Season 5, EP 4

Apple Devices as a Growing Attack Vector

In this ConversingLabs episode, host Paul Roberts speaks with Devin Byrd, Director of Threat Intelligence at Kandji. Byrd explains how Kandji has grown into a major security provider for macOS users, and how the attack vector for macOS and iOS users has increased in recent years. 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PAUL ROBERTS
Welcome back everybody to another episode of ConversingLabs. I'm your host, Paul Roberts. I'm the Cyber Content Lead here at ReversingLabs, and we are here with another ConversingLabs Cafe edition. Last time we were talking to you from the RSA conference. This time we're at Black Hat here in Las Vegas, Nevada.
And we're here with Devin Byrd, who's the Director of Threat Intelligence at Kandji, Devin, welcome to ConversingLabs podcast.

DEVIN BYRD
Thanks, Paul. Great to be here with you guys.

PAUL ROBERTS
It's your first time having you on, thrilled to have you.
Obviously, we're here at Black Hat. We're in the ReversingLabs booth. Over there is the Kandji booth. Also pretty crowded. What are you seeing at the show? And what's interesting to you?

DEVIN BYRD
It's been great. There's been a huge turnout. There's been a, at least from our side, we're definitely an Apple house.
So it's been great seeing a big influx in Apple people and Apple talks and stuff that's been going through this year. So seeing that grow and keep getting bigger. It's been a great thing for us.

PAUL ROBERTS
For the folks who don't know Kandji talk just a little bit about what Kandji does.

DEVIN BYRD
Sure, so Kandji is a MDM and EDR provider. So we secure and do mobile device management for iOS devices, Apple TV, iPadOS, and macOS devices. And then we also have an additional EDR product that ties into our macOS product.

PAUL ROBERTS
Okay, and your customers are enterprise, small business?

DEVIN BYRD
We have everything from small business all the way up to bigger enterprises. It's more of just people who like really want to have their Apple devices secured and maintained and managed. So we have customers with as little as 50 devices and we have thousands of devices on other ones.

PAUL ROBERTS
So much of the whole InfoSec sector is predicated on Windows, right?

DEVIN BYRD
Oh, yes.

PAUL ROBERTS
It was, 95% market share for so long. It's really less true today, particularly in verticals like tech, right? Where Mac and non-Windows OS is actually really common. Talk about some of the challenges that presents for companies, in terms of doing endpoint protection.

DEVIN BYRD
Sure, so one of the biggest things and some of the things that I've seen across my career and kind of path has been that there's a huge influx of people who are very big into Windows security. It's always been the cash cow. It's the one everybody goes to. It's the one everybody knows. But as the enterprises are growing and you see a lot more with the millennial generation, the Gen Z generation that they really like their Apple devices. They want to have the seamless connectivity between iOS and macOS and have that kind of build to expand on.More and more malware writers are attacking iOS and macOS devices. The problem that we've run into in the past is that because it's been such a niche field and it's so small, finding the people with those expertise has been really difficult and hard.So that's one of the things that we try to pride ourselves on is we've built out a really great team of people who really specialize in that. But for the longest time, we were the black sheep. People were like, why are you studying macOS security? Nobody cares.