Talkin' Bout [Infosec] News

The BHIS crew discusses MonsterCloud’s ransomware decryption fraud, a Canadian cybersecurity executive’s arrest, and strikes on Russian data centers linked to a sharp decline in Yandex bot traffic. AI reverse engineering takes center stage as the team explores game recreations, commercial software clones, Linux vulnerability discovery, and the changing economics of software. They also examine AI-powered threat hunting and deception, a cyberattack on French supermarket refrigeration, fake Claude Code installers, and a controversial critique of passkeys. The episode closes with a preview of questions about AI-generated mathematics and encryption security.

Join us LIVE on Mondays, 4:30pm EST.
A weekly Podcast with BHIS and Friends. We discuss notable Infosec, and infosec-adjacent news stories gathered by our community news team.
https://www.youtube.com/@BlackHillsInformationSecurity

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Chapters
  • (00:00) - PreShow Banter™ — Less Boty on the Internet
  • (08:10) - Russian Data Centers Bombed - 2026-10-12
  • (11:05) - MonsterCloud’s Ransomware Decryption Fraud
  • (15:24) - Canadian Cybersecurity Executive Arrested in Ransomware Case
  • (19:15) - Russian Data Center Strikes and the Drop in Yandex Bot Traffic
  • (24:41) - Drone Threats Prompt B-1 Bomber Withdrawal from the UK
  • (27:22) - AI Reverse Engineers PlayStation 2 Games
  • (28:45) - AI Software Recreations and Linux Zero-Day Discovery
  • (57:22) - Kip Boyle’s “Owning AI Risk” Training and Discount Code
  • (01:00:36) - Cyberattack Disrupts French Supermarket Refrigeration
  • (01:03:17) - ClickFix Campaigns Use Fake Claude Code Installers
  • (01:05:32) - Kip Boyle’s New Book: Gears Don’t Guess
  • (01:07:08) - “Passkeys Are a Trap”: Examining a Controversial Article
  • (01:08:11) - AI Math Breakthroughs and Potential Encryption Risks
  • (01:09:48) - Ashley’s October 28 Webcast: Using AI for Research and Learning
  • (01:13:13) - BHIS Penetration Testing and Incident Response Services
  • (01:14:22) - Bronwen's Proposed Local LLM Workshop

Links
Publix Hurricane cakes are a long-standing tradition of hurricanes
Storm passes as Publix discontinues controversial hurricane cakes

MonsterCloud’s Ransomware Decryption Fraud
Canadian Cybersecurity Executive Arrested in Ransomware Case
Russian Data Center Strikes and the Drop in Yandex Bot Traffic
Drone Threats Prompt B-1 Bomber Withdrawal from the UK
AI Reverse Engineers Classic Games
AI Software Recreations and Linux Zero-Day Discovery
Kip Boyle’s “Owning AI Risk” Training and Discount Code
Cyberattack Disrupts French Supermarket Refrigeration
ClickFix Campaigns Use Fake Claude Code Installers
Kip Boyle’s New Book: Gears Don’t Guess
“Passkeys Are a Trap”: Examining a Controversial Article
AI Math Breakthroughs and Potential Encryption Risks
Ashley’s October 28 Webcast: Using AI for Research and Learning

WWHF Mile High Conference 2027

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Creators and Guests

Host
Bronwen Aker
Bronwen Aker is a BHIS Technical Editor who joined full-time in 2022 after years of contract work, bringing decades of web development and technical training experience to her roles in editing pentest reports, enhancing QA/QC processes, and improving public websites, and who enjoys sci-fi/fantasy, Animal Crossing, and dogs outside of work.
Host
Corey Ham
Corey Ham has been with Black Hills Information Security (BHIS) since 2021 delivering red teaming and OSINT services. Currently, Corey leads the ANTISOC team at BHIS, providing subscription-based continuous red teaming to BHIS clients. Outside of his time at BHIS, you can find him out in the woods or up on a mountain somewhere.
Host
John Strand
John Strand has both consulted and taught hundreds of organizations in the areas of security, regulatory compliance, and penetration testing. He is a coveted speaker and much loved SANS teacher. John is a contributor to the industry-shaping Penetration Testing Execution Standard and 20 Critical Controls frameworks.
Host
Ralph May
Ralph is a U.S. Army veteran and former DoD contractor who supported the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) with information security challenges and threat actor simulations. Over the past decade, he has provided offensive security services at Optiv Security and Black Hills Information Security (BHIS) across various industries. His expertise spans network, physical, and wireless penetration testing, social engineering, and advanced adversarial emulation through red and purple team assessments. Ralph has developed several tools, including Bitor (set to release in January 2025) and Warhorse, which enhance efficiency in penetration testing infrastructure and operations. He has spoken at numerous conferences, including DEF CON, Black Hat, Hack Miami, B-Sides Tampa, and Hack Space Con.
Host
Wade Wells
Wade Wells has been working in cybersecurity for a decade, focusing on detection engineering, threat intelligence, and defensive operations. Wade currently works as a Lead Detection Engineer at 1Password, where he helps build and mature scalable detection programs. Outside of his day-to-day work, Wade is deeply involved in the security community through teaching, mentoring, podcasting, and running local events
Guest
Ashley Knowles
Ashley Knowles joined Black Hills Information Security (BHIS) in Fall 2021. As a Security Consultant, Ashley’s role is to perform network (internal/external), social engineering, and cloud penetration tests, as well as participating in red team assessments. Since joining the infosec community in 2013, she has developed and taught hacking classes, worked as a security consultant, and been a team lead on a red team. Ashley serves as a mentor at a local high school’s cyber security class and, as someone who loves to learn and teach, she looks forward to developing and teaching classes that add to BHIS’s educational catalogue. In her free time, Ashely enjoys photography, hiking and exploring new places with her kids, and building Legos.
Guest
Kip Boyle
Kip Boyle is a husband, dad, entrepreneur, and experienced cyber risk manager. He founded Cyber Risk Opportunities LLC in 2015 after 7 years as the CISO of PEMCO Insurance in Seattle. As a captain on active duty in the US Air Force, he served in the Combat Archer and F-22 Stealth Fighter programs, where he was the director of enterprise network security. These days, he serves as virtual chief information security officer for many customers, including a professional sports team and fast-growing FinTech and AdTech companies. Over the years, Kip has built teams by interviewing hundreds of cybersecurity professionals. And now, he’s sharing his insider’s perspective with you!
Producer
Ryan Poirier
Ryan Poirier began his time at Black Hills Information Security (BHIS) as the Video Producer and Editor in August 2020. Ryan polishes and perfects every webcast, podcast, and workshop on the BHIS, ACM, and WWHF YouTube Channels. Prior to Ryan’s time at BHIS, he worked for one of the largest public schools in the United States, conducting their video production and live broadcasting. He joined the BHIS team because he felt like it would be a great group of people to work with, and he couldn’t pass up the perfect next step in his career. Outside of his time with BHIS, Ryan does freelance photography, attends Cars & Coffee events, and expands his knowledge of audio and videos.

What is Talkin' Bout [Infosec] News?

A weekly Podcast with BHIS and Friends. We discuss notable Infosec, and infosec-adjacent news stories gathered by our community news team. Join us live on YouTube, Monday's at 4:30PM ET.

Ralph May:

What?

Corey Ham:

Yeah. I don't even know what Publix is.

Bronwen Aker:

It's a supermarket chain.

Corey Ham:

Okay. It's

Ralph May:

it's an overpriced, the most expensive now grocery store in Florida. Don't run

Corey Ham:

that way. Dude, there's

Corey Ham:

no way.

Corey Ham:

There's no way. You guys gotta have an arowan or something.

Ralph May:

Like No. There's no one. No. No. No. Half of one.

Bronwen Aker:

Okay. I find it impossible to believe that Publix is more expensive than Whole Foods. Whole Foods isn't that bad.

Corey Ham:

Whole Foods got anarcho capitalism.

Ralph May:

Yeah. They got Amazon cut. They cut off the prices of food a lot. Honestly, I think Whole Foods and Publix have very similar prices.

Corey Ham:

But

Ralph May:

on average, Publix is 100% more expensive than Aldi's. One?

Corey Ham:

Mhmm. I only go to Trader Joe's and Costco, so I can't be bothered.

Ashley Knowles:

Or like I also only go to Trader Joe's and Costco.

Corey Ham:

Yes, Ashley. We can be best friends and talk about... Have you tried the pumpkin Jojo's? Oh my god. Anyway I'll have

Wade Wells:

to play with it on here.

Bronwen Aker:

You you missed the pumpkin spice cookies that I brought to the conference. I never I never brought them up to registration, so I'm sorry.

Corey Ham:

Come on. But after all the podcasting we've done I know.

Ralph May:

All of it.

Bronwen Aker:

Know. Know.

Corey Ham:

After all the podcasting. Oh, we I thought those who pod together those who pod together share their cookies with each other, and I do need a clue about that.

Bronwen Aker:

Culpa. Me a maxima.

Corey Ham:

Okay. Good. That's three Hail Marys and a Mythos.

Wade Wells:

Oh. Did you

Bronwen Aker:

Genu flex. Genu flex. Genu flex.

Wade Wells:

I will say with the new Anthropic stuff, though, because they put out that new push email that was like, oh, everyone re sign up. They did specifically state threat detection and IR, more blue team capabilities, and that was the first time that I'd ever seen them state that, which was cool.

Corey Ham:

No. It's it's cool. It's it's exciting. I think, like, also Google published their, like, date... I forget what it's called, but it's like Gemini, but, like, for blue team use unrestricted under...

Corey Ham:

Like, wide open. Did Wade fade, is he just really good at his, like, I slightly don't believe you poker face?

Ashley Knowles:

No. I think he fell apart. That hurricane got him.

Bronwen Aker:

He looks

Corey Ham:

so suspicious. Look at him. He's like, I don't believe you.

Bronwen Aker:

Totally sus.

Corey Ham:

Guys, I haven't looked at any news articles.

Ralph May:

I haven't. You don't know

Wade Wells:

I'm trying to talking

Ashley Knowles:

about the passkey ones, Kip and I.

Ralph May:

What what what what passkey?

Ashley Knowles:

So basically Someone published

Corey Ham:

a published a very spicy article that just says don't use pass keys.

Ralph May:

Oh, that is spicy.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. So like... But it's just some random substack with someone's name... With no one's name on it.

