Breach Please

Folks, our apologies. We didn't realize how bad the audio was with a given microphone/computer setup was for Riverside (our recording platform). We re-recorded and honestly, not only is the audio better, but it's a MUCH better episode overall.

On September 11, 2026, reporting requirements baked into the EU Cyber Resiliency Act came into force. The requirements apply to any vendor that sells or makes available for sale digital products (including SaaS, yes, you too) in the EU. You don't have to be an EU company. Reporting timelines are extremely tight, with 24 and 72 hour initial triggers. Fines for noncompliance are huge. This is something several of our clients don't realize applies to them, so we figured it was a good idea to do an episode on it.

We're not lawyers, so you should read what some actual lawyers wrote on the subject if you want more information:

https://www.taylorwessing.com/en/insights-and-events/insights/2026/09/cra-reporting-requirements

In this episode, I sit down with Golan Myers with Bloom Security and discuss what EDR is missing in its visibility. We then discuss some of the findings from his research and Bloom Security and what they're doing to solve the problem.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/golan-myers/

https://bloom.security/

Trezor disclosed a breach affecting roughly 67,000 US customers, data from orders placed between November 2019 and August 2021. The twist: Trezor had repeatedly requested and received written assurance that this data was deleted, in line with their contract and data policy. It wasn't. Jess and Jake use this as a real-world case study in third-party risk management, why "right to audit" is often a paper tiger control nobody budgets to actually use, and why this is the exact kind of story to proactively brief leadership on before it happens to you.

Second half: a wave of CVEs in PaperCut, the managed print service used heavily in schools and enterprises, letting attackers remotely take over print servers running as SYSTEM. Jess and Jake talk through why that's a bigger deal than it sounds (credential theft, lateral movement, and every sensitive document that crosses the print queue), why these servers so often end up exposed to the internet, and how to actually think about vulnerability risk beyond raw CVE counts.

In this episode:

• Trezor's breach: third-party vendor data that should have been deleted years ago, wasn't
• Why "right to audit" contract language rarely gets used, and what to do instead
• Reducing blast radius: don't retain data you don't need, and if you must, wall it off behind a jump box
• How to brief leadership proactively: "we can do everything right and still get burned"
• PaperCut's remote takeover CVEs: SYSTEM-level access, credential theft, and lateral movement
• Why print servers end up internet-exposed (BYOD, guest Wi-Fi, mobile printing)
• CVE count vs. actual risk: reading vulnerability history like an engineer, not a scorecard
• A tone-deaf vendor sales pitch that used their own vulnerability disclosures as a selling point

Breach Please is a production of JWJH Media LLC. The opinions of our hosts are their own. Nothing in this episode is legal, financial, or security advice. Do your homework before pointing anything we said at prod.

Researchers at security firm Calif found a zero-click exploit chain in WeChat: place a call, the target doesn't even have to answer, and you get code execution on their phone. Chain it with other bugs and you get full device control, on both iOS and Android. Tencent patched it. The bigger problem started after, when the New York Times ran a headline blaming an AI model for building a computer worm that could rapidly hack WeChat accounts.

Jess and Jake walk through what the researchers actually did (AI sped up the process, it didn't discover or weaponize anything on its own), why "the model built a worm" is the kind of sensationalism that makes their actual jobs harder, and why this is fundamentally an attack surface story, not an AI story or even really a WeChat-specific one.

In this episode:

• The WeChat zero-click exploit: how it works, and why the caller needs to already be a contact
• Chaining bugs to go from initial code execution to full device control
• Why "the AI model built a worm" is bad reporting, and what it actually means when researchers say AI sped up their work
• Why this is an attack surface conversation, not an AI-apocalypse one
• The real cost of sensationalist headlines: talking execs down instead of focusing on what matters
• Corporate messaging apps: WeChat, WhatsApp, and why "this is how the business communicates" isn't a security answer

Sygnia published new research on Fire Ant, a threat actor they first tracked in 2025 around hypervisor espionage against vCenter and ESXi. The new report covers something rarer: live compromise of Cisco IOS XR network devices, discovered because a responder noticed a GRE tunnel in network monitoring that didn't exist in the running config and left no trace in the logs. Jess and Jake walk through what that means for defenders, why IOS XR being Linux-based changes the economics of building a backdoor, and why "compromised network devices" remains one of the most underappreciated categories of incident today.

They also get into the ongoing mess of threat actor naming conventions (why one group can have a dozen different names across vendors, and why that's not just marketing), and revisit an earlier debate: is network device security part of zero trust, or a separate problem? Jake asked the internet. The internet had opinions.

In this episode:

• Why one threat actor group ends up with a different name at every vendor, and why that's harder to fix than it sounds
• Fire Ant: Sygnia's research on Cisco IOS XR compromise and a GRE tunnel that left no trace in logs or saved config
• Why IOS XR being Linux-based lowers the cost of building a persistent backdoor from six figures to a scripting problem
• The running-config-vs-saved-config trap during incident response
• Why unencrypted internal traffic means a compromised network device gets credentials, not just topology
• Man-in-the-middle terminology, RC4, Kerberoasting, and why alerting on SPN enumeration breaks down for an on-path attacker
• Why network device security has to be part of zero trust, not an asterisk on it

Breach Please is a production of JWJH Media LLC. The opinions of our hosts are their own. Nothing in this episode is legal, financial, or security advice. Do your homework before pointing anything we said at prod.

