Risky Business News Podcast

The BlackBasta ransomware group implodes, Russian military hackers target Signal with QR codes, Microsoft patches a Power Pages zero-day, and Meta sues a man who hacked accounts and extorted users.

In this podcast Tom Uren and Patrick Gray talk about the idea of launching a retaliatory campaign to hack Chinese telcos in response to Salt Typhoon’s targeting of US ones. US Senator Mark Warner floated the idea as a way to persuade the Chinese government to pull back Salt Typhoon, but we think that kind of campaign has merit regardless.

They also discuss how Samoa’s CERT calling out APT40 is a big deal. It’s striking to see a small country of 200,000 people calling out Chinese hacking.

VC giant Insight Partners gets social engineered; OpenSSH patches an attacker-in-the-middle bug; Ecuador’s parliament hit by cyberattacks; …and a Monero zero-day awaits a patch.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about the United State’s Vulnerabilities Equities Program, which balances the need for intelligence collection with the need to protect the public. The government recently revealed that in 2023 it released 39 vulnerabilities, but what does this really tell us?

This episode is also available on Youtube.

Sandworm deploys Tor nodes on hacked networks, the UK drops military training for cyber staff, Salt Typhoon’s hacking spree continues, and Russian APTs adopt device code phishing.

In this Risky Business News sponsor interview, Catalin Cimpanu talks with Jimmy Mesta, CTO and Co-Founder of Rad Security (formerly KSOC). Jimmy talks about how companies adopting new AI-based technologies may accidentally expose their infrastructure and data to new threats.

In this podcast Tom Uren and Patrick Gray talk about Apple’s refusal to obey a UK government order to provide the capability to access to encrypted iCloud data. Its the latest round in the ongoing government vs technology fights over warrant-proof encryption, and again it looks like governments will lose.

They also talk about good news in the fight against ransomware. Government actions are putting pressure on the cyber criminal ecosystem, splintering groups and even making it hard to for crooks to convert cryptocurrency to hard cash.

This episode is also available on [Youtube](

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about Israeli spyware vendor Paragon, how and why it positions itself to sell to the US market, and how its capabilities might work.

A short podcast updating listeners on the security news of the last few days, as prepared by Catalin Cimpanu and read by Claire Aird.

UPDATED AUDIO: An earlier version of this podcast audio contained an editing mistake that desynchronised Patrick and Tom’s audio.

In this podcast Tom Uren and Patrick Gray talk about the cyber espionage implications of Chinese AI firm DeepSeek’s recently released models. They will certainly be picked up by various APT crews to try and accelerate their campaigns.

They also discuss the UK NCSC’s attempt to quantify ‘comedy bugs’ and whether EU sanctions against Russian military intelligence officers for a five-year-old cyber espionage campaign targeting Estonia are pointless.