Risky Bulletin

Expired credit cards can be used for malicious transactions, Iranian hackers shut down a UK power plant, the Lazarus Group hacks South Korea’s Presidential Office, and an Android malware strain is infecting smart cars.

In this Risky Business sponsored interview, James Wilson chats with Luke Jennings, Push Security’s VP of Research, about how stronger authentication is pushing attackers towards the authorisation layer.

Device code phishing is on the rise. Luke explains how these attacks can survive passkeys and phishing-resistant MFA and, importantly, how defenders can check if their controls against these attacks actually work.

The US warns of AI-aided attacks against Siemens PLCs, hackers breach Latvia’s road traffic agency, a new hacking tool enrolls an attacker’s passkey to your account, and academics find source code overlaps between Geedge devices and China’s Great Firewall

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about President Donald Trump’s memo enlisting the US private sector to tackle cybercriminals. The initiative gets the big idea right: traditional law enforcement approaches have not worked against cybercriminals so the government has turned to disruption operations, but there simply isn’t enough government capacity. So it is time to bring in the private sector.

They also discuss Ukraine’s combined cyber and kinetic strikes against Wildberries, the logistics company that is called the Amazon of Russia. These cyber operations didn’t amplify the effects of kinetic strikes, but it is great propaganda to say that they did.

This episode is also available on YouTube

Slovakia finds Russian backdoors on its speed cameras, French police used a public exploit to hack EncroChat, Microsoft delays Exchange updates due to a deluge of AI bugs, and a ransomware-affiliate poses as a data recovery firm.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss The Offense Death Cycle, a paper looking at how to take advantage of a defender’s ability to control a network to discover intruders.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

The EU publishes its upcoming cybersecurity standards, hackers breach France’s tax agency, threat actors exploit a GeoServer zero-day hours after disclosure, and an exploit unlocks old AMD CPUs with one instruction.

In this Risky Business sponsored interview, Casey Ellis chats with Socket founder Feross Aboukhadijeh about npm 12’s move to disable install scripts by default. Attackers are already shifting payloads into package source code, and Feross explains why teams need to understand what third-party code actually does before allowing it into their environments.

The White House will let private companies carry out offensive cyber ops, an AI hacking campaign breached Taiwan’s government, a macOS bug was exploited over the internet to drop cryptominers, and Kenya orders internet cafes to store logs.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about the cybercrime ecosystem shifting towards data theft extortion, stealing sensitive data and extracting ransoms from victims by threatening to leak it. For organisations whose reputation is very important to them, data leaks are a bigger threat than having their files locked up.

They also discuss how the rise of AI makes it worth reinvigorating CISA’s Secure by Design initiative.