Ashley Knowles:

It's a trap, guys.

Corey Ham:

You can tell I will say, though. I don't know. Their name is the hack. Does anyone know who this person... We'll talk about it on the news.

Corey Ham:

Does anyone know this person? I don't know who they are. They've only ever posted one thing. One. So it's not like it's posted by, you know, a Kip Boyle or someone that we actually know and trust.

Ashley Knowles:

There are misspellings in the article. So

Corey Ham:

So they didn't write with AI?

Ashley Knowles:

Potentially not written with AI.

Corey Ham:

Well, then I don't believe it. Well, just You don't

Bronwen Aker:

believe anything. What are you talking about?

Corey Ham:

That's true. You know me too well, Bronwen.

Bronwen Aker:

It's a dirty job. Somebody's gotta do it.

Ashley Knowles:

I thought someone said that we're live.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. We've been live. You didn't share your you didn't share your password live on the air?

Ralph May:

Whenever you share, you gotta go full desktop. Don't don't do that window thing. Always full desktop.

Corey Ham:

Oh, my word.

Ralph May:

Let's see. What what else happened?

Corey Ham:

Yeah. What... Well Stuff happened. Yeah. We just we we just talked about the news Wednesday, so it's only been, I like know.

Corey Ham:

Three minutes. We don't even have those

Ralph May:

extra two

Corey Ham:

days. Everyone blogs on Mondays,I found.

Ralph May:

Yeah.

Corey Ham:

It's got one. That... The... Okay.

Corey Ham:

The matter... What is it called? I'm blanking on the name, but this is such a good one. It's gonna be a quick article, but the one about monster cloud is so funny. It's so sad, but also so funny.

Corey Ham:

We'll we'll talk about it. Ryan, roll the figure. Let's go. Wait. Is it too soon?

Ralph May:

No.

Bronwen Aker:

It's too soon. It's only twenty six minutes.

Kip Boyle:

Three minutes.

Corey Ham:

Sorry. Sorry.

Ralph May:

But we also... We could also talk about old Yandex and... You know?

Corey Ham:

Old Yandex? What happened with that? But It went Oh, literal kinetic kinetic index.

Bronwen Aker:

Yeah. Ukraine bombed the bejesus out of it.

Bronwen Aker:

Can you imagine how many old CPUs just got destroyed?

Corey Ham:

Dude, my Xeon Xeon e four twenty four hundred whatever. Yeah. A 100%. Yeah.

Wade Wells:

Just Do

Corey Ham:

you think that was who bought that supercomputer that went up for sale a couple years ago?

Ralph May:

Not on Russia?

Wade Wells:

Yeah. The Yandex.

Corey Ham:

The Yandex

Ralph May:

is not supposedly, the the big effect is all the bots. It's been very less bot... Body on the Internet recently.

Bronwen Aker:

Is... The reporting said that there was a significant drop in bot generated misinformation. What was tracking this? Four zero four media amongst others.

Corey Ham:

Big bot. But did they just Google, like, bot posts per... Like, how do you how do you actually track that? Like, if we know the posts are bots, why are we just tracking them instead of just blocking them? Or is it just all Reddit comments?

Corey Ham:

Reddit comments. What comments are just 50,000 a day? Yeah.

Bronwen Aker:

Reddit, x, you know, all of the open social media.

Ralph May:

If we know they're all bots, why not just block them? You make an excellent point. I don't know. These statistics seem

Bronwen Aker:

Because as soon as you block one, 10 more show up. They're worse than freaking hybrids.

Corey Ham:

The reason they're not blocking it was because they don't wanna make the bot creators mad.

Ralph May:

Yeah. We don't want more.

Kip Boyle:

Well, they're still getting lots of money from all the clicks, right, on the ads. That's still a thing.

Corey Ham:

Oh, yeah. That is true. True.

Bronwen Aker:

Yeah.

Ashley Knowles:

Do you make mini cupcakes?

Corey Ham:

How do you even say the the current hurricane?

Bronwen Aker:

I... Isaiah's.

Corey Ham:

Isaiah's. It's Isaiah's.

Corey Ham:

Okay. But what happened in San Diego? What was your hurricane?

Wade Wells:

Rachel.

Kip Boyle:

Rachel.

Ralph May:

Rachel.

Corey Ham:

Rachel? Okay. Why wasn't it Rachel and Ross?

Wade Wells:

Yeah. Dude, that is a good... Because they named them

Corey Ham:

based on some here. These.

Wade Wells:

Come on. Someone

Kip Boyle:

late.

Wade Wells:

Someone in the in the marketing just didn't Theyk

Ralph May:

already have all the names already picked out too.

Corey Ham:

So they're alphabetical. Not Yeah. Yeah. I thought it

Bronwen Aker:

that the Pacific is ahead in terms of the number of

Corey Ham:

Way ahead.

Bronwen Aker:

Named storms because we're already in the r's, and the Atlantic is only in the eyes.

Wade Wells:

El Nino is messing everything up.

Wade Wells:

Yeah. I talked to... I I prepped for El Nino last two weeks. And What do

Corey Ham:

you mean you prepped? What did you do? Get out your Hawaiian shirt and some cargo shorts?

Wade Wells:

Dude, no. Like, flooding. Like, the thing is, like, San Diego is not ready for rain. Right? So, like

Kip Boyle:

A case of Dos Equis.

Wade Wells:

Dude, I was... Had some, like, drainage in my backyard that's blocked by roots. I made sure my garage was, like, thoroughly draining water. Like, my garage wasn't gonna get flooded. I'm a tell you this.

Wade Wells:

Like, none of my projects passed. Well, I don't live in

Bronwen Aker:

middle of year. I

Corey Ham:

can't You're sandbagging

Wade Wells:

You buy them? I thought you get sandbags for free. I thought that's, like, another thing. Did

Wade Wells:

they go free fill?

Bronwen Aker:

Service will give them out, but they they only give out the plastic ones, and I prefer the burlap because, you know, national flags wanna

Corey Ham:

Bronwen, let me just say, I love that you have a hot take on the correct way to make a sandbag. That's the best thing ever. Alright. Thank you so much for existing. Let's roll the finger, and Bronwen appears to have cut out with that comment.

Corey Ham:

She'll come. Alright. Hold the finger. Hello, and welcome to Black Hills Information Security's Talkin' Bout News. It's 10/12/2026.

Corey Ham:

We just saw you last week live in Deadwood. It was great for those that were there. For those that weren't there, it was terrible. You didn't miss anything. I'm just kidding.

Corey Ham:

You you kinda missed some things. Sadly, Wade didn't give the keynote, but that's okay. We'll allow it.

Ralph May:

Next year. One

Corey Ham:

year. Yeah. Ralph was there. Bronwen was there. Kip, I didn't see you if you were there.

Corey Ham:

I'm so sorry.

Wade Wells:

I didn't get to say

Corey Ham:

hi to you. Ashley was there junior

Ashley Knowles:

pen

Corey Ham:

testing your way to a senior pen tester. You did it. Amazing. Not yet. How's everyone doing?

Corey Ham:

How's everyone doing?

Wade Wells:

Great. I've been good. Sleep for a

Corey Ham:

week. Yeah. That's that's that's fake news. Don't believe that. Anyone that was there knows that I got announced for a promotion.

Corey Ham:

Now I'm now a senior podcaster, which means Wow. I don't do anything differently.

Wade Wells:

You're now you're now a thought leader. Welcome.

Corey Ham:

I'm a I'm a thought leader, which I Mhmm. Basically just means I go John.

Bronwen Aker:

Those beyond.

Wade Wells:

Yeah. It's wild.

Corey Ham:

Is that the voice of John Strand, or am I am I That was

Bronwen Aker:

the voice of John. There he is. Ta da.

Corey Ham:

Such a little worried. There's a lot

Wade Wells:

of hard to

Wade Wells:

ask for approval.

Wade Wells:

Yeah. I had to install Zoom. It was one of those things like, you know what you need to do on this new computer? Install Zoom. And it's like, right now.

Wade Wells:

Okay.

Corey Ham:

New computer? What are you, a billionaire? We can't afford nights.

Wade Wells:

No. I got really, really lucky. So I was gonna buy a new MacBook Pro with 128 gig of memory.

Ralph May:

Yeah. Billionaire right there.

Corey Ham:

Wow. That's worse than a PJ. That's worse than a PJ. Hold on. Hold on.

Wade Wells:

So so I ordered one, and Amazon basically jumped in and said, I think there's fraud on your account because this button that you purchased is usually associated with fraud, so they canceled the order. So I'm sitting, and I'm talking to D Rock and Owen, you know, some tech people at BHIS. And I'm saying, god. They did this. Can you guys order it for me?

Wade Wells:

And Owen's like, you know, we we actually have one that we got, like, two years ago before things were expensive. Do you just want that one?

Corey Ham:

And just just... Yes, please. Go to... You'd ride your horse to the South Dakota Apple store, which is... That would

Wade Wells:

be shit. Alright. Anyway,

Corey Ham:

I guess we should, like, do the podcast.

Wade Wells:

We should do the podcast. Let's

Corey Ham:

do it. I don't think anyone here really needs to be introduced other than... Honestly, Kip, you're you're a regular. I'm... Do you need to be introduced?

Wade Wells:

Everyone's been

Corey Ham:

on here.

Wade Wells:

We've got

Corey Ham:

Ashley been on here before. We got Ashley.

Wade Wells:

Recovered from Wild West Hacking Fest.

Corey Ham:

It was Ashley's, like, usually a pre show banter, and now she's on the news, and I'm happy to see her here. We got Ralph. We got Wade. We got Bronwen, and then, of course, John. So I think first article is I...

Corey Ham:

We gotta talk about the monster cloud thing. This hit my radar right after we did the news on Wednesday. Someone messaged it to me. And, basically, this is the craziest story that is not at all crazy, and everyone could just predict it. So there's this company called Monster Cloud, and this company had ransomware decryption services.

Corey Ham:

But turns out their ransomware decryption services, which claim to rely on special technology, was just the creator going to the ransomware people and just paying for the key. And also Oh god. To... And also charging people two x what he was paying essentially.

Wade Wells:

It's worse than that. He'd paid, like, $10,000 for the key and send them an invoice for a 150 k.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Wow. If Man.

