Videos

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq how the use of cyber operations in the war in Ukraine has evolved over time.

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about the argy-bargy between the Pentagon and AI company Anthropic. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is demanding that all safeguards are lifted from Claude, while Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is insisting on protections against mass surveillance of Americans and use in lethal autonomous weapons.

They also discuss the return of Volt Typhoon, the Chinese hacker group prepositioning in critical infrastructure for sabotage in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. The group is still around, even though the US government declared victory against it last July.

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

• Low skill actors compromise 600 Fortinets with AI-generated playbooks
• Anthropic calls out Chinese AI firms over model distillation
• Meta’s director of AI safety tells her ClawdBot not to delete her mail… so of course it does
• Peter Williams cops 7 years in jail for selling L3 Harris Trenchant’s exploits to Russia
• Ivanti got hacked in 2021 via… bugs in Ivanti

This episode is sponsored by line-rate network capture system Corelight. CEO Brian Dye joins to discuss what AI can do for defenders, and what it can’t. …

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about how ‘professional’ Five Eyes cyber espionage agencies like NSA will use AI. These agencies place a premium on stealth and won’t yolo AI

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about a groundswell of calls from European officials to build cyber capabilities to strike back against adversaries. There are good reasons that countries should have their own cyber capabilities, but if you don’t have the political will to strike back, having a magic cyber weapon doesn’t really make a difference.

They also talk about ‘distillation attacks’. They are a way that AI developers can steal the secret sauce of advanced models just by asking questions. It looks like American companies need government assistance if the US wants to keep its AI lead.

There’s a lethal trifecta of AI risks: access to private data, exposure to untrusted content, and external communication. In this conversation, Risky Business host Patrick Gray chats with Josh Devon, the co-founder of Sondera, about how to best address these risks.

There is no magic solution to this problem. AI models mix code and data, are non-deterministic, and are crawling around all over your enterprise data and APIs as you read this.

But in this sponsored interview, Josh outlines how we can start to wrap our hands around the problem.

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

• Palo Alto threat researchers want to attribute to China, but its management says shush
• An increasing proportion of ransomware is data extortion. Is this good?
• Cambodia says it’s going to dismantle scam compounds
• CISA sufferers through yet another shutdown
• Google Gemini’s training secrets are being systematically harvested to improve other LLMs
• Academics assess SaaS password managers’ resilience against a malicious server

This episode is sponsored by SSO-firewall integration vendor Knocknoc. Chief exec Adam Pointon joins to talk about the latest in defences… which is to say Knocknoc for Solaris/Sparc and HPUX on PA-RISC?! Okay also that other little known OS… Windows. …

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss whether middle powers should be investing in military cyber capabilities.

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s messaging around personnel changes at the top of its security organisation. These signal a focus on selling security products rather than on making secure products.

They also discuss Expedition Cloud, a Chinese cyber range that replicated the critical infrastructure of neighbouring countries, apparently to develop and fine-tune cyber disruption operations.

Finally, they talk about what we’ve learnt about the role of cyber operations in the US bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities. It was far bigger than we previously thought.

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

• Microsoft reshuffles security leadership. It doesn’t spark joy.
• Russia is hacking the Winter Olympics. Again. But y tho?
• China-linked groups are keeping busy, hacking telcos in Norway, Singapore and dozens of others
• Campaigns underway targeting Ivanti, BeyondTrust and SolarWinds products
• An unknown hero blocks 23/tcp on the US internet backbone
• And James Wilson pops into talk about Claude’s go at a C compiler

This episode is sponsored by Ent.AI, an AI startup that isn’t quite ready to tell us all what they’re doing. But nevertheless, founder Brandon Dixon joins to discuss AI’s role in security. Where does language-based understanding take us that previous methods couldn’t?…