Risky Bulletin

A hacker wipes Romania’s entire land registry database, Magnet Forensics sues a former employee for leaking an iPhone exploit, an autonomous AI agent hacked Hugging Face, and an unauthenticated remote code execution bug was finally found in WordPress.

In this Risky Business sponsor interview Casey Ellis chats with Haroon Meer from Thinkst about building companies customers don’t hate. Haroon explains why Thinkst still offers Canary tokens for free and why it has avoided annual price hikes on its paid products. They talk about Eric Ries’s “Incorruptible”, Rob Lee’s 100-year-company approach at Dragos, and why keeping customers happy is a better business strategy than chasing easy sugar highs.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about different ways ransomware groups are taking advantage of AI. The relatively new FulcrumSec group uses simple techniques to breach companies and then uses AI to get more leverage over victims in its extortion negotiations.

They also discuss the ever so many bugs being patched. This is good for organisations that patch, but it will leave a very long tail of unpatched vulnerabilities.

This episode is also available on YouTube

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss just how important exploits are for cyber operations using data published in a new paper authored by two members of Ukraine’s cyber security agency.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

The NSA’s Tailored Access Operations team is back, India bans an app used to hack e-rickshaws, Accenture has another data breach, and a leak exposes a suspected Chinese cyber contractor.

The Risky Bulletin newsletter and podcast will be on an editorial break until July 20.

In this Risky Business sponsored interview, Tom Uren chats with Sublime Security Product Manager AJ Williams about how the company targets its AI use. Rather than throwing its AI agents at everything, Sublime gives them the time-consuming email security tasks that humans don’t want to do.

Its ASA (Autonomous Security Analyst) agent investigates suspicious and user-reported messages, while the ADÉ (Autonomous Detection Engineer) agent writes new detection coverage for attacks that slipped through.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about a new US Supreme Court decision that puts the current EU-US data sharing agreement at risk. American intelligence collection efforts have been at the centre of legal challenges of these on-again off-again data transfer agreements, and if the current agreement were struck down it would cripple Section 702 collection from Europe.

They also discuss Canada’s effort to be more transparent about its active cyber operations, those that degrade and disrupt foreign adversaries.

This episode is also available on YouTube

The DHS inspector general will investigate forced CISA reassignments, Canada hacked a ransomware gang, Taiwan charges two executives with helping Chinese hackers, and new vulnerabilities can disable Hoymiles solar panels.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about why we haven’t seen an explosion of devastating hacks even though AI has been used to discover lots and lots of bugs.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

A European MP’s phone was infected by Pegasus spyware, Android drops its PIN guessing limit from 1,800 attempts to 20, Alibaba bans employees from using Claude at work, and there’s a new vulnerability in the Linux kernel.