Videos

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about Anthropic’s discovery of an “AI-orchestrated” cyber espionage campaign. To Tom, it feels a research project, but it’s pretty clear it will be really useful for threat actors that aren’t focussed on specific high-priority targets. Think ransomware, Chinese intellectual property theft and North Korean hackers. But it won’t be so good for Western intelligence agencies.

They also discuss Google’s legal disruption of the China-based Lighthouse phishing as a service operation. Surprisingly, it seems to be working!

Finally, they talk about why the memory safe Rust language has been a triple win for Android.

In this sponsored Soap Box edition of the podcast, Andrew Morris joins Patrick Gray to talk about how Greynoise can often get a 90 day heads up on serious vulnerabilities. Whether it’s malicious actors doing reconnaissance or the affected vendors trying to understand the scope of the problem, it seems that mass scanning activity lines up pretty nicely with typical 90-day disclosure timelines.

A fascinating chat with Andrew, as always.

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

• Anthropic says a Chinese APT orchestrated attacks using its AI
• It’s a day ending in -y, so of course there are shamefully bad Fortinet exploits in the wild
• Turns out slashing CISA was a bad idea, now it’s time for a hiring spree
• Researchers brute force entire phone number space against Whatsapp contact discovery API
• DOJ figures out how to make SpaceX turn off scam compounds’ Starlink service

This week’s episode is sponsored by Mastercard. Senior Vice President of Mastercard Cybersecurity Urooj Burney joins to talk about how the roles of fraud and cyber teams in the financial sector are starting to converge. Mastercard also recently acquired Recorded Future, and Urooj talks about how they aim to integrate cyber threat intelligence into the financial world. …

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about the strategic “logic” of Russian wiper attacks on the Ukrainian grain sector.

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about a new Reuters’ report that reveals how Meta is knowingly raking in cash from scam advertisements. It’s around $16 billion worth, and in documents Meta calculates that it outweighs the costs of possible regulatory action.

They also discuss recent state-backed supply chain attacks that have, so far, remained targeted and responsible. Finally they look at the UK’s decision to stop sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug boats in the Caribbean.

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

• The KK Park scam compound in Myanmar gets blasted with actual dynamite
• China sentences more scammers TO DEATH
• While Singapore is opting to lash them with the cane
• Chinese security firm KnownSec leaks a bunch of documents
• Necromancy continues on NSO Group, with a Trump associate in charge
• OWASP freshens up the Top 10, you won’t believe what’s number three!

This week’s episode is sponsored by Thinkst Canary. Big bird Haroon Meer joins and, as usual, makes a good point. If you’re going to trust a vendor to do something risky like put a box on your network, they have an obligation to explain how they make that safe. Thinkst has a /security page that does exactly that. So why do we let Palo Alto and Fortinet get away with “trust me, bro”?…

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss how cyber criminals and even state actors are being dumb about using AI.

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about aggressive US cyber operations targeting the Venezuelan government in President Trump’s first term. These were narrowly successful in that they achieved their immediate operational goals, but they didn’t achieve Trump’s broader policy goal of ousting Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

They also talk about why the adtech ecosystem is a national security problem all round the world and how cybercriminals are collaborating with organised crime to steal cargo from logistics companies.

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

• We love some good vulnerability reporting drama, this time FFmpeg’s got beef with Google
• OpenAI announces its Aardvark bug-gobbling system
• Two US ransomware responders get arrested for… ransomware
• Memento (nee HackingTeam) CEO says: Sì, those are totally our tools getting snapped in Russia
• Hackers help freight theft gangs steal shipments to resell
• A second Jabber Zeus mastermind gets his comeuppance 15 years on

This week’s episode is sponsored by Nucleus Security, who make a vulnerability information management system. Co-founder Scott Kuffer says that approaches for triaging vulnerabilities have started to fall apart, given there are just. So. Many. And they’re all important!…

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss the futility of using aggressive cyber operations to send messages between states.