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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 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.

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.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about why we haven’t seen an explosion of devastating hacks even though AI has been used to discover lots and lots of bugs.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

A European MP’s phone was infected by Pegasus spyware, Android drops its PIN guessing limit from 1,800 attempts to 20, Alibaba bans employees from using Claude at work, and there’s a new vulnerability in the Linux kernel.

FatFs bugs enable physical access attacks on industrial equipment, a clever password spraying attack bypasses M365 MFA, an AI agent is deploying ransomware in live attacks, and a webinar platform sues two security firms over bad IOCs.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about Chinese AI labs stealing the special sauce of American AI models in ‘distillation attacks’. These attacks are fed by a grey market in which Chinese consumers buy access to American models, where one of the byproducts is logs of user requests and responses. These make wonderful inputs into distillation attacks and the whole market might be subsidised by Chinese AI Labs paying for these logs.

They also discuss the possibility that last year’s hack of Jaguar Land Rover was caused by a group of Russian hackers. Was it Russians? Was it state-directed or endorsed? Who knows, but even the possibility that it was has some benefits for the Russian state.

This episode is also available on YouTube