Anthropic agents went hacking again, South Korea increases its data breach fines, Apple notifies three Turkish ministers of mercenary spyware attacks, and CISA is ready to hire 250 staff.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about how Chinese intelligence services will take advantage of a massive breach of 150 million American drivers licences.

They also discuss the steps the US military is taking to counter adtech device tracking. It’s too slow and not enough.

Finally, they talk about how often cryptocurrency hackers claim to be white hat hackers. Its ludicrous, but suprisingly often it is a successful strategy.

This episode is also available on YouTube

Ukraine’s top prosecutor resigns amid a scam call center scandal, the US accuses Chinese AI companies of industrial-scale distillation, a cyberattack hits medical practices in Luxembourg, and the Liquid Network attacker returns some stolen Bitcoin, but keeps a $50 million bounty.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about whether AI will help cyber defence in critical infrastructure and organisations that are below the cyber poverty line.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

Hackers steal €35 million euros from French notaries, OpenAI agents hacked a German wiki, a new bill will allow the Pentagon to use cyber contractors, and the Five Eyes members tell hacked companies to drop PR spin.

In this Risky Business sponsored interview, James Wilson chats with Authentik Security CEO Fletcher Heisler about how AI is driving a need for privileged access management to adapt.

Fletcher explains Authentik’s approach: each agent has its own identity, begins with no permissions and is tied to a human.

They also discuss transferring ownership when employees leave, mitigating risks of agents creating identities for each other, and whether task-based access could eventually be a better fit than clock-controlled access.

Russia tells data centers to deploy drone defenses, Dropbox discloses a security breach, a new spyware wave hits Serbia, and CISA scraps six free cybersecurity assessment programs.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about China’s long-term shift to getting private companies to build botnets for cyberespionage. A disruption effort from the US this week is good news, but China has been using these networks for a surprisingly long time and will rebuild.

They also discuss a hack at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). It looks like the Qilin ransomware group might have stolen data from the ATF’s CALEA, or lawful intercept system. That’s a big deal!

Finally, they discuss efforts to fix US water sector security. Sprinkling free tools on the problem will have limited impact.

This episode is also available on YouTube

A BGP hijack delivered malicious Virtualizor updates, the White House launches Project Watershed 250, Indian authorities take down a Telegram doxing bot, and Composer packages deliver iOS badness.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about how AI is the perfect hacker, but what makes it perfect for states is the opposite of what makes it perfect for criminals.

This episode is also available on YouTube.