Corey Ham:

If you look overall overall, the, you know, the actual, like... He took in 9,000,000 or he took in 18,000,000 and paid out 9,000,000. So, like, the overall ratio is about two to one. This is obviously wire fraud. I'm actually not a 100% clear on why because it seems like the ransomware negotiation firms are doing the same thing.

Corey Ham:

They're just doing it better and not getting caught. I don't know. It is misrepresentation.

Wade Wells:

This gets... This... You know, they don't get greedy. You know? That's that's the...

Wade Wells:

They don't have the

Corey Ham:

100%.

Wade Wells:

They don't have the, what's it, 10 x markup.

Corey Ham:

That's for their services. This is like blue chip stocks or, I mean, off, like, penny stocks. Yeah. I mean, basically, this is base... Exactly what you would expect.

Corey Ham:

Don't pay the ransom. Like, we can all say that now. You know, if you are paying the ransom, your chances of getting taken advantage of are so much higher. The other fun thing, at least the website, you know, was active when I looked, and they had, like, a bunch of law enforcement testimonials on there. Like, from, like, small from small, you know, like, city of Fort Lauderdale or whatever, like, small police departments who...

Corey Ham:

Like, totally fair. They're not... They can't negotiate ransomware. It's probably like one IT person for the whole company. So I like how

Wade Wells:

it was... He's got... What is it? He's got, like... What is his name?

Wade Wells:

Jack Green or Jack Silver? He had, like, aliases. And, like, wow. I... How come I how come I got stuck with Strand.

Wade Wells:

Js? I just I just

Corey Ham:

Dude, no one forced you into that. You could you could make

Wade Wells:

I know.

Wade Wells:

No. You could totally change your name.

Corey Ham:

You can change it. You gotta get a handle, man. We are nameless.

Wade Wells:

Gotta be nameless.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. My School of Minds and

Wade Wells:

Technology email address in '96 was Strand JS, and that's just who I was. I I wanna be like T Bone. Is that what

Corey Ham:

what they had in

Wade Wells:

in in sign

Wade Wells:

John, it I need

Bronwen Aker:

a quote. Be worse. In 1996, I was Star Pixie. Okay?

Corey Ham:

Alright. Listen. The the opportunities with the word Strand are many. I mean, your own son has created an airline that

Wade Wells:

has My kids have done this. Right? You know, they they clean airplanes, airplanes, and and they they have have stranded stranded aviation. Aviation. And my son has a plow company that...

Wade Wells:

You know, this is the plow company. My son has been up in Bozeman working all day today clearing driveways. That's stranded plowing.

Corey Ham:

They Yes.

Wade Wells:

You're correct.

Corey Ham:

So you could have been stranded in cyberspace.

Wade Wells:

Like, man, it's so Dude, John, you missed out. What? What

Wade Wells:

were you making?

Corey Ham:

Bronwen We needed the version two straight. Pixie.

Wade Wells:

That would've worked.

Corey Ham:

Stranded Pixie. Yeah.

Bronwen Aker:

I'm the Pixie, not you.

Wade Wells:

It would've been stranded, you know, stranded Pixie Girl or something like that.

Corey Ham:

I I don't know. Manic Stranded Pixie Girl? Alright. Anyway Let's

Bronwen Aker:

After a few more monsters, maybe. Does it Jack Silver...

Wade Wells:

What is Jack Silver? They say that he's a known information security professional. Like Correct. Have we ever seen him at DEF CON or Black Hat or anything at all anywhere?

Corey Ham:

I personally haven't. No. But... Yeah. I mean, this...

Corey Ham:

Okay. So second Or is he

Wade Wells:

known to? Right?

Corey Ham:

He was he known to? I mean, I don't know Ralph should know him. Right? He probably gator hunts in your neck of the woods, Ralph.

Ralph May:

Right? I don't... No. I don't.

Wade Wells:

I don't He's like, why would I know him? It's Florida.

Corey Ham:

So all of his all of his law enforcement test... All of his law enforcement testimonials on his website were Florida, but I

Ralph May:

don't know.

Corey Ham:

Okay. Yeah. Anyway, I mean, who knows? Did you guys also see the person, the Canadian guy that got arrested related to ransomware or whatever? I can find the link.

Corey Ham:

But this is, like, people are speculating whether this is, like, related to the FBI shiny hunters thing. No. Yeah. I don't know. I'll find the article.

Corey Ham:

But, basically, I have a few arrests of, like, you know, is it... I'll I'll send you the link.

Wade Wells:

But But, like, they're

Wade Wells:

trying to stole FBI personnel files. Right? Isn't that what you have to relate to?

Corey Ham:

So this is like an exec an exec got arrested. So there's the article. Basically, a Canadian guy who actually we did... Someone in our... My team knew actually who this guy was and apparently worked with him and said he had nothing but negative things to say about this person.

Corey Ham:

He usually had to work with. But since this person's been arrested, Edward who worked as an exec at cybersecurity firms, it's not super clear. Conspiracy to threaten and impair the confidentiality of information. And so, like, I guess it's like, is he tipping off shiny hunters? Is, like, the...

Corey Ham:

Like, you could speculate what he's doing. I don't think it's super clear, but is he, like, giving them good ransom targets? Maybe telling them what the ransom demand should be? Like I wouldn't

Wade Wells:

be surprised.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. It's it's it's that kind of interesting. This is Two people have been arrested who worked for reputable firms in the space of Unquote.

Wade Wells:

He's doing air quotes for those who are listening to the podcast.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. He's not doing air quotes.

Wade Wells:

Reputable. Sarcasm. Supposed. Sub... Allegedly.

Corey Ham:

I'm assuming they just have, like, FBI is digging through all the shiny hunter logs. Right? Like, that's probably what's happening is they're getting information. And they're

Wade Wells:

And they're pissed.

Corey Ham:

Just... And they're pissed. And they're discovering things that... I mean, even with the Canadian American tensions that, you know, our wonderful leader has created for us, the RCMP was still willing to go and take this guy down. Right?

Corey Ham:

Like, this is... Still, they were willing to go... Like, this isn't politicized. This is just, like, a real crime case where this person was now, you know, is getting in trouble.

Wade Wells:

And I'm here for it. I like seeing. Like, you know, we always talk about, you know, theory of broken windows, which is very, very problematic in poli sci. But the more that you have these people that are running these rings, actually getting arrested and facing some consequences, it actually reduces the likelihood of other people looking at this as a field and being like, well, that's a low risk, high reward field I should get into.

Corey Ham:

Ransomware negotiations, it's free money. Yeah. Prank on victims.

Wade Wells:

That's the other thing that kinda bothers me about this is that, you know, there's plenty of money to be made in security, like, without actually negotiating with the bad guys and trying to get, like, a 10 x payout. I... You know, it's just... It... Yeah.

Bronwen Aker:

You know? It's just greed. It's just greed.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. It is also just exploiting the weakest, like, population. Like, it's, like, kind of predatory to be like, oh, are you already getting hacked by ransomware, which means you probably don't have the strongest security posture? Let me take advantage of you again or whatever. Yeah.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. It's like, I don't

Bronwen Aker:

know. Unfortunately, if if you do pay the ransom, you've basically proven that you're a legit mark. Yeah. To the target on yourself.

Wade Wells:

True. So And

Corey Ham:

how do

Ashley Knowles:

you know that they leave your network entirely after you pay the ransom, and they're not gonna come back again?

Corey Ham:

Well, they said they did, so it's fine. They said they deleted all

Wade Wells:

the files. You know? Yeah.

Corey Ham:

They said they deleted... They showed me screenshot. Scouts screenshot of RM dash RF. It's fine.

Wade Wells:

They let us zoom in. They did a Zoom session, shared their screen, and I saw them right click delete and empty trash.

Corey Ham:

I installed any desk on my PC, and they showed me through there that they had deleted all the files.

Wade Wells:

Yeah. They deleted all the pictures from my time at paul.com security weekly, so I trust them.

Corey Ham:

Alright. Next article. We were talking about this a little bit in the preshow, but there was a kinetic attack against Russian data centers.

Wade Wells:

To December. This is

Wade Wells:

the really

Wade Wells:

good story of the week. And we've

Corey Ham:

seen Yandex, which Yandex is Russia's Google, bot traffic drop significantly. I will say when it says bot traffic, that is, like, crawling. That's like page rank or But Right?

Bronwen Aker:

That's not Yeah. But it closed.

Wade Wells:

But reports that dropped

Bronwen Aker:

to 0.4% of the maximum recorded in the past two weeks. Yeah. That's massive.

Wade Wells:

I... Yeah. And, honestly, I could tell, like, on Reddit, like, some of the subreddits and things like that, it... There were significantly fewer posts because of this. So I'm I'm here for this.

Corey Ham:

Like Why don't we why don't

Ralph May:

we just block the IP addresses from Russia? Wouldn't that be a

Wade Wells:

good question, Ralph.

Corey Ham:

She had a wonderful their diesel, dude. We need their diesel.

Ralph May:

It's fine. We need their diesel, but we don't don't need, their bots. Okay? Come on. Can we make a line diesel?

Ralph May:

Diesel.

Corey Ham:

Are you telling me that geopolitical deals come with strings attached? No. I don't believe it. You. No.

Corey Ham:

Never. No. Can't wait to get all

Ralph May:

that diesel to cover us for, like, a week when we could stop all

Corey Ham:

these plots forever.

Wade Wells:

So what's funny about this is there's a couple of things. One, the diesel, I guess the ship arrived. It didn't even have diesel on it. It had, like, fertilizer.

Corey Ham:

No. So It's melting. Carts and diesel are basically the same thing. It's fine.

Ralph May:

Same thing.

Corey Ham:

Carts and diesel. We can convert it.

Wade Wells:

So it was filled with fertilizer, cow piss, and no diesel.

Corey Ham:

That's... Do we need that? We also need cow piss because that's how you make

Wade Wells:

Ashley's really confused. Ashley, the DEF fluid that they put in trucks

Corey Ham:

still, like,

Wade Wells:

It's it's cow pee.

Corey Ham:

They they spray pig pee, I think. Where do they get that

Wade Wells:

pee from? Who who harvest the pee?

Wade Wells:

No. That's the thing.

Bronwen Aker:

Urea is used in so many things. It is. It's... It is a a widely used ingredient. So your pee is more valuable than you realize.

