Risky Bulletin Podcast feed

A hacker breached Hungary’s State Treasury, Russia will mandate 40 apps on all smartphones next year, hackers steal Liechtenstein’s business database, and an AI agent got real CVEs for hallucinated vulnerability reports.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about whether hacker culture is inherently anti-authoritarian and how different states get their country’s hackers to work for the state.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

Anthropic models also did the hacky-hacks, Coldcard was hacked for $70 million in Bitcoin, npm adds publish-time malware scanning, and Russia is behind the recent hotel WiFi hacks.

In this sponsored interview James Wilson chats with Permiso CTO Ian Ahl about detecting ShinyHunters-style attackers as they move through cloud and SaaS environments.

Ian explains how ordinary-looking events such as a password reset, a new MFA device, unusual searches and a first-time AWS role assumption can combine to reveal an intrusion. Permiso’s platform connects these signals across identity providers, cloud platforms and SaaS applications. They also discuss how AI is helping attackers move from initial access to extortion in just four hours.

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.

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.