Podcasts

A non-profit puts a $22,000 bounty on the INC ransomware group, hackers breach the UK Department for Education, Russia charges Telegram founder Pavel Durov, and the FCC bans foreign robots and power inverters.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about open-weight AI models and distillation. These topics have been subject to a lot of US government attention in recent weeks, but let’s not forget that America’s overriding goal is to remain ahead of China in the AI race. There are better ways to do that than overindexing on distillation.

They also discuss Iranian attacks on US critical infrastructure. Given that the war in Iran is unpopular, incidents that make headlines without causing serious impact are perfectly calibrated.

This episode is also available on YouTube

A cyberattack has disrupted water utilities in more than 30 communities in Minnesota, Denmark tests a secondary banking system in case of a cyberattack, North Korea arrests bank hackers, and a new Chinese cyber contractor has been identified.

On this week’s show special guest co-host Pete Ranks, the former director of the CIA’s Centre for Cyber Intelligence, joins Patrick Gray and James Wilson to discuss the week’s cybersecurity news. They cover:

• Everyone signs the open weights open letter, except Anthropic… of course.
• OpenAI had no idea it had hacked Hugging Face
• Kimi K3 open weights released and they’re massive!
• Why a more aggressive response is needed to cyber attacks on OT
• And much, much more!

This week’s show is brought to you by SpecterOps. In this week’s sponsor interview Justin Kohler and Jared Atkinson talk about how SpecterOps’ Bloodhound now supports AWS attack paths. Run it against your AWS infra, but only if you have a strong stomach. The results will terrify you.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

The US government is flirting with the idea of regulating most open weight models out of existence. What would that mean for everyone who’s currently using them?

Policymakers who just look at the benchmarks and token costs might think frontier and open weight AI models are all interchangeable. That they can just banhammer them without causing any disruption. That’s far from the truth.

In this solo podcast, James Wilson looks beyond the US vs China AI race rhetoric and instead games out what the real world consequences of the US government slapping bans on AI models could be.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss how important people are to cyber power and whether the rise of AI is changing that.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

A JSON bug is about to rock the Java world, scam compounds continue in Myanmar despite the junta crackdown, and Google has a new APT naming scheme.

In this sponsored interview James Wilson chats with Airlock Digital co-founders David Cottingham and Daniel Schell about how attackers are using LLMs to enumerate EDR detections.

LLMs dramatically reduce the time and specialist labour needed to extract rulesets out of EDR products. What once might have taken months of manual reversing can now be accelerated by “burning tokens”. The takeaway is that defenders increasingly need to assume attackers have visibility into how their endpoint security products work.

A Russian hacking campaign targets Zimbra servers, the US accuses Moonshot AI of distillation attacks, Iran targets more PLC vendors, and Google adds selfie video to its login options.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about the future of open-weight models. For different reasons, both the Chinese and American governments have reasons to crack down on them.

They also talk about arrests of several members of the Scattered Spider juvenile cybercrime collective.

This episode is also available on YouTube