Ralph May:

Oh, yeah. You know, that's not, like, the predator pee thing where you can, like, buy predator pee and then, like, that'll keep the predator?

Wade Wells:

Yeah. He just went too far,

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Yeah. I heard. We're turning left. It's turning left.

Corey Ham:

Turning left. GPS says, out. We've already been demonetized five times. So so... Yes.

Wade Wells:

So so They destroyed,

Wade Wells:

but they brought down three of the nine data centers.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. So Yes. Hold on. Hold on. But let's think about

Ralph May:

this from, like, a kinetic piece of taking down data centers. Right? So Yeah. In this particular thing, we're seeing, like, the backside of, you know, maybe, like, misinformation or whatever. But what about, like, AI data centers?

Ralph May:

Like, what... Like, how destructive could that be to, like, an economy if, like... You know? I I don't know. I'm just saying how upset would you be as an investor?

Wade Wells:

I... But you know what? You... Right? So if you're looking at this, like, this idea of asymmetry and warfare warfare or or any of these different things, like, that's running a data center and they're forcing their data center on, like, some rural population in Arkansas, and they're shoving it through, and they're getting it approved by the board and...

Wade Wells:

Or the the city council, and no one wants it, you would better start putting this in your threat model because

Wade Wells:

Yeah.

Wade Wells:

I fully expect we're gonna have customers talking to us about physical security for data centers here shortly. And they're like, can we set up miniguns for

Wade Wells:

drones on the top of the building?

Corey Ham:

Because

Bronwen Aker:

Well... And and on top of it, I mean, they're talking about that center they're planning for Utah. It's gonna raise the ambient temperature in the surrounding territory by five degrees at night.

Ralph May:

Yes. Oh,

Corey Ham:

that's fine. You just leave your fridge open in your house. It works fine. Jeez.

Wade Wells:

So But but still dodge.

Wade Wells:

Cow pee to this. But I I think that this whole entire thing is a harbinger of what's to come. Right? You look at what's happening in Saudi Arabia. We were talking...

Wade Wells:

Well, we... I don't know if we're gonna talk about the airport strikes. And I always go back to that rage against the machine quote. There'll be no shelter here. The front line is everywhere.

Wade Wells:

If you're looking at this concept of asymmetry, the Yandex servers, these servers are not coming back on anytime soon. Just they were all built, I think, before the AI boom and stuff got really expensive. And you

Corey Ham:

And they're sanctioned, by the way?

Wade Wells:

Right. Before they were sanctioned, and you know Ukraine is going after the other six. There's no question that they're gonna go hard after the

Corey Ham:

other six. The other wild thing to think

Ralph May:

about from, like, a data center explosion or whatever is that, like, you know, they're processing all this AI in the data center. Like, what if you blow that up and then, like, the little, like, drones flying next to your jet just crash? You know, like like, if you're using all of this to, like, run something bigger, right, like, how, like

Wade Wells:

No way that would happen. It's FedRAMP.

Wade Wells:

That's good.

Corey Ham:

It's FedRAMP. So... Okay.

Wade Wells:

There are totally different data center.

Corey Ham:

Next. Great. Great. Yeah. So...

Corey Ham:

Okay.

Wade Wells:

But let's take a second. Like, I just want everyone to think about this. Like, once again, look at the concept of asymmetry. Right? This and the Adobe thing and the reverse engineering of video games, like, all of this crap is connected about to that.

Wade Wells:

It's We so are gonna talk about that. So we're kinda setting the stage. It's now getting harder and harder to actually hold, like, this type of informational wealth and protect it. Whether it's a data center that literally someone just drops a couple of drones on, sets the roof on fire because the roof. Yeah.

Wade Wells:

Roof. The roof is on fire.

Wade Wells:

Oh.

Wade Wells:

Or you're talking about reverse engineering intellectual property. Like, this... What the world is going to look like over the next five to ten years is flipping wild.

Wade Wells:

And speaking of the kinetic bit, b one bombers from The UK have been recalled to North America because there was a drone based threat that could have knocked them out while they were sitting on the flight line.

Corey Ham:

Yep. Yeah. They're like, this is no big deal. Guys, this is a huge deal. It's fine.

Corey Ham:

This is a huge pain. But look at the

Wade Wells:

cost. Look at the cost because those b ones can take off from Texas, and I think it's Midland, and then also out here out at Ellsworth Air Force Base. And they can go all the way around the world. They absolutely can.

Bronwen Aker:

But look at that

Wade Wells:

cost increase associated with having to do that because of a $10 dollar drop.

Bronwen Aker:

Well, it's cost and it's time on-site. It winds up being a double hit from a

Corey Ham:

Okay. So he... My question is if... So how long has the Russia Ukraine war been happening? Five years?

Corey Ham:

Five years.

Wade Wells:

Yeah. I think we're only four and a half now.

Corey Ham:

So, basically,

Ralph May:

remember when the first kicked off,

Corey Ham:

I was like, oh gosh. This will only be a little while. Yeah. This will be quick. This will be quick.

Wade Wells:

So I'm trying to be one.

Corey Ham:

I think so. It's it's been a while. So the question is, this is how far into a war the data centers get hit. Five years in, I guess. Like, oh my god.

Corey Ham:

So that's... You know?

Wade Wells:

So, Corey, that's interesting because if if we're looking at it, I was listening to some some guy that has been doing a bunch of Ukraine research. And one of the things that's interesting is Ukraine is, no question, it's innovating much, much, much faster than anybody else is. The problem is when Ukraine innovates, Russia is about two to three months behind. So whatever Ukraine is doing, Russia is then, like, synthesizing that and throwing it back at Ukraine. And that synthesis of what Ukraine is doing is not expensive.

Wade Wells:

It's not like, you know, Star Wars in the Reagan era where it's billions of dollars to do something. It's something that Iran and China and, yes, even, like, Taiwan and all these countries are picking up on this as well. And this is gonna get into the cyber aspect because, you know, we were talk... We've been talking about it at the conference. Cyber offensive operations now are far cheaper than they ever used to be as well.

Wade Wells:

So it's all part of the asymmetry of the new future.

Wade Wells:

And higher quality.

Ralph May:

Oh, yeah. Yep.

Bronwen Aker:

Well, in in in a lot of ways, I think the the drone attacks, the physical drone attacks are a new form of guerrilla warfare too.

Ralph May:

Oh, yeah. Yep. Yeah. Absolutely.

Wade Wells:

It's Absolutely. Cost.

Ralph May:

Right? You know, the jet... That the $35,000,000 jet, that's kind of expensive to put out there. Right? You know, the 10...

Ralph May:

You know, the $30,000 drone, or I'll take a

Corey Ham:

couple of those. Right?

Ralph May:

Like, it gives a crap. Right? Yeah. It's crazy. That's a kid's cost thing.

Corey Ham:

Asymmetric warfare. Only on the rise.

Ralph May:

Can we talk about that? And so I don't know if you... I read about this this morning. Right? And this was specific...

Ralph May:

And I... And I'm gonna relate this to cybersecurity very quickly. So this was AI and essentially Claude being really good at decompiling things. Right? And the article is about PlayStation two games.

Ralph May:

Okay? And what people are doing is they're grabbing the game, the raw files, and Opus is a lot... Is ripping through these and making these games playable in the browser. And they're not they're not, like, literally an emulator. Stop thinking emulator.

Ralph May:

Think like a recreation of the game all in JavaScript.

Corey Ham:

Have the source code.

Ralph May:

It's vault port. Yes. Yes. Using using the actual assets and all the other fun stuff. Right?

Ralph May:

And this is a perfect example when we move into cybersecurity is the explosion of decompiling of code to not just find vulnerabilities, but to also replicate and do these things. Right? Like, they used to be. I compiled it and it was difficult to look, but now it is Yeah. But that's because software

Wade Wells:

is cheap now. Software costs nothing. Software is so cheap that a lot of software is being written once and thrown away after after somebody spends two minutes looking at it. So the whole economics of software, like you said, being expensive and time consuming to create, that's all out the window. This guy that created, what, open source versions of all of the Adobe Creative Suite products?

Corey Ham:

There's been

Ralph May:

like three people now. There's been, like, someone recently that that have done this.

Wade Wells:

So... Okay. I saw one. So... Okay.

Corey Ham:

This is... This... Yeah. And this ties in with... Like, I went to Jeff McJunken's talk at Wild West, and he really blew the, you know, top off of this.

Corey Ham:

With a similar pipeline to what people are using to reverse engineer video games and Adobe products and Microsoft, people are able to reverse engineer major security products and

Wade Wells:

Windows. Like,

Corey Ham:

you know, Jeff in his talk in the... He built... Basically built a pipeline in his garage that found five Linux zero days, some of which are still undisclosed. It found over 6,000 bugs in Linux and including five zero days that were... It was all LPEs, so local privilege elevation.

Corey Ham:

He wasn't looking for RCEs or other, like, high risk things. But the... Basically, these these are the table stakes. So you can reverse engineer and derive the source code of basically any product given enough time and effort, And that includes PS five games, PS two games, Adobe, Microsoft Word, like, whatever it is. Which means you can audit the source code for...

Corey Ham:

Yeah. For Baldur's Gate three. Sure. You can can audit the source code for vulnerabilities, right, of that. And then you can do that to basically wreak havoc on, like, the software community as a whole.

Corey Ham:

I mean, what... Where do we go? Like, where what... Is it just gonna be like... It's just gonna suck for six months and then it's gonna be better?

Corey Ham:

Is it gonna get worse?

Wade Wells:

The wildest part

Ralph May:

about something like the Photoshop, you know, recreations or whatever. And then this took me a second to really think about it is that, like, Photoshop and all these applications, they're built to help humans do stuff. Right? Like, to help you edit a photo. But you don't need that to edit a photo with AI.

Ralph May:

Like, it doesn't... Like, you... We can jump the shark. Right? Like, you're making software to help you do things when you don't even need that.

Ralph May:

You just need to tell it in the most elegant language we've ever written,

Wade Wells:

which is just, you know, English. Elegant? Elegant?

Wade Wells:

Alright. Ella Ralph,

Corey Ham:

I've seen how many typos you're putting your coffee this morning. Ralph. I've seen how you... I've seen how many typos you usually have. I was hoping you'd know.

Corey Ham:

I know.

Wade Wells:

Let's there's no sarcasm. Let's... I wanna bring this back to Pirate Bay. And I think that everybody that's doing

Corey Ham:

stuff Or Napster.

