Videos

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about why we haven’t yet seen an explosion of devastating hacks even though AI has been used to discover lots and lots of bugs.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about Chinese AI labs stealing the special sauce of American AI models in ‘distillation attacks’. These attacks are fed by a grey market in which Chinese consumers buy access to American models, where one of the byproducts is logs of user requests and responses. These make wonderful inputs into distillation attacks and the whole market might be subsidised by Chinese AI Labs paying for these logs.

They also discuss the possibility that last year’s hack of Jaguar Land Rover was caused by a group of Russian hackers. Was it Russians? Was it state-directed or endorsed? Who knows, but even the possibility that it was has some benefits for the Russian state.

On this week’s show Patrick Gray, Adam Boileau and James Wilson discuss the week’s cybersecurity news. They cover:

• Anthropic’s Fable 5 returning while OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 gets thrown in model jail
• Distillation, cheap tokens, and AI chat harvesting is an industry in China
• Edge becomes a lolbin via a new malicious extension
• An Iranian APT boss’s vacation in a beautiful place goes wrong
• Much, much more!

In this week’s sponsor interview Daf Stuttard and Katie Warren from Portswigger pop along to talk about how they built an AI security testing product that people would actually feel comfortable using….

In this podcast episode James Wilson chats with Karsten Nohl about his research into using local LLMs to replace cloud AI in security code reviews.

In essence, Karsten created a hybrid code reviewing system where both cloud and local models are used to orchestrate, triage outputs, and write reports. In this system, only the local LLMs have source code access, with the cloud models used to manage the local models.

In this “source-local” review technique, the source code never leaves the local endpoint, which is a requirement for some reviews. But funnily enough, Karsten was able to use this system to generate findings that were as impressive as when using frontier models directly. …

In this edition of Between Two Nerds, Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss whether cyber organisations should be separated from Signals Intelligence organisations. The Grugq argues that having cyber expertise subordinate to intelligence collection means that many opportunities are never explored.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about the Five Eyes cyber security agencies warning about the arrival of AI-enabled cyber threats. The call-to-action is driven by the recognition that it is no longer possible to limit AI’s offensive cyber security capabilities to benign actors. The genie is out of the bottle, regardless of export controls on frontier models.

They also discuss the progress of Operation Endgame, the multinational joint operation that has been disrupting the cybercriminal ecosystem. It’s been a great success, but criminal enterprises bounce back. Keeping a lid on cybercrime will require continuous disruption programs.

On this week’s show special guest co-host Rob Joyce joins Patrick Gray and James Wilson to discuss the week’s cybersecurity news. Rob served as an advisor to Donald Trump during his first term as president and also served at NSA for 34 years. While at the agency, Joyce led Tailored Access Operations (TAO), and later became NSA’s Director of Cybersecurity.

They cover:

• The surprisingly well done Fortibleed campaign
• Stolen Klue OAuth tokens lead to Salesforce data theft
• OpenAI wants to patch the planet
• runZero gets acquired by Accenture, congrats HD Moore!
• Much, much more!

In this podcast Patrick Gray and James Wilson chat with Decibel Partners founder and Managing Partner Jon Sakoda to talk about pitching cybersecurity startups to VC firms in the AI age.

Coding agents and large language models have made it easier than ever to create software products, but despite this, the bar for what interests an investor is still largely the same. Everyone can run the marathon, but it’s usually the same few folks who finish first.

So tune in to hear Jon share with us his wisdom on when to start the conversation with investors, how to leverage the experience of the founder community, and what founders should watch out for.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss the idea that the People’s Republic of China has mobilised its influence operations against the construction of US data centres and its build out of AI capacity.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about Anthropic rolling out its latest models only to have them effectively banned by the US government within days. Although the administration’s process for assessing new models is, ahem, amorphous, Anthropic is doing itself no favours by dismissing its concerns. The company needs to show some emotional intelligence and learn how to manage upwards.

They also discuss Section 702 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act collection. The law authorising it has lapsed amidst political shenanigans, but it looks like collection can continue until next year. Plenty of time for kicking of political footballs!