Podcasts

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about Peter Williams, the general manager of vulnerability research firm Trenchant, who has pleaded guilty to selling exploits to the Russian 0day broker Operation Zero. It’s a terrible look, but it doesn’t mean the private sector can’t be trusted to develop exploits.

They also discuss a new report’s recommendations to empower the Office of the National Cyber Director. It’s a good idea, but it won’t make up for the cuts in funding and personnel across the Trump administration’s cyber portfolio.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

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

• L3Harris Trenchant boss accused of selling exploits to Russia once worked at the Australian Signals Directorate
• Microsoft WSUS bug being exploited in the wild
• Dan Kaminsky DNS cache poisoning comes back because of a bad PRNG
• SpaceX finally starts disabling Starlink terminals used by scammers
• Garbage HP update deletes certificates that authed Windows systems to Entra

This week’s episode is sponsored by automation company Tines. Field CISO Matt Muller joins to discuss how Tines has embraced LLMs and the agentic-AI future into their workflow automation.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

HackingTeam’s successor is targeting Russia and Belarus, X users must re-enroll their security keys, Chrome will put HTTP behind a warning dialogue, and 15 people are expected to plead guilty in an Italian hacking scandal.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq dissect a recent Chinese CERT report that the NSA had hacked China’s national time keeping service.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

A bug in Microsoft WSUS is under attack, Thailand revokes the citizenship of scam-linked businessman, the US charges high tech poker cheat, and Iran’s top hacking school is breached.

In this sponsored podcast Patrick Gray chats with Knocknoc CEO Adam Pointon about why true Zero Trust architectures never really got there. Spinning up ZTNA access to core applications and slapping SSO prompts on everything else is great, but if we’re honest, it’s not really Zero Trust. So, how and why did we get here?

A change in iOS is deleting-clues of old spyware infections, Starlink disables 2,500 terminals at scam compounds, a Caribbean hospital is still down 5 months after a ransomware attack, and officials are charged in Poland’s Pegasus spyware scandal.

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about how America can better use its private sector to scale up offensive cyber activities, including espionage and disruption operations. Involving it to tackle ransomware and cryptocurrency scammers makes a lot of sense.

They also talk about how the ransomware ecosystem is splintering, and one operator’s relatively quick journey from being an affiliate to a platform operator.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

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

• China has been rummaging in F5’s networks for a couple of years
• Meanwhile China tries to deflect by accusing the NSA of hacking its national timing system
• Salesforce hackers use their stolen data trove to dox NSA, ICE employees
• Crypto stealing, proxy-deploying, blockchain-C2-ing VS Code worm charms us with its chutzpah
• Adam gets humbled by new Linux-capabilities backdoor trick
• Microsoft ignores its own guidance on avoiding BinaryFormatter, gets WSUS owned.

This episode is sponsored by Push Security. Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Jacques Louw joins to talk through how Push traced a LinkedIn phishing campaign targeting CEOs, and the new logging capabilities that proved critical to understanding it.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

A worm hits VS Code users, F5 was breached via its own devices back in 2023, Korea Telecom’s CEO says he’ll resign following a recent security breach, and the Boy Scouts will award cybersecurity merit badges.