Risky Bulletin

A non-profit puts a $22,000 bounty on the INC ransomware group, hackers breach the UK Department for Education, Russia charges Telegram founder Pavel Durov, and the FCC bans foreign robots and power inverters.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about open-weight AI models and distillation. These topics have been subject to a lot of US government attention in recent weeks, but let’s not forget that America’s overriding goal is to remain ahead of China in the AI race. There are better ways to do that than overindexing on distillation.

They also discuss Iranian attacks on US critical infrastructure. Given that the war in Iran is unpopular, incidents that make headlines without causing serious impact are perfectly calibrated.

This episode is also available on YouTube

A cyberattack has disrupted water utilities in more than 30 communities in Minnesota, Denmark tests a secondary banking system in case of a cyberattack, North Korea arrests bank hackers, and a new Chinese cyber contractor has been identified.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss how important people are to cyber power and whether the rise of AI is changing that.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

A JSON bug is about to rock the Java world, scam compounds continue in Myanmar despite the junta crackdown, and Google has a new APT naming scheme.

In this sponsored interview James Wilson chats with Airlock Digital co-founders David Cottingham and Daniel Schell about how attackers are using LLMs to enumerate EDR detections.

LLMs dramatically reduce the time and specialist labour needed to extract rulesets out of EDR products. What once might have taken months of manual reversing can now be accelerated by “burning tokens”. The takeaway is that defenders increasingly need to assume attackers have visibility into how their endpoint security products work.

A Russian hacking campaign targets Zimbra servers, the US accuses Moonshot AI of distillation attacks, Iran targets more PLC vendors, and Google adds selfie video to its login options.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about the future of open-weight models. For different reasons, both the Chinese and American governments have reasons to crack down on them.

They also talk about arrests of several members of the Scattered Spider juvenile cybercrime collective.

This episode is also available on YouTube

Rogue OpenAI models were behind last week’s Hugging Face breach, the Linux kernel discloses 442 vulnerabilities as the AI bugpocalypse settles in, France becomes the first EU country to pass a social media age limit, and Germany takes down the Kratos phishing service.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss what mainland Chinese analysts think about Russia’s use of cyber operations in the war in Ukraine.

This episode is also available on YouTube.