Videos

In this edition of the Snake Oilers podcast three vendors stop by to pitch the audience on their products:

• watchTowr: We’re all familiar with watchTowr’s research, but what do they actually do? (https://watchtowr.com/))
• XBOW: The AI pentesting company pitches its approach (https://xbow.com/))
• CoreView: Your M365 tenant is probably a security disaster. Tame it with CoreView! (https://www.coreview.com/))

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about how Chinese intelligence services will take advantage of a massive breach of 150 million American drivers licences.

They also discuss the steps the US military is taking to counter adtech device tracking. It’s too slow and not enough.

Finally, they talk about how often cryptocurrency hackers claim to be white hat hackers. Its ludicrous, but suprisingly often it is a successful strategy.

On this week’s show Patrick Gray and James Wilson are joined by guest co-host Robby Winchester from SpecterOps to talk through the week’s news, including:

• ID verification company IDScan was breached and 153m driver licenses wound up for sale online. Cue the barrage of lawsuits
• The US government plans to pay private contractors to conduct military hacks
• The US accuses China of distillation attacks, a.k.a. forbidden training
• It’s Wednesday, so OpenAI’s agents escaped sandboxes again and passed notes around on a German Wiki
• Much, much more…

This week’s show is brought to you by Sublime Security. Sublime’s head of detection engineering Randy Pargman joins the show to chat about how the company is preparing for prompt injection attacks to move from being largely theoretical to commonplace….

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about whether AI will help cyber defence in critical infrastructure and organisations that are below the cyber poverty line.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about China’s long-term shift to getting private companies to build botnets for cyberespionage. A disruption effort from the US this week is good news, but China has been using these networks for a surprisingly long time and will rebuild.

They also discuss a hack at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). It looks like the Qilin ransomware group might have stolen data from the ATF’s CALEA, or lawful intercept system. That’s a big deal!

Finally, they discuss efforts to fix US water sector security. Sprinkling free tools on the problem will have limited impact.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about how AI is the perfect hacker, but what makes it perfect for states is the opposite of what makes it perfect for criminals.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about evidence that Chinese APT groups are using AI in a really sensible way, to beef up their malware arsenal. This will make it harder for threat intel firms to cluster activity for attribution.

They also discuss the US disrupting Iranian hackers by revealing that some of them are hacking the country’s own firms. That’s a new tactic, but making that information public in a Treasury Department sanctions package doesn’t really make sense.

On this week’s show Patrick Gray and James Wilson are joined by guest co-host Ollie Whitehouse, the CTO of the UK’s NCSC, to talk through the week’s news, including:

• Iranian hackers take down a small-scale power generator in the UK
• Siemens PLCs in critical US sectors are also being targeted… We’re stumped on who could be behind that one, too.
• Microsoft fixed a CVSS 10 deserialisation bug in Entra before someone else found it and owned the planet
• Prompt injection isn’t going away
• LLMs are deceiving us meat sacks and it’s a worry
• Much, much more…

This week’s show is brought to you by Okta. VP of Threat Intel Brett Winterford joins the show in this week’s sponsor interview to talk James through how the company is turning its plethora of accumulated data into free alerting for its customers. They also chat about Okta’s new threat intelligence product line….

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about whether the increasing use of AI will make it harder for forensics teams to determine who is responsible for a hack.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about President Donald Trump’s memo enlisting the US private sector to tackle cybercriminals. The initiative gets the big idea right: traditional law enforcement approaches have not worked against cybercriminals so the government has turned to disruption operations, but there simply isn’t enough government capacity. So it is time to bring in the private sector.

They also discuss Ukraine’s combined cyber and kinetic strikes against Wildberries, the logistics company that is called the Amazon of Russia. These cyber operations didn’t amplify the effects of kinetic strikes, but it is great propaganda to say that they did.