Podcasts

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

An anonymous researcher has dropped a giant cache of zero-day exploits, a sensitive DHS network got hacked, the US Supreme Court restricts geofence warrants, and security firm Huntress has denied accusations of a malicious insider.

On this week’s show Patrick Gray, Adam Boileau and James Wilson discuss the week’s cybersecurity news. They cover:

• Anthropic’s Fable 5 returning while OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 gets thrown in model jail
• Distillation, cheap tokens, and AI chat harvesting is an industry in China
• Edge becomes a lolbin via a new malicious extension
• An Iranian APT boss’s vacation in a beautiful place goes wrong
• Much, much more!

In this week’s sponsor interview Daf Stuttard and Katie Warren from Portswigger pop along to talk about how they built an AI security testing product that people would actually feel comfortable using.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

In this podcast episode James Wilson chats with Karsten Nohl about his research into using local LLMs to replace cloud AI in security code reviews.

In essence, Karsten created a hybrid code reviewing system where both cloud and local models are used to orchestrate, triage outputs, and write reports. In this system, only the local LLMs have source code access, with the cloud models used to manage the local models.

In this “source-local” review technique, the source code never leaves the local endpoint, which is a requirement for some reviews. But funnily enough, Karsten was able to use this system to generate findings that were as impressive as when using frontier models directly.

In a nutshell, Karsten proved it’s possible to use locally-hosted, open-weight models running on commodity hardware to produce findings comparable to those discovered by frontier cloud models.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds, Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss whether cyber organisations should actually be separated from Signals Intelligence organisations. The Grugq argues that having cyber expertise subordinate to intelligence collection means that many opportunities are never explored.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

The White House asks OpenAI to keep a tight grip on ChatGPT 5.6, the US Secret Service made some appalling OpSec mistakes, AMD has reintroduced a CPU security feature after consumer backlash, and an Iranian APT operator has been arrested in Montenegro.

In this sponsored interview James Wilson chats with Corelight’s VP of Product Vijit Nair about defence strategies for the AI era. When agents can find and exploit vulnerabilities at machine speed, you need to balance between proactive and reactive measures.

On the proactive side, you need modelling of assets and threats. On the reactive side you’ll need telemetry so you can act quickly if a threat becomes a reality.

Corelight makes NDR hardware that runs a heavily optimised version of the Zeek network monitoring tool. Combined with its Agentic Triage product, customers can detect threats in their networks, and monitor the effectiveness of their mitigation strategies.

Law enforcement dismantles two more malware operations, Japan’s army used infected USB drives, Anthropic accuses Alibaba of distillation attacks, and Australia finds “digital dynamite” on critical networks.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about the Five Eyes cyber security agencies warning about the arrival of AI-enabled cyber threats. The call-to-action is driven by the recognition that it is no longer possible to limit AI’s offensive cyber security capabilities to benign actors. The genie is out of the bottle, regardless of export controls on frontier models.

They also discuss the progress of Operation Endgame, the multinational joint operation that has been disrupting the cybercriminal ecosystem. It’s been a great success, but criminal enterprises bounce back. Keeping a lid on cybercrime will require continuous disruption programs.

This episode is also available on YouTube.