Videos

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about the Pall Mall Process, an international effort to reign in abusive spyware. Tom thinks the US has already stumbled into a viable carrots and sticks style strategy that will shape the industry more than coming up with standards will.

The pair also discuss news that Chinese Salt Typhoon hackers compromised the calls of senior UK officials in Downing Street. The UK has extensive telecommunications security regulations and the incident makes us wonder what that legislation is actually good for.

In this week’s show Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week’s cybersecurity news. They discuss:

• La France is tres sérieux about ditching US productivity software
• China’s Salt Typhoon was snooping on Downing Street
• Trump wields the mighty DISCOMBOBULATOR
• ESET says the Polish power grid wiper was Russia’s GRU Sandworm crew
• US cyber institutions CISA and NIST are struggling
• Voice phishing for MFA bypass is getting even more polished

This episode is sponsored by Sublime Security. Brian Baskin is one of the team behind Sublime’s 2026 Email Threat Research report. He joins to talk through what they see of attackers’ use of AI, as well as the other trends of the year….

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss how getting pinged hurts state hackers by introducing uncertainty. Publishing technical reports on the hack can actually improve the situation by removing uncertainty about how attackers were detected.

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about the rise of technologies that can undermine internet blackouts such as Starlink and its relatively new direct-to-cell service. Authoritarian internet shutdowns and disasters happen often enough that governments should think about how to take advantage of these new technologies rather than just reacting when crises arise.

They also discuss the nomination of General Joshua Rudd as head of NSA and US Cyber Command.

In this week’s show, Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau discuss the week’s cybersecurity news, joined by a special guest. BBC World Cyber Correspondent Joe Tidy is a long time listener and he pops in for a ride-along in the news segment plus a chat about his new book.

This week news includes:

• Did the US cyber Venezuela’s power grid, or do they just want us to think they coulda?
• US govt might boycott the RSAC Conference ‘cause Jen Easterly being CEO makes them mad
• MS Patch Tuesday fixes CVSS5.5 bug and … stops you shutting down
• Wiz pulls off cloud stunt hack that ends with control of everyone’s AWS console…

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about what information warfare even is, revisit a 30-year-old paper and examine why Western governments struggle with the concept.

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about the Chinese government’s reactive approach to tackling scam compounds. It’s driven by bad news on domestic media and therefore focusses on the compounds that are targeting Chinese citizens. Rather than eliminating the industry, that may instead be shaping the industry to focus on other countries and particularly Americans.

They also discuss the role of disruptive cyber operations in the US’s raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Risky Business returns for 2026! Patrick Gray and Adam Boileau talk through the week’s cybersecurity news, including:

• Santa brings hackers MongoDB memory leaks for Christmas
• Vercel pays out a million bucks to improve its React2Shell WAF defences
• 39C3 delivers; the pink Power Ranger deletes nazis, while a catgirl ruins GnuPG
• Cambodian scam compound kingpin gets extradited to China, and we don’t think it’ll go well for him
• Krebs picks apart the Kimwolf botnet and residential proxy networks
• So many healthcare data leaks that we have a roundup section

This week’s episode is sponsored by Airlock Digital. The founders of the application allow-listing vendor, David Cottingham and Daniel Schell, discuss Microsoft’s ClickOnce .NET app packaging, and how attackers have been abusing it to load code. Airlock hates it when you load code!…

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq about the role of cyber operations in the US capture of Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro.

Tom Uren and Patrick Gray talk about America’s increasing dependence on Chinese manufacturers for electrical sector equipment. This doesn’t seem like a good idea when China is hacking electric utilities for sabotage and PLA researchers are dreaming up ways to attack the grid.

They also discuss the possibility that the US was responsible for a cyber attack on Venezuela’s state oil company and how Russian state-backed hacktivism is so dumb.