Jess opened LinkedIn to a CISO certificate program announcement featuring its full guest lecturer roster. Every single one looked the same. Tarah Wheeler joins Jess and Jake for their first-ever guest episode to talk through why this particular miss is worse than a one-hour conference "manel," what accountability actually looks like when it happens (spoiler: it's not calling out names), and the real cost people pay for pointing it out in the first place.

They also get into an International Security paper on the offense-defense automation gap and why creativity and diverse thinking matter more on the attacker side than AI alone can replace, plus a trip down memory lane through some genuinely bad booth-babe decisions from Black Hat and RSA years past.

In this episode:

• A CISO certificate program's all-white-male guest lecturer lineup, and why a training program is a different problem than a one-off panel
• Why calling this out publicly carries real career risk, especially for the people left off
• What accountability actually looks like: own the mistake, fix it, don't relitigate who's to blame
• The double bind: get dismissed as "not qualified" or "not collegial" for speaking up
• Diversity of thought vs. diversity of background, and why both matter for how you manage and lead
• The offense-defense automation gap: why creativity in attack techniques resists automation in ways defense doesn't
• A look back at some infamous industry moments and how far things have and haven't come

Breach Please is a production of JWJH Media LLC. The opinions of our hosts are their own. For the first time, the opinions of our guest are hers alone and don't represent any employer, client, or official position. None of this is legal, financial, or security advice. Do your homework before pointing anything we said at prod.

Palo Alto's Unit 42 published a report describing a fully automated, agentic AI ransomware attack, complete with an 80-page lessons-learned document the attackers supposedly left behind for the victim. It got picked up and ran with by outlets looking for the AI-apocalypse angle. Jess and Jake go through what the report actually says versus what got exaggerated in the retelling, and call out the pattern of vendors using AI-attack framing to sell their own AI-defense product.

Second half: a stolen API key with no spending cap burned through hundreds of thousands of dollars in usage before anyone noticed. Jess and Jake use it to talk through exposure management, reachability analysis, and toxic combinations, why chasing CVSS criticals alone is the wrong way to prioritize vulnerability management, and where AI can actually help defenders instead of just generating more hype.

In this episode:

• Unit 42's "agentic ransomware" report: what checks out and what's marketing spin
• Why "the threat actor used AI" doesn't mean the defense should be AI-shaped
• Practical advice for stakeholders asking "how do I defend against AI-driven attacks"
• Toxic combinations and why prioritizing by CVSS score alone fails
• A stolen API key with no spending cap and the usage spike that followed
• Exposure management, reachability analysis, and where AI genuinely helps defenders
• Adam Shostack's updated threat modeling book and his PHANTOM-B threat model framework

Show notes:

• Unit 42 report: https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/ai-assisted-cyber-attack-inside-a-unit-42-investigation/
• The Register coverage: https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/02/ai-agents-carried-out-every-step-of-this-ransomware-attack-then-left-the-victim-an-80-page-security-audit/5294009
• API key incident (The Register): https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/01/attacker-stole-a-metr-api-key-used-600k-worth-of-credits-and-no-one-noticed-for-weeks/5293730
• Threat Modeling, 2nd Edition (preorder): https://www.amazon.com/Threat-Modeling-Designing-Adam-Shostack/dp/1394413327
• PHANTOM-B whitepaper: https://shostack.org/files/papers/PHANTOM-B_Whitepaper_Shostack.pdf

Breach Please is a production of JWJH Media LLC. The opinions of our hosts are their own. Nothing in this episode is legal, financial, or security advice. Do your homework before pointing anything we said at prod.

In this episode of Breach Please, Jake and Jess talk about the suspected IDScan.net breach. We discuss whether a situation like this is a data breach for your org if you "only" use a third party processor to verify identity. We decide this is a question best left for external counsel (with the cover of their malpractice insurance). We discuss the difficulties of saying "third party risk management will fix this" and challenge snake oil vendors not to use that line. Finally, we discuss how we might change architecture of our applications in the future.

Source article: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selling-153m-drivers-licenses/

A CVSS 8 elevation-of-privilege bug in on-prem Exchange looks unassuming until you dig into what it actually grants an attacker. Jess and Jake break down the proxy flaw, why "authorized attacker" is doing a lot of quiet work in that description, and why this is one of the rare moments defenders get a head start before exploitation goes wide.

Jake's course at Wild West Hackin' Fest: https://www.antisyphontraining.com/product/hands-on-ai-security-risk-assessment-with-jake-williams/

In this episode, Jake and Jess talk about the IT availability issue occurring at Boston Scientific (be real, it's almost certainly ransomware). Then we talk about ransomware response, immutable backups (and specifically what they DON'T get you), and rabbit hole in the ransomware discussion several times.

Jake also reps #SAINTCON - you should go if you get the opportunity (tickets for this year are sold out, but you can get on the standby list).

https://saintcon.org/

Speaking of conferences, Wild West Hackin' Fest is about a month away and Jake still has a few in-person seats left in his class (expected to sell out this week or next) and unlimited seats in his virtual training. You'll leave after two days ready to perform AI Risk Assessments.

https://www.antisyphontraining.com/product/hands-on-ai-security-risk-assessment-with-jake-williams/