In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss how important people are to cyber power and whether the rise of AI is changing that. This episode is also available on YouTube.

A JSON bug is about to rock the Java world, scam compounds continue in Myanmar despite the junta crackdown, and Google has a new APT naming scheme.

In this sponsored interview James Wilson chats with Airlock Digital co-founders David Cottingham and Daniel Schell about how attackers are using LLMs to enumerate EDR detections. LLMs dramatically reduce the time and specialist labour needed to extract rulesets out of EDR products. What once might have taken months of manual reversing can now be accelerated by “burning tokens”. The takeaway is that defenders increasingly need to assume attackers have visibility into how their endpoint security products work.

A Russian hacking campaign targets Zimbra servers, the US accuses Moonshot AI of distillation attacks, Iran targets more PLC vendors, and Google adds selfie video to its login options.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about the future of open-weight models. For different reasons, both the Chinese and American governments have reasons to crack down on them. They also talk about arrests of several members of the Scattered Spider juvenile cybercrime collective. This episode is also available on YouTube

Rogue OpenAI models were behind last week’s Hugging Face breach, the Linux kernel discloses 442 vulnerabilities as the AI bugpocalypse settles in, France becomes the first EU country to pass a social media age limit, and Germany takes down the Kratos phishing service.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss what mainland Chinese analysts think about Russia’s use of cyber operations in the war in Ukraine. This episode is also available on YouTube.

A hacker wipes Romania’s entire land registry database, Magnet Forensics sues a former employee for leaking an iPhone exploit, an autonomous AI agent hacked Hugging Face, and an unauthenticated remote code execution bug was finally found in WordPress.

In this Risky Business sponsor interview Casey Ellis chats with Haroon Meer from Thinkst about building companies customers don’t hate. Haroon explains why Thinkst still offers Canary tokens for free and why it has avoided annual price hikes on its paid products. They talk about Eric Ries’s “Incorruptible”, Rob Lee’s 100-year-company approach at Dragos, and why keeping customers happy is a better business strategy than chasing easy sugar highs.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about different ways ransomware groups are taking advantage of AI. The relatively new FulcrumSec group uses simple techniques to breach companies and then uses AI to get more leverage over victims in its extortion negotiations. They also discuss the ever so many bugs being patched. This is good for organisations that patch, but it will leave a very long tail of unpatched vulnerabilities. This episode is also available on YouTube