Risky Bulletin

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss the idea that the People’s Republic of China has mobilised its influence operations against the construction of US data centres and its build out of AI capacity.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

A data breach at business analytics platform Klue spreads to security firms, a hacker breaches Brazil’s national alert system, North Koreans are behind the Mastra supply chain attack, and a new, unfixable vulnerability has been found in Apple’s A12 and A13 chips.

A LOT of Fortinet creds have leaked online, Canada’s spy agency allowed to remove a botnet from Canadian devices, a supply chain attack hits the Mastra AI framework, and Europol disrupts SocGolish.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about Anthropic rolling out its latest models only to have them effectively banned by the US government within days. Although the administration’s process for assessing new models is, ahem, amorphous, Anthropic is doing itself no favours by dismissing its concerns. The company needs to show some emotional intelligence and learn how to manage upwards.

They also discuss Section 702 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act collection. The law authorising it has lapsed amidst political shenanigans, but it looks like collection can continue until next year. Plenty of time for kicking of political footballs!

This episode is also available on YouTube

66 members of the Silver Fox cybercrime group arrested in China, the EU will help Ukraine in the event of a major cyberattack, MS-ISAC loses 70% of its members after a DHS funding cut, and S-BOMs are still not widely adopted.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about how NATO is set up to deter conventional conflict, and how that approach is fundamentally unsuited for ongoing, everyday cyber operations that are intended to confound adversaries.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

Almost 2,000 Arch Linux packages have been infected with malware in a supply chain attack, FISA surveillance powers expire for the first time since 2008, the FBI takes down a Chinese phishing service, and a major supply chain attack hits the WordPress ecosystem.

In this Risky Business sponsored interview, Catalin Cimpanu talks with Brandon Dixon, co-founder and CTO of Ent AI, about the company’s innovative use of local LLMs to track user behavior on the endpoint, and add context to suspicious events to detect or prevent malicious activity.

CISA changes federal patching rules due to AI, a House Republican was hacked by Russia, ShinyHunters go on an Oracle hacking spree, and npm will block auto-run install scripts by default.

In this sponsored episode, James Wilson chats with SpecterOps CTO Jared Atkinson about the central role that GitHub has played in recent supply chain compromises. GitHub is where code gets built, tested, and shipped to devices, cloud, and on-prem environments. Understanding the paths an attacker can use to get into GitHub, and where they can pivot to from there, is essential to securing your GitHub repos and CI/CD pipelines.