Podcasts

A hacker wipes Romania’s entire land registry database, Magnet Forensics sues a former employee for leaking an iPhone exploit, an autonomous AI agent hacked Hugging Face, and an unauthenticated remote code execution bug was finally found in WordPress.

In this Risky Business sponsor interview Casey Ellis chats with Haroon Meer from Thinkst about building companies customers don’t hate. Haroon explains why Thinkst still offers Canary tokens for free and why it has avoided annual price hikes on its paid products. They talk about Eric Ries’s “Incorruptible”, Rob Lee’s 100-year-company approach at Dragos, and why keeping customers happy is a better business strategy than chasing easy sugar highs.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about different ways ransomware groups are taking advantage of AI. The relatively new FulcrumSec group uses simple techniques to breach companies and then uses AI to get more leverage over victims in its extortion negotiations.

They also discuss the ever so many bugs being patched. This is good for organisations that patch, but it will leave a very long tail of unpatched vulnerabilities.

This episode is also available on YouTube

In this podcast episode SOCRadar CISO Ensar Seker and James Wilson chat about the company’s deep dive into the Fortibleed campaign. A small investigation into a curiously open directory on an unknown server expanded into the discovery of an attack that targeted 400,000 Fortinet devices.

As Ensar says, each time the SOCRadar team pulled a single thread, it led to a tapestry of AI-enabled cybercrime. They uncovered custom initial access, persistence and packet sniffing tools, as well as direct links to the INC and Lynx ransomware operations. Most interesting though is the use of AI to design, implement and operate all aspects of the campaign across a team of 20 individual actors. Operating more like a modern software company than a traditional cybercrime gang, Fortibleed serves as our first in-depth look at the future of cybercrime.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss just how important exploits are for cyber operations using data published in a new paper authored by two members of Ukraine’s cyber security agency.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

In this podcast episode Brad Arkin joins James Wilson to discuss how defenders can get ahead of the late-running bugpocalypse. While we’re confident the offensive cybersecurity capabilities of frontier and open-weight LLMs are real, attackers don’t yet seem able to fully utilise them. This creates a window of opportunity for defenders to tackle the threat.

There are a few well-funded and seemingly overlapping industry efforts under way including Athena, Akrites, and Patch the Planet. But, as Brad says in this interview, there’s too much focus on fixing bugs and traditional vulnerability triage, and not enough on exploring how to make entire classes of vulnerabilities inert.

The NSA’s Tailored Access Operations team is back, India bans an app used to hack e-rickshaws, Accenture has another data breach, and a leak exposes a suspected Chinese cyber contractor.

The Risky Bulletin newsletter and podcast will be on an editorial break until July 20.

In this Risky Business sponsored interview, Tom Uren chats with Sublime Security Product Manager AJ Williams about how the company targets its AI use. Rather than throwing its AI agents at everything, Sublime gives them the time-consuming email security tasks that humans don’t want to do.

Its ASA (Autonomous Security Analyst) agent investigates suspicious and user-reported messages, while the ADÉ (Autonomous Detection Engineer) agent writes new detection coverage for attacks that slipped through.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about a new US Supreme Court decision that puts the current EU-US data sharing agreement at risk. American intelligence collection efforts have been at the centre of legal challenges of these on-again off-again data transfer agreements, and if the current agreement were struck down it would cripple Section 702 collection from Europe.

They also discuss Canada’s effort to be more transparent about its active cyber operations, those that degrade and disrupt foreign adversaries.

This episode is also available on YouTube

The DHS inspector general will investigate forced CISA reassignments, Canada hacked a ransomware gang, Taiwan charges two executives with helping Chinese hackers, and new vulnerabilities can disable Hoymiles solar panels.