Wade Wells:

Yeah. Any of these things.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Yeah. If you

Wade Wells:

look at if you look at Pirate Bay, people were pirating movies, and they were pirating video games. It was just, like, basically kind of sucking up the entire industry. And there was all of this... You know, we had Metallica going after Napster, the Jewelrymanian copyright act. You had all this bullshit going on to try to fight it.

Wade Wells:

What actually finally beat it is making it simple. People did a Netflix subscription. Cheap. And it was it was cheap. It was quick.

Wade Wells:

It was easy. If you had Netflix and you had Amazon Prime, you could watch Spotify? Spotify. Yeah. And made it easy for people so no one was stealing your stuff.

Wade Wells:

Yeah. So there was this rapid hyperscaling in the industry whenever it came to music, whenever it came to movies, and then everybody got greedy. Right? And then you gotta have Paramount plus. You gotta have Hulu.

Wade Wells:

You gotta have Disney. You have to have all these packages to be able to watch all the shows that you want. And now all of a sudden, Pirate Bay and piracy is now on the rise again. So I think that if there's any vendor out there that has, like, an expensive product... And let's be honest, Adobe suite of tools ain't cheap

Corey Ham:

It ain't cheap.

Wade Wells:

Or fun. It ain't cheap. And it is not that it's not complex. It's a complex product, but now it's directly in the crosshairs of any number, like, what, hundreds of thousands of people now have the tools to be able to reverse engineer it. And the best way that I'm just gonna put out there to keep people from reverse engineering your shit is to make your shit affordable.

Wade Wells:

If you make it affordable, you make it accessible, you produce good quality, you're going to

Wade Wells:

And you make investors cry.

Corey Ham:

And you then No. Okay. It's a numbers game. It's a numbers It's price

Bronwen Aker:

if you set the price point at a reasonable level, you sell more, and that means your profits go up. It's strictly a numbers game. Sometimes. Another factor.

Corey Ham:

The reason why You're forgetting you're you're forgetting the business model of how all these companies actually work, which is you get into the market, you're affordable, then you drive everyone else out of the market, and then you increase the prices. Right? Like, that

Bronwen Aker:

is everyone else out or

Corey Ham:

or

Bronwen Aker:

buy them out and absorb them. But, I mean, I got so PO'd at Adobe because every time I opened any app at all, I got in my face, oh, you gotta use AI. Well, I'm already using it when I want to. You don't need to be hammering me constantly, and that was why I killed my $70 a month

Wade Wells:

Yeah.

Wade Wells:

Cloud

Wade Wells:

Yep.

Bronwen Aker:

Account with them.

Wade Wells:

But people who use those products to actually generate a living, once they get into that ecosystem, it's like, how do you step

Corey Ham:

out of it?

Wade Wells:

There's really no alternative. And recently, I did... I'm not in the ecosystem, but I I read a story that a few years ago, Adobe, there was some additional license problem that they were having. I think it was images just went black inside of all of this work that these people that were subscribing to Creative Cloud, they just lost all these images, and then they had to sign up for an extra $15 a month subscription to turn that all back on again.

Corey Ham:

So... Okay. This is like the

Bronwen Aker:

raw storage of assets maybe?

Wade Wells:

Well, I don't wanna unpack it too too. I mean, it's a publicly... It's a public thing, but I I bring it up just to point out that once you're... You know, it's like you've got a a a leg in the bear trap. Right?

Wade Wells:

I mean, once they got you, they got you. So Yeah. And as much outrage as that caused, people still, like, they had to pay.

Wade Wells:

Well, I mean... So I wanna kind of, like... Let's talk about the leg and the bear trap and where we're at. So if you look at traditional, like, May, Yoda, Yoda, UPX, all these different packers that we had, that we use to basically make reverse engineering difficult. Right?

Wade Wells:

The reason why we use those packers is we wanted to stop the code from being decompiled into human readable code so a human could do it and, like, copy that code. AI doesn't give a shit. Like, if it's packed, it's gonna reverse engineer it based on the behavior of what that code does, and you can pack that code as many ways as you possibly can. AI doesn't

Ralph May:

gonna change anything. You gotta run it.

Wade Wells:

It's just doing a black box analysis. Right? It just looks at what what goes in, what comes out, and it goes, oh, I can make that.

Wade Wells:

And even if you... Dude, even if you're at point, Kip, even if you make your app completely browser based, there's no code going to the client, all an AI has to do now is crawl it to figure out what it actually does, and now it can recreate it. So this

Wade Wells:

is what I've

Wade Wells:

been talking about for months now with the coming SaaS apocalypse or the SaaS apocalypse is here. It is right now. So anybody out there that's an investor... Bronwen, I think it was you. I'm not sure.

Wade Wells:

Maybe it was Kip, was talking about the investors and all of that. If you're an investment firm and you're sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into a software product and just a software product, you are making a big mistake. You are making a dumb dumb level of mistake because literally anyone can come along and reverse engineer that. So Right. I don't know if you're in the investment space.

Corey Ham:

What the

Wade Wells:

hell other than in, like, CPU or GPUs and memory? What the hell do you invest in right now? Because none of this shit's patentable at this particular point with AI and the vibe coded code coming out of it. So like I said, I... I'm here for a lot of this because a lot of the vendors that are getting hit are just like...

Wade Wells:

They're greedy, and they were horrible products. They didn't maintain them. They were difficult to work with, and they punished their user base. So once again, I think the best defense that you have... And I'd like to hear, you know, from all of you guys that are technical.

Wade Wells:

The best defense is make it affordable and make it good, and that'll keep people reverse engineering. But other than that, what technical controls can people put on their code to keep it from getting stolen?

Corey Ham:

There... They... There are no technical controls, and there never really have been. If you look at how this... Like, the classic example of this is EDR.

Corey Ham:

Right? So, like, you could go back any, you know, number of years, even we did it at BHIS, but, like, it's kind of an open secret that, like, you can bypass EDR if you know what you're doing. You can reverse engineer EDR to the point that you can figure out how to bypass it if you know what you're doing. That being said, that hasn't prevented the average person from being protected by EDR, just broad strokes. And even in pen testing where we know how to do it, we do do it, they've they've still been able to basically win the battle by just constantly evolving, constantly changing, constantly, you know, improving their technology, making it harder to reverse engineer, making it more resistant to being killed or inspected, moving things out of the user space and into the kernel.

Corey Ham:

There's been a bunch of changes that have all been minor over the years. But, basically, it comes down to the truly advanced programs still work in a way that, like, we don't really bother to RE them because it doesn't really get us anything. Like, sure, we spend however many Mythos tokens or whatever reverse engineering the program, then it changes the next week. They publish a new update. They change the way their DLL is structured.

Corey Ham:

They... Like, all of these types of mitigations for it. Also, we don't talk about this publicly because we don't wanna get sued. And that's probably the biggest, like, lever they're gonna pull immediately is this guy who's publishing Microsoft Office and Adobe products. I mean, this guy's gonna get so many letters, so many, like, cease and desist.

Corey Ham:

Like, unfortunately, that's how it's gonna play out in the

Wade Wells:

short term. Long term, it comes down biggest lever.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Yeah. Long term, it comes down to, like, the Spotify effect of making, like, subscription prices for SaaS products are gonna go down. Subscription, you know, like, that that type of stuff, it... We're gonna see a shift away from, like, the brutally expensive vendor locked companies, you know, your Oracles, your IBMs, the companies that, like, you get eye rolls and boardrooms and you talk about them because of how painful they are to work with.

Corey Ham:

It... Like, that isn't gone. Because the reason that they're hard to work with... Like, you would be a little crazy if you said, alright, DBAs. We're gonna give you Mythos or whatever.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Yeah. Oh god. We're gonna reverse it to near Oracle database, and you're gonna re... Like, if they

Wade Wells:

have the data.

Corey Ham:

Okay. Yeah. Maybe. But if they had the capability, they could also just type into the AI, like, help get me off of Oracle database. I hate it.

Corey Ham:

And then, you know, the reasons they're keeping it are are not because they... It's because of business reasons mostly, I think. Yeah. And that is gonna change.

Wade Wells:

Do you remember back in the day when you'd, have to put, like, a dongle in your, you know, parallel port or something like that in order to be able to run the game or something. I mean, even that stuff's not a surefire answer to preventing piracy because it can... That can be gamed as well. So, yeah, I was just sitting here thinking through all the different things I could do, I'm like, I can't think of a thing.

Wade Wells:

Well, and and, you know, I remember back in those days, like, engineering software, you were talking about video games or whatever. Mostly, like, actual products like STAD or AutoCAD or any of these really expensive corporate programs, they would send you a hardware dongle. And there were first engineered ones out there that were cracked. I know oxygen group is really big in this space for a long time. And, usually, all they did is they looked for the routine where it basically did an evaluation as to whether or not it was plugged in.

Wade Wells:

And then if it was, it would jump you and allow it to execute. And they would just basically comment that out and allow it to be done. And I don't... Even the hardware dongles, I don't see... Once again, AI doesn't need to see the code.

Wade Wells:

It just needs to kind of what it does, and then it can recreate it.

Wade Wells:

Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

Bronwen Aker:

The end result. Yeah.

Wade Wells:

I think the big thing

Corey Ham:

is article that we're talking about in the in the Discord in case anyone's curious. Just kind of the broad theme here. But, yeah, this is the specific scenario we're in right now today.

Wade Wells:

And and, oh, I wanna call out one thing that pisses me off is LibreOffice. Like, LibreOffice's only job in the entire universe is to be compatible with Microsoft Office for Word and Excel. That's all they had to do. And then they get all kind of sidetracked into an open standard for Word documents and things like that. And it's like now at the point, they absolutely could be able to take that open source product, make it completely 100% seamlessly compatible with Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations.

Wade Wells:

I just hope that they're doing that because that would be great.

Corey Ham:

I I actually did check, while we're having the discussion how many open merge requests there are in GIMP.

Wade Wells:

Oh my god.

Corey Ham:

Which for those that don't know, GIMP is the open source version of Photoshop. And the answer is there's 200, which is actually that many. Like, I've seen projects with more. But... Yeah.

