In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about cyber’s ‘hard problems’ and why they are intractable.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

A major exodus of leadership is underway at CISA, the US government will audit NIST over its vulnerability backlog; an ancient and mysterious APT has been linked to Spain’s government, and the SVG image format is great for phishing.

In this Risky Business News sponsor interview, Catalin Cimpanu talks with Bobby Filar, Head of Machine Learning at Sublime Security. Bobby takes us through the rising problem of spam bombing, or email bombing, a technique threat actors are increasingly using for initial access into corporate environments.

Law enforcement takes down the DanaBot and Lumma Stealer malware operations, the US government wants a centralized data broker platform, Turkey dismantles a Chinese IMSI catcher spy ring, and Russia hacked border cameras to track Ukrainian military aid.

Tom Uren and Patrick Gray talk about how Telegram took down the two largest ever criminal marketplaces recently. They used Telegram for all their communications and had collectively sold over USD$30 billion in illicit products. The pair discuss why Telegram is now cooperating with authorities after historically being reluctant and whether this assistance will continue.

They also discuss how Meta is awash with scam advertisements and how Chinese mobile app encryption is suspiciously awful.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

DDoSecrets archives 400GB of stolen TeleMessage data, the FBI closes its FISA watchdog office, Predatorgate lawsuit delayed due to interpreter shortage, and a wave of DDoS attacks disrupt Russian government portals.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq examine what makes it hard for even competent hackers to contribute to state-backed espionage agencies.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

Japan passes a new active cyber defense law, printer software gets shipped with malware, a UK telco leaks user data and geolocation via its 4G network, and Volkswagen patches major bugs in its mobile app.

In this Risky Bulletin sponsor interview Justin Kohler, Chief Product Officer at SpecterOps talks to Tom Uren about the impossible challenge of managing identity directory services securely. Organisations try to implement the principle of least privilege but have no idea if they have done a good job. Justin talks about approaches SpecterOps is developing to address this problem.

Coinbase was extorted by hackers who bribed employees for user data, America’s largest steel producer halts production after a cyberattack, Scattered Spider shifts to targeting US retailers, and the US abandons plans to protect Americans from data brokers.