In this episode of Beers with Talos, Hazel, Bill, Dave and Joe are joined by Kendall McKay to dive into the soap opera of modern cybercrime. From rival gangs launching smear campaigns against one another to reputation systems, trusted intermediaries and dark web "customer reviews". Turns out, every ransomware operation is one passive-aggressive group chat message away from falling apart. Kendall chats to us about how AI is changing the economics of cybercrime, why it's helping inexperienced a...

In this episode of Beers with Talos, Hazel, Bill, Dave and Joe are joined by Talos Security Research Engineer James Nutland to discuss Living Off Trusted Services (LOTS) - a growing technique where attackers use platforms such as GitHub, Google Drive, Microsoft services and Telegram for command and control, malware delivery and data exfiltration. We explore why this trend is growing, how it differs from Living Off the Land (LOTL)....and Lord of the Rings (LOTR)....why trusted services create ...

AI is accelerating vulnerability discovery, so what impact is that having on defenders? In this episode of Beers with Talos, Hazel, Bill, Joe, and Dave are joined by Nick Biasini to unpack what attackers are doing with AI-assisted vulnerability discovery, why local models rather than frontier models may be a more attractive route for them, and the vendors who are now drowning in a flood of bug reports (many of them junk) as AI sifts through decades of technical debt with nothing but time and ...

Hazel, Dave and Joe plot to celebrate Bill's 25 years at Talos with stories and a good old fashioned roast. The team also covers the latest security headlines, including AI-assisted vulnerability research, and why attackers still can’t resist abusing trusted systems (or Roblox). They also break down the latest Cisco Talos Incident Response Quarterly Trends report, including: Phishing’s return as the top initial access vectorAI-generated credential harvesting pages built in minutesCrimson Coll...

Hazel, Bill, Joe and Dave break down (sometimes in the literal sense) the 2025 Talos Year in Review which is available now at blog.talosintelligence.com/2025yearinreview The team, supported as always by the Turkey Lurkey Man, dives into the biggest cybersecurity trends of the year, including: · The rapid weaponization of vulnerabilities · Why identity abuse showed up everywhere · Ransomware trends ·&nbsp...

It's the one, the only, it's Matt Olney! We are delighted to have Matt back to talk with the crew about about the most random things, including TikTok diagnosing us with ADHD, inspiring vtubers, K-Pop Demon Hunters, ransomware in hospitals (the serious bit), attacker use of AI, why 1999-era tricks are still undefeated, and an entirely reasonable number of desserts. We recorded this episode on 20 February - please see the Talos blog for the latest on the developing situation in the Middle East...

Guess who’s back? Hazel, Bill and Joe welcome back fresh-from-parental-leave Dave Liebenberg, who has returned with a new baby, and some truly chaotic Thanksgiving opinions. We kick things off with the security headlines. Joe gets spicy about a recent “AI-orchestrated cyber campaign” report. Dave brings us the poetic news that AI models can apparently be jailbroken with a well-placed limerick. Hazel challenges the others to a guessing game about just how much cyberatt...

Talos' Vice President Christopher Marshall (the “real Marshall,” much to Joe’s displeasure) joins Hazel, Bill, and Joe for a very real conversation about leading people when the world won’t stop moving. We start with Marshall’s days in the Navy’s nuclear program and the art of translating deeply technical work for non-technical leaders. We then get into how he joined Talos (“you WILL do this for me”), why being right beats being first, and how to keep a team steady and mission focussed when t...

This week, the B-Team gets an upgrade as we’re joined by Sara McBroom from Talos’ nation-state threat intelligence and interdiction team. Sara shares her journey from a liberal arts major to tracking some of the world’s most advanced adversaries. Along the way, she talks about moving from the U.S federal service to Talos, mentoring, leading with empathy, and why making bad actors miserable is a pretty good day’s work. Before diving into Sara’s story, we hit the security headlines (ouch) and a...

We welcome new Talos teammate and incident commander Alex Ryan to the pod this week. Bill, Joe and Hazel chat with Alex about what it really takes to lead through the chaos of a cybersecurity incident, from coordinating stressed-out teams, fielding exec questions, and making sure people eat. Much to Bill's dismay, we have something resembling a "format" for this episode, and we start by breaking down the week's security news, including: The SharePoint zero-day exploit (“ToolShell”) and what d...