Corey Ham:

I mean, really, it comes down to, like, while the SaaSpocalypse is coming in... Sure, I guess, running a reverse. I will say, I saw some videos, and it seems like the reversed versions of, like, Photoshop just don't even work if we're being... Like, there there are major... Like, this is buggy as heck.

Corey Ham:

So I hope Yeah.

Wade Wells:

But it was

Bronwen Aker:

just Yeah.

Wade Wells:

Well But it was created under a completely different circumstance. Yeah. No AI.

Corey Ham:

The point is put your tokens into supporting open source software, not into reverse engineering closed source software. But I get it. Lots of people have personal vendettas against these companies, which, like, honestly, like, that's the thing. Like, that's like the CISO story. Don't have a bunch of freaking vendettas against your company.

Corey Ham:

Like, that's basically where we're at. Like, Microsoft is in trouble because they have a vulnerable code base, and they've created years of personal vendettas through, like, the nice air clips, all that stuff.

Ralph May:

I think that the AI thing, just to, like, sum up what... I think what John was saying is... And kind of my personal take is that we have when we had piracy. Right? And you could get it all for free.

Ralph May:

As soon as you could offer me, you know, a... It still required work. You still have to go find the thing. You still have to go download it. It wasn't always perfect, and it never always will be.

Ralph May:

But when as soon as you had something like Spotify that was cheap enough, you get everything. You were like, yeah. That's what I'll do. And then, you know, it really kind of slowed down music piracy. And so I think it's the same thing.

Ralph May:

Even with AI, as long as the software provides value at a reasonable price point, you're not gonna go write it yourself because I have the value. It doesn't matter that I could download all of the music in the world. It still wasn't free, and it never will be to develop your own software with AI or without. Those tokens cost money. Those humans require time, and that software needs support.

Ralph May:

And that all's gotta come from somewhere.

Wade Wells:

I also think that we're gonna see an explosion in creative digital rights management. So I remember there was a tool that we we used to teach in in 05/2004 when I was still teaching that. I think it was called Hayden, where you could take all of the, you know, add functions, and you could turn them into ones and zeros by turning them to subtract a negative value function. So it's still function. It would work the same way.

Wade Wells:

But if you ran it through, you could have it print out a message. And there were some vendors that whenever they were submitting executables to people, they could actually hide within the executable who was getting that specific executable. And I think that, you know, when we're talking about reverse engineering and AI, I do think we're gonna see companies coming up with really creative digital rights management, where if you are running a product and AI comes in and swoops and sucks the whole thing back and down, that there's going to be a watermark that's gonna uniquely identify that to the customer that lost the intellectual property. So I think we're gonna start seeing some more creative intellectual property protection mechanisms. I don't know if I'm necessarily super excited about that, but it is...

Wade Wells:

It... It's where the industry is going to go because lawyers are gonna get involved. They're gonna continue to try to hold on to their existing model of trying to charge lots of money, and they're gonna find ways to try to punish the customers first before they get to what Ralph was just talking about.

Wade Wells:

Because the music is gonna be like TRAM. Just steroids.

Wade Wells:

What... What's that, Kip?

Wade Wells:

Sorry, Kip. No. No problem. I was gonna say that, the music industry went down swinging. Right?

Wade Wells:

They didn't they didn't just go, oh, oh, okay. You know? It... It's over. You know?

Wade Wells:

No. They lawsuits. You know? They they went after IP addresses, and they lawsuited teenagers. I mean, it was a real debacle.

Wade Wells:

I think there's there's one market that we haven't talked

Wade Wells:

about yet. Agree.

Corey Ham:

No problem.

Wade Wells:

There's one market we really haven't talked about yet, and I feel like it's more me, is whenever you're a blue teamer, there's always a question is buy it or build it. Right? And I have found much more lately that building it is a better option than buying it, especially when it comes to all these new AI products that really at the end of the day are just a fancy prompt or agent that has a couple MCPs attached to it. Yep. I...

Wade Wells:

I'm wondering, like, with that, I don't know. I... From from what I've talked about with a lot of blue teams, not as many people are using AI as adaptively as, like, I... As I've seen, like, the top tier teams are. But I feel like that is gonna be the huge jump that'll help people a lot is once any blue teamer can go out there and start building some gnarly things rather than just, like, the couple aces on your team who actually know Python or Rust or something.

Corey Ham:

I mean, hasn't that been the case for the last two years?

Wade Wells:

Yeah. I don't think it's I don't think it's widely adopted. Like, I think you're probably looking at last 5% have adopted at the level of what what what Wade's talking about. And I'm gonna see if, like, Dave and I can flip. So we're thinking about going to other

Wade Wells:

cons

Wade Wells:

doing our debate. So for those of you who don't know, I debated Dave Kennedy on is AI gonna be more of an advantage to offense or defense? And I said off Okay. That's weird. Everything just

Corey Ham:

Looks like you need another new laptop, John. I had the same problem. Dave got him. I had the same problem. I...

Corey Ham:

It was in my dock. I had to get I had to get a different dock.

Wade Wells:

But that's so that's so weird. Hear us? Can you guys hear me, though?

Wade Wells:

Yeah. Yeah. We can.

Corey Ham:

It's your dock. I'm telling you. You gotta get a new dock.

Wade Wells:

Oh, I don't want my dock to die. I love my dock so much.

Corey Ham:

I had the same problem, and it cost me $40 to fix it. Hell no.

Wade Wells:

But but

Corey Ham:

one of the things if

Wade Wells:

I flipped and I had to take the Dave Kennedy approach, right, if I had to say that AI was going to be more supportive to defenders than than people doing offense, I would take the take of what Wade was talking about. I would take the approach that the amount of defenders that are now equipped with tools to come out with creative new strategies is in the stratosphere, and I don't think we can discount that.

Wade Wells:

No. I think that's a cool thing.

Corey Ham:

Oh, what?

Bronwen Aker:

I was gonna say one of the other cool things about, defenders developing their own on the fly software is that it can be so tightly focused. And when you are using someone else's tool, they built it with a certain set of features designed for an audience, but you may or may not need three quarters of those features for this specific engagement. So that means that the generated software can be a lot lighter, a lot tighter, assuming that the AI knows how to do that. But there there is potential there to definitely escalate and amplify the defender's ability to hit fast, hard, and get on with their business.

Corey Ham:

Yep. I mean, I can tell you right now, like, just like I can type find, you know, find vulnerabilities in this web app until... You know, slash goal, find all vulnerabilities in this web app, and find a vulnerability in a web app. A Defender who gives Claude or any other AI agent all of their network and telemetry and says find the threats, it's gonna be it's gonna be insanely successful. I can tell you I already have one customer who AI threat hunts us, and it is brutal.

Corey Ham:

It is so brutal. And they... Like, the... I mean, just like for attackers, how easy it is to compromise someone if you have all the things and you put them into AI, the same thing is true for defenders. Like, if you have all this telemetry and you tell it to go hunt for threats, what accounts, like anomalies and things like that, it is insanely effective, and it makes our threats really hard.

Wade Wells:

I also think the concept of deception and AI generated deception is something that's really cool. If you if you look at it years ago, long, long, long time ago, was a sub to a... Hold on. I was a sub to a sub to a sub to sub, and I was doing something for Facebook, long when they first got started. One of the coolest things they had was kind of an upside downternet.

Wade Wells:

So as soon as they knew that an attacker was on the system, they could flip that system over to a mimic of the existing network and watch that attacker for days, and the attacker thought that they were on a real network. That was really expensive back in the day. But now with AI, I think with deception, you absolutely have the capability of being like, oh, you're attacking my web app? Great. You're no longer in my web app.

Wade Wells:

You're now in the spawned version of the web app that is riddled with security vulnerabilities, and we're just gonna feed you fake credit cards. We're gonna feed you fake passwords. We're gonna waste a tremendous amount of your time in what you're doing.

Corey Ham:

And Can you please please no one listen to John? I just wanna request as a red teamer. No one no one... Cut that... Delete that.

Corey Ham:

Cut that out. That out. Cut that too much. Because can you imagine also the funny thing is, like, finding out you burned, like, $600 in tokens on a freaking tar pit or whatever. Like

Wade Wells:

I think that's the true future of with Defenders is those AI deceptions. Right? Like, how many times... Like, I've asked this around a couple of my other red team friends, but how many times does the actual AI think it's ever in deception?

Corey Ham:

Like Never.

Wade Wells:

From what I've heard, never. Right?

Corey Ham:

The AI is naive. It wants attack all the things. Yeah.

Wade Wells:

I think it's usually your best. Usually, the deception tactics are your... Some of your best detections, and it's also going to buy time for a defender to actually see and stop that, like, brutal onslaught of a bunch of attacks all at once.

Wade Wells:

So I mean, if you if you if you if you read, Cuckoo's Egg. Right? Yeah. The... I mean, this isn't new.

Wade Wells:

Right? Because Stole was doing this in the eighties.

Corey Ham:

A 100%. So... Okay. I have a question for you, Kip. So...

Corey Ham:

And this will give you maybe a chance to plug your stuff. So I would I would... Like, if I was doing the whole John Kennedy versus Dave Kennedy or John Kennedy. John Kennedy.

Ralph May:

Whatever. He created

Corey Ham:

a mouthful. Listen. I have two dads.

Ralph May:

Okay? John Kennedy. That is your... Hey. That's your hacker name, John.

Corey Ham:

John... Listen. Yes. Okay. So, okay, John Kennedy, aka Relic, aka Strand JS.

Corey Ham:

Basically, I would argue the biggest impediment to defenders is, like, I'm gonna... Just gonna say GRC. I'm sorry if you're in GRC, but, like Okay. Basically, getting them access and ability to load all their stuff into AI, unrestricted models, and the ability to actually use it to do things like lock accounts, threat hunt, agentic, blah blah blah. What...

Corey Ham:

Is that... Do you think that's accurate, and what would be your, like, recommendation for how organizations can get past that? Because that, to me, seems like if I am just allowed to put everything into AI and let it threat hunt for me, but I am not allowed to do that. Right? So what can organizations do?

Wade Wells:

Well, first first of all, I think it's not GRC that's the primary blocker there. I think it's IT is the primary blocker because they don't wanna let automation run wild and accidentally cause services to not be available or accounts that get locked out.

Wade Wells:

Can can

Corey Ham:

I ask you a question about that? Yeah.

