Risky Bulletin

FatFs bugs enable physical access attacks on industrial equipment, a clever password spraying attack bypasses M365 MFA, an AI agent is deploying ransomware in live attacks, and a webinar platform sues two security firms over bad IOCs.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about Chinese AI labs stealing the special sauce of American AI models in ‘distillation attacks’. These attacks are fed by a grey market in which Chinese consumers buy access to American models, where one of the byproducts is logs of user requests and responses. These make wonderful inputs into distillation attacks and the whole market might be subsidised by Chinese AI Labs paying for these logs.

They also discuss the possibility that last year’s hack of Jaguar Land Rover was caused by a group of Russian hackers. Was it Russians? Was it state-directed or endorsed? Who knows, but even the possibility that it was has some benefits for the Russian state.

This episode is also available on YouTube

An anonymous researcher has dropped a giant cache of zero-day exploits, a sensitive DHS network got hacked, the US Supreme Court restricts geofence warrants, and security firm Huntress has denied accusations of a malicious insider.

In this edition of Between Two Nerds, Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss whether cyber organisations should actually be separated from Signals Intelligence organisations. The Grugq argues that having cyber expertise subordinate to intelligence collection means that many opportunities are never explored.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

The White House asks OpenAI to keep a tight grip on ChatGPT 5.6, the US Secret Service made some appalling OpSec mistakes, AMD has reintroduced a CPU security feature after consumer backlash, and an Iranian APT operator has been arrested in Montenegro.

In this sponsored interview James Wilson chats with Corelight’s VP of Product Vijit Nair about defence strategies for the AI era. When agents can find and exploit vulnerabilities at machine speed, you need to balance between proactive and reactive measures.

On the proactive side, you need modelling of assets and threats. On the reactive side you’ll need telemetry so you can act quickly if a threat becomes a reality.

Corelight makes NDR hardware that runs a heavily optimised version of the Zeek network monitoring tool. Combined with its Agentic Triage product, customers can detect threats in their networks, and monitor the effectiveness of their mitigation strategies.

Law enforcement dismantles two more malware operations, Japan’s army used infected USB drives, Anthropic accuses Alibaba of distillation attacks, and Australia finds “digital dynamite” on critical networks.

Tom Uren and James Wilson talk about the Five Eyes cyber security agencies warning about the arrival of AI-enabled cyber threats. The call-to-action is driven by the recognition that it is no longer possible to limit AI’s offensive cyber security capabilities to benign actors. The genie is out of the bottle, regardless of export controls on frontier models.

They also discuss the progress of Operation Endgame, the multinational joint operation that has been disrupting the cybercriminal ecosystem. It’s been a great success, but criminal enterprises bounce back. Keeping a lid on cybercrime will require continuous disruption programs.

This episode is also available on YouTube.

The FortiBleed hacks are worse than a credentials leak, a new White House executive order sets out a hard 2031 post quantum cryptography deadline, Meta leaks employee keystroke data, and a third of Samsung and LG TVs act as proxies.

In this sponsored interview James Wilson chats with Trail of Bits founder and CEO Dan Guido about its newly announced partnership with OpenAI. Together, they’ve started a new initiative called “Patch the Planet” to support open source maintainers.

Being an open source maintainer is more difficult than ever. Just using frontier models to keep up with all the bug reports isn’t enough. Trail of Bits wants to help maintainers by combining its deep cybersecurity expertise with OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 Cyber.

As Dan points out in this interview, this isn’t just about helping maintainers find and fix bugs. They’re spending just as much time on SDLC improvements, architecture changes, and the foundations needed to make open source sustainable in the AI era.