Risky Bulletin Podcast feed

An OpenSSH authentication bypass bug hits Alpine Linux and OpenWRT, hackers attempt to raise fridge temperatures at French blood banks, a French bank gets hacked for $133 million, and the Thai opposition has been targeted with spyware.

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about North Korea’s hack of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. Binance’s founder CZ says it is a wake up call for real banks, but he’s wrong. Even though they are probably just as hackable as crypto exchanges, real banks cooperate to reverse fraudulent transactions and it is far harder to get away with billions.

They also discuss the pressure being felt in tech firms everywhere to speed up software development using AI. From a security perspective, results will be mixed.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

Hackers brick Chinese EVs in Russia, a second wave of hacks defrost European supermarket freezers, the US boots Acronis from government networks and the major distros patch a Linux kernel RCE.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss CISO’s expectations and priorities regarding budgets and what they will spend their money on. AI features heavily in 2027 priorities, but what will it deliver?

This episode is also available on YouTube.

The FBI links the Binance hack to North Korea, game developers are being extorted with game-cloning threats, the Belarusian CyberPartisans hack Russia’s statistics service and Apple sends new mercenary spyware notifications.

In this Risky Business News sponsor interview, Catalin Cimpanu talks with Luke Wescott, Threat Detection Engineer at Sublime Security. Luke talks through the rise of calendar-based phishing campaigns over the past year and the reasons behind it.

Billions stolen from Binance in a crypto hack, Last week’s PHP2Shell bugs are being exploited to hack Palo Alto Networks firewalls, The Brotli bugs also get a run, Belarusian state hackers carry out a wiper attack, and a hacker leaks the data of 41,000 DHS employees.

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about new research that shows that Chinese open-weight AI models can be reeducated to remove pro-CCP bias. Good news for American businesses that want cheap AI, but we suspect that many knives will still be out for Chinese open-weight models.

They also discuss the near-misses from the PHP and Brotli bugs. We collectively dodged the bullet so that we only got grazed, but the good luck won’t last forever.

Finally, Tom looked at CISA’s 2030 strategy. Amazingly, it doesn’t really mention AI at all. Bizarre!

This episode is also available on YouTube.

Moldova takes down more than 80 public services after a cyberattack, the White House launches a new cybersecurity pilot program, South Korea arrests an AI-assisted cybercrime ring, and the Electrum wallet patches a crypto-stealing bug.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about security culture. The PHP foundation seems to have had a change of heart about security, but what are the chances that OpenAI or other frontier AI labs will start to take it seriously?

This episode is also available on YouTube.