Videos

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.

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.

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. …

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.

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.

Show Notes:

From Chaos to Capability: Building the US Market for Offensive Cyber https://sergeybratus.gitlab.io/papers/DartmouthCyberRoundtable2025.pdf…

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….

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk to Joe Devanny, senior lecturer from King’s College London, all about India’s missing cyber power. It has the ingredients to become a cyber superpower, but so far, hasn’t shown the motivation.

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about First Wap, a Jakarta-based company that is selling surveillance-as-a-service. The good news is that it appears that government and media attention has had an impact on high-profile spyware vendors like NSO Group. The bad news is that these smaller players are flying under the radar and aren’t afraid of selling to sketchy customers.

They also talk about how the Chinese government has harnessed the power of its exploit development community with hacking contests.