdStrike’s Counter Adversary Operations team, which tracks five North Korean threat actors, has a unique perspective on the country’s evolution as a global cybersecurity threat and the many ways it has used cyber capabilities to achieve its goals. In this episode, Adam and Cristian trace the history of North Korean cyber operations from its...

Cristian is joined by CrowdStrike Global CTO Elia Zaitsev to revisit the world of AI and large language models (LLMs), this time from the perspective of modern defenders. While this space has seen explosive growth in the past year, most organizations are still working to determine how LLM technology fits into their cybersecurity strategies. In this episode, Cristian and Elia unpack the rapid evolution of AI models — a trend the two consider both exciting and frightening — and examine how...

In mid-December 2023, an adversary CrowdStrike tracks as VOODOO BEAR targeted Ukrainian telecom provider Kyivstar, wreaking havoc and disrupting thousands of systems and assets. The Russia-linked adversary has for years treated Ukraine as its “lab of offensive cyber operations”, testing attack techniques and demonstrating the destructive behavior it has become known for since it emerged in late 2010. In this episode, Adam and Cristian dive into the details of the recent Kyivstar attack and...

It has been a whirlwind year for the cybersecurity industry. In this episode of the Adversary Universe podcast, we revisit clips from standout episodes of 2023. Tune in to catch pieces of our conversations on the evolution of cloud-focused cyberattacks, the rise of cyber activity from Iran and China, the process of discovering and mitigating vulnerabilities, the role of AI in the cyber threat landscape and more. For those who want to listen to the full episodes related to each of these...