Wade Wells:

Do you believe that that's, like, similar to not deploying patches immediately? Like, we go back, like, ten, fifteen years. They were like, no. We can't deploy patches immediately because we're worried about the damage even though the perception was worse than the actual damage was.

Corey Ham:

Yeah.

Wade Wells:

So do you think it's more of a perception, or do you think that those are legitimate concerns as Well right now, do we have that maturity that we need to have to make that implemented, or do you think it's still immature?

Wade Wells:

I I still think IT people get the shit kicked out of them when availability isn't what everybody in the rest of the organization or the customers

Wade Wells:

Okay. Touche.

Wade Wells:

To be. And I think that's that's... I mean, that's ultimately when they get kicked, that's what it's about. Everything else, know, they might get a, you know, a bad word or a dirty look, but they're gonna get kicked in the back alley hard if they can't keep the systems up.

Wade Wells:

Because that's their... In the end of the day, that's their number one priority.

Wade Wells:

Yeah. That's their number one metric.

Corey Ham:

So... Okay. So is there... Like, do we just do a thing where it's like, okay. Anything broken by AI is not IT's fault.

Corey Ham:

Have fun. Good luck. Like, is that real? It's not really real. You can't...

Corey Ham:

I mean, you can't... It's like risk accepted. It's risk accepted, but for IT, it's like their version of risk accepted. It was AI. I prove it.

Wade Wells:

You'd have you'd have to prove it. Right? And that that would be difficult. But I disagree.

Wade Wells:

Proof has never been an issue. It's always when something goes down, they're getting kicked in the back alley. They can say it was IBM's fault. They can say it's Cylance fault. They can say it's CrowdStrike's fault.

Wade Wells:

At the end of the day, it's still their responsibility, and the executives are gonna kick the nearest the nearest dog that's around them.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Okay. So, Kip, how do we... What do we do? How how do we empower IT departments to deploy AI?

Corey Ham:

Like, what what can we do?

Wade Wells:

Well, if if it's AI to assist the blue teamers, I think the first thing is we've got to find a use case that's important but not critical. And it can't be something silly. It's got to be something that's worth doing but isn't going to destroy uptime if it goes sideways. And just show them that this thing can be helpful. And then that's your beachhead.

Wade Wells:

Once you figure that out, then you get some traction. You can start going into other areas where you can actually make a difference. But this is less about technology change management. It's way more about people change management. Remember...

Wade Wells:

Okay, I'm old, right? But I remember when VMware first showed up, I remember going, what? What? Run my server on other software?

Corey Ham:

On a server?

Wade Wells:

No. That's stupid. God, nobody will do that. And I was totally wrong. Everybody does it now.

Wade Wells:

But there was a big culture issue, right, And a big mental blocker around it. So I really think it's about people how can we get them to change and showing them something again that's meaningful, that will actually help them have a better life at work and then build from there.

Corey Ham:

Alright. Great idea. Wade, what do you think? Do you got any tips? Like, if you if you were advising blue teams, which I'm sure you do a lot, what are you what are you like?

Corey Ham:

Give me your, like, playbook for, here's what you gotta say. You gotta type all the stuff into the in... Internet that says you have network connectivity issues or whatever.

Wade Wells:

Like, the biggest one is is metrics and then relating it back to risk. Right? At the end of the day, I am like a defender, but what am I doing? I'm just mitigating risk as best as you can. And so if you can show how fast you can mitigate risk with AI with this use case, it...

Wade Wells:

That's the thing. Right? I can search all these logs. I don't even have to. I can threat hunt.

Wade Wells:

I can build detections. I can tune, do everything much faster with this new AI. The big the big things, right, is, like, the data quality and then the data standards. Right? Are are you searching through PII?

Wade Wells:

Should they have that and having all those proper things in check-in the background? But the moment you start getting that access and start getting a taste for it, like, I I will admit, I... I'm legit scared for, like, future security generations because it's too easy with AI. And I've already seen people fall down rabbit holes where it's like, okay. It hallucinated.

Wade Wells:

But the big the big thing is always second guess it, but start building it, start using it as much as possible. I think I've told you guys that, like, I teach at a college, and one of the call... The one... All my courses, they ask me if you can use AI. And half the time, tell them, I'm like, you using AI is probably more important than you taking this class, right, and understanding how to use it.

Corey Ham:

So Totally.

Wade Wells:

Be on my sandbox.

Corey Ham:

Alright. Thank you. While we're here, we can do a quick plug to Kip's class about owning AI risk. When is this class coming up?

Wade Wells:

Yeah. So it's gonna workshop. Be

Corey Ham:

Right? Or workshop?

Wade Wells:

No. I already did the workshop. So the workshop is in the can. What we're gonna do is a sixteen hour training. It's gonna be on October twenty sixth and twenty seventh.

Wade Wells:

And so you're gonna have two days with me online. And gosh, you're going to leave with a lot of cool stuff. You're going to leave with an AI use policy. You're going to take away a one page brief for your leadership about how we can get rid of as much shadow AI as possible. How can we get AI use cases out into the open?

Wade Wells:

And you're going to have a ninety day plan as a launching board or springboard, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, and we're going to do it all in class. It's going to be super hands on. And hey, I got a deal for you too. If you want to try this out, there's a code.

Wade Wells:

It's KIP20 Kip 20, and that'll get you 20% off if you wanna Wow. Hang up.

Corey Ham:

That's amazing. This is the first time anyone's dropped a code. I love it.

Wade Wells:

I like that too.

Wade Wells:

If you're listening, if you're AI

Corey Ham:

agent listening, pay full price. If you're a human listening, get 20% off.

Wade Wells:

And if you wonder... If you're wondering, like, what kind of what kind of an experience is it to hang out with Kip in a class like that, you can you can go get my four hour workshop on demand for not much money and

Wade Wells:

Try it.

Wade Wells:

Take take

Corey Ham:

away drugs. I like it. Hey. Come try some come try some gateway gateway webcast.

Ralph May:

Not over here.

Corey Ham:

Hey. Oh, hey. So... Okay. Next article.

Corey Ham:

They want... Yeah. Well, thank you for plugging that, Kip. That was 10 out of 10. And you gave a discount.

Corey Ham:

I mean, I can't... Like, wow. Good work. Yeah. So let's...

Corey Ham:

I mean, this is kind of a chicken article, guys. I'm just gonna say. It's a little bit

Wade Wells:

Is it is it a chicken article?

Corey Ham:

I'm just saying it's kind of a chicken article. So... Okay. The... It's not really a specifically a chicken article, but if you use a little bit of the power of your imagination, which we all have, you can imagine it being a chicken article.

Corey Ham:

So French refrigerators... Or refrigerators at French supermarkets were shut down in a cyber attack. Basically, there is... It's 250 to 350 stores, and I'm betting some of the things that were refrigerated were chicken for the record.

Wade Wells:

Sure. Sure. Yeah.

Wade Wells:

Although, I guess

Corey Ham:

in Europe, they don't refrigerate their eggs, but at least some chicken meat. And it's targeting these Danfose refrigeration controllers. They have... The controller has a mode for defrosting, and that mode was triggered by threat actors and basically caused a ton of food waste. And

Wade Wells:

Yep.

Corey Ham:

You know? I guess my biggest question is, why? Like, why do this? Is it just a 12 year old with mythos, like, is it, like One story, you gotta you

Wade Wells:

gotta understand their only crime is curiosity.

Corey Ham:

I get it because they should. I see.

Wade Wells:

Expect them.

Wade Wells:

Yeah. You know what's interesting about this one is the the the refrigeration cabinets and the freezer cabinets got up, like, a 120 degrees Fahrenheit. So that that stuff stunk crazy. Wow. So would not I would not be the...

Wade Wells:

I would not wanna be the person who had to go and clean all that out. Awful. But I actually read too that there was, like, a fire broke out. So I can see

Corey Ham:

it in Everyone's... Every single person's defroster triggering all at once. That's crazy.

Wade Wells:

So, I mean, this this

Corey Ham:

I'm surprised it's still breakers. Right? Blow. I'm surprised certain

Wade Wells:

breakers didn't blow. But... Yeah.

Corey Ham:

Go ahead. You would think. I don't know. Basically, don't expose your refrigerators on the Internet? Well, I thought we learned information.

Wade Wells:

No. I thought we learned that after Target. Like, come on.

Wade Wells:

Well, okay. Just gonna say that. I've got customers that have these so called smart buildings and smart arenas. And I'm sorry, but I have to point out to them constantly that, okay. I'm glad you're putting all your HVAC, online.

Wade Wells:

Okay. I'm glad you're putting all your, you know, your broadcast video and audio, onto the network now, but we we have to have a conversation about, you know, it's not just cool. There's other things that could happen here too. And, yeah, they just don't think about it like that.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. I don't know. That's a crazy one. The biggest thing is, like, why wouldn't you, like... I guess you could ransom it.

Corey Ham:

I don't There's, like, there's not really a good way to monetize it. It's just mass chaos is the only way to do it.

Wade Wells:

Destabilized version of a website deface. Right?

Wade Wells:

Yeah. Maybe it was maybe it was, like, the vegans. They're like, what?

Corey Ham:

I could see that. I could see that. But...

Wade Wells:

Yeah. Because the... Okay. Alright. That's a militant ball.

Wade Wells:

It's like the vegans. We always have to make sure.

Corey Ham:

Someone's tracking a new, like, vegan vegan related threat actor that's out there that only goes after chicken products. I like this. This plays into the story that we have on the news, you know, like chicken articles.

Wade Wells:

The... What do we call them? We have to name them. The the

Corey Ham:

actor. What? The the threat actor? Yeah.

Wade Wells:

Threat actor.

Corey Ham:

Ideas for what this threat actor would be called. I see. What is Discord.

Wade Wells:

There was a threat actor group way back in the early two thousands, mid two thousands that were vegans, and they were they were they were hacking specifically for those types of agenda. I honestly can't remember their name. It's just just... But, yeah, there was one already.

Corey Ham:

The quinoa? The meat murderers? I don't know. I I will call it something. The

Wade Wells:

quinoa compilers.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Quinoa compilers.

Wade Wells:

Alright. The live cow society.

Corey Ham:

The live cow. Yeah. The cult of the live cow. Yeah. I'm sorry.

Wade Wells:

The live cow. Eat more chicken. More chicken.

Corey Ham:

The live cow. I I think that's the best one. News wise, click fix is big right now. Apparently, Claude is the new, like, designated target for click fix, which totally makes sense. Paste this into your AI agent.

Corey Ham:

What could go wrong? Right? Like, just the chaos of things. I'll paste that article here. I don't know.

Corey Ham:

I mean, it's... It makes sense. So, basically, hackers are... It's mainly search result redirects to, you know, a totally legit version of Claude code that you then install, which, you know, is definitely a backdoor. And...

Corey Ham:

Yeah. It's basically classic, you know, claw dot ai/install, but it's actually, you know, claw.sketchy.ai./install. So

Wade Wells:

Yeah. Well, I mean, this is one of those things that I talk about in my workshop and in my training, which is if you're not giving the people in your workforce an approved path to get some kind of AI that will help them with their particular use case. If you've got twelve week approval cycles or you just look at them and say, you know, take your copilot and go sit down and get back to work in your cubicle, This is what they're gonna do is they're gonna go out and they're gonna try to roll their own, and sometimes they're gonna encounter this stuff.

Corey Ham:

Yep. It makes sense. I mean, these campaigns just target anything that people are trying to install. But, you know, the fact that it's a copy and paste into a bash, like, we probably should do better as a security industry. Although I will say, it is really convenient.

Corey Ham:

You know? It's kinda like QR codes. Are there security issues with QR codes? Yes. Do we do it anyway because, of course, we do it because they're so convenient?

Corey Ham:

Yes.

Wade Wells:

It just it just won because of convenience. And that goes back to our Napster and Spotify and Pirate Bay analogy. Right? Do a good job. Make make your product good.

Wade Wells:

Make it accessible. Make it affordable, and you probably don't have a lot to worry about.

Wade Wells:

That's what that's what human beings want. They want easy buttons. They want easy buttons everywhere all the time. If you make an easy button, they will press it, and then they'll think about it later.

Wade Wells:

Shout out to all the homies who run Plex servers.

Wade Wells:

Kip, I hope you're I hope you're writing a book, and I hope that that quote is a chapter because it it it needs to be... That needs to be elaborated on for sure.

Wade Wells:

Okay. Well, since you since you brought it up, can I show you my new book?

Wade Wells:

You should.

Corey Ham:

Yes. Yeah.

Wade Wells:

This is my new book. It's called Gears Don't Guess. This is the cousin to Fire Doesn't Innovate, and this is all about how you manage AI risk using the risk, skills you already have. Yep. Alright.

Wade Wells:

Everybody who comes to my training is gonna get a free copy.

Wade Wells:

And it's out on Amazon?

Wade Wells:

It is. Yeah. And unfortunately

Corey Ham:

few moments.

Wade Wells:

Had a free offer. I'm sorry. I had a free Kindle offer that expired, but it... It's only $10. Come on.

Wade Wells:

I'm going to, tell everybody out there that I also have a book on Amazon, and I do not recommend that anyone buy it. I have a couple of books. Do not

Corey Ham:

purchase the the sexy tale of dinosaurs and cougars? Oh my god. No. No. I thought that someone else did different.

Corey Ham:

Was that

Wade Wells:

a different... Was that the

Corey Ham:

male model John Strand that wrote that one?

Wade Wells:

That was that one. I'm gonna let him

Corey Ham:

take Why did it end up in my reading list? Did I get fish?

Wade Wells:

Sorry. It's just... It's cross pollinization. You know, the AI models out there, they they they they cross me with him all the time. It...

Wade Wells:

We we look like twins, especially when our shirts are off. It's like that commercial. You can hardly tell.

Wade Wells:

Washboard abs.

Wade Wells:

But the biggest reason you can tell that John Strand for me is if I'm... If if the person you're looking at is wearing pants, it's probably me.

Corey Ham:

If he... If the...

Wade Wells:

If he's wearing pants, probably because someone helped him. So so, no, there's a big difference there.

Corey Ham:

Alright. Yeah. I'm... I need to return some books now. Anyway Wow.

Corey Ham:

So, anyway

Wade Wells:

I'm seeing John, and it totally I've returned

Wade Wells:

some books now.

Corey Ham:

The last thing I think would be the passkey thing. Do we wanna talk about The... I I don't know. Quickly. Yeah.

Corey Ham:

Don't really know how to... Like, I don't really know how to talk about it. Bronwen, did you look into it at all? So

Bronwen Aker:

I haven't had a chance to other than I've been hearing more that passkeys are falling out of favor. But... So...

Corey Ham:

Yeah. So so basic

Wade Wells:

Basically, I don't know.

Corey Ham:

I I wanna give full, like, amounts of salt that you should take this with because I don't know who wrote this, and I have not looked at it, but it's certainly been making some waves. So essentially, someone posted on Substack and just said, passkeys are a trap. Here's why you shouldn't use them. It's supposed to be, you know, targeting a nontechnical audience.

Ralph May:

This feels like clickbait.

Corey Ham:

It kinda feels like clickbait, but I'm like, it's on Substack. Like, what am I... There's no, like,

Wade Wells:

ad Gotcha. Yeah.

Bronwen Aker:

But anybody can post on Substack.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. That's what I mean. Like, what are they... It's... If it's clickbait, what are they getting out of me clicking?

Corey Ham:

They don't have ads. They don't... Like, there's no way to monetize this. First of all,

Wade Wells:

kinds of reasons. This isn't

Corey Ham:

the one that's

Wade Wells:

the most interesting to me. There was a... And we can get into this next week. We should. There's been a lot of really smart mathy people because of all of the, AI generated proofs for...

Wade Wells:

In mathematics. I think they dropped something like 400, and they think it's gonna take, like, a decade for humans to try to figure this out. But in that, like, dump, there are some people that are, like, crypto math people that are like, holy crap. S blocks are now at risk. And there's actual possibility of, like, AES being broken, by AI in the near future, which is...

Wade Wells:

I wanted to give it a little bit more time, but it's kind of

Corey Ham:

subtle. Gonna drop that and be like, this is a teaser for next week. It's a

Wade Wells:

teaser for next week. You gotta come back. But I'm telling you, I... This is a clickbaity. Like, really super smart mathy people are actually starting to get very spooked about AI and mathematics and the possibility of cracking crypto.

Wade Wells:

Silicon Valley is becoming real. We've

Wade Wells:

got Yes. Quantum. 1%. Now did they actually crack AES at Silicon Valley in the last season? I think remember what

Wade Wells:

it was. It wasn't AES? It was bio. Yeah.

Wade Wells:

But, no, seriously, it's like there's a bunch of people saying NP equals p, and that means nonprobabilistic hard problems are now probable, and they're able to be attacked. And we'll talk more about that. I'm trying to wade through it, but it's heavy math, and I suck at math. So we'll we'll see

Corey Ham:

what works.

Wade Wells:

I had to look at it, John.

Corey Ham:

I calling you. I'd already brute forced and proved that other people already wrote. Anyway,

Wade Wells:

so We gotta wrap up.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Basically, let's let's get ready to close out. Does anyone have anything to plug? Ashley, what do you got? You got something coming up?

Corey Ham:

You got a webcast? You got just general thoughts you wanna share? Anything spicy?

Ashley Knowles:

Spicy. No.

Corey Ham:

I'm You do have a webcast.

Wade Wells:

What? Ashley lied. There is a webcast

Ashley Knowles:

Yeah. Coming I do have a webcast coming up. I built a skill and a site and basically gonna teach people how to use AI to do research for you and learn effectively.

Corey Ham:

And when is this? October 28, which is a two ish week.

Bronwen Aker:

Two weeks. That's... Isn't that one of the dates that Kip's last Actually,

Wade Wells:

the great news is they can come to my training and still go to Ashley.

Corey Ham:

Oh. It's almost like we planned this. Huzzah. Nice. That...

Corey Ham:

Yeah. This is awesome. I love using AI to research things, but I also am very curious how you made it even more useful than it already is just one shotting prompts.

Wade Wells:

I hate a lot of this stuff, though, because, like, I know I'm gonna go to this. Like, I've done some research assistant stuff with n eight n, and I know I'm gonna go to this and be like, Ashley's is, like, a 100 times better than mine. So

Ashley Knowles:

do I do have to admit that the idea is not original, and it's borrowed from someone who's extremely smart, and I did credit them in the webcast. So

Wade Wells:

Awesome.

Ashley Knowles:

But I adapt... I adapted it to our purposes inside of system.

Wade Wells:

Thank you for doing that.

Corey Ham:

Lovely. And, yeah, n eight n is cool, but also it is just code execution on code execution on code execution. It always makes me a little nervous. I'm like, which of these boxes is getting hacked? All of them.

Corey Ham:

Okay. Cool. So anyone else have anything to blog? Wade, how's death con, man? Tell me...

Wade Wells:

Don't know if I need... We got more people signed up. I will admit, people actually reached out to me who watched... Who signed up. Well, so thank you very much.

Corey Ham:

The system works.

Wade Wells:

The system worked. I think I'm at, like, 20 sign ups out of the 40 I thought I was gonna get. But there's still a lot more DEFCON. You can sign up online as well. There's still a lot of other...

Wade Wells:

Like, it's not just San Diego. There's Seattle. There's... It's actually worldwide, so go check it out.

Wade Wells:

And I wanna do a shout out to Ralph. Ralph came in and taught the satellite hacking class and security class at Wild West Hacking Fest and crushed it and just took my slides and elevated them into something absolutely awesome.

Corey Ham:

So, hopefully So we can some webcast coming up. Open... Well, yeah, let's just openly, on this webcast, ask Ralph to make a webcast about how to make slides look like that that look like that. Let's do it. Because seriously, everyone is freaking...

Corey Ham:

Like, you... Okay. We are living in a world where we've all been looking at boring PowerPoints for what? Twenty years or something?

Bronwen Aker:

Oh my god. Death by a PowerPoint.

Corey Ham:

And Ralph has decided to make it better. And it's mostly because he probably just doesn't have a PowerPoint license and doesn't care enough.

Ralph May:

I couldn't Yeah. I couldn't afford Office three sixty five.

Corey Ham:

He could... He tried to reverse it. He ran out of tokens, so he decided to just roll his own. But I do think the coolest thing that Ralph did was putting actual live data sources into his presentation. Putting actual...

Corey Ham:

Integrating with live things. That's pretty awesome.

Ralph May:

So I think... Yeah. I was gonna say the interactive piece was the more important than making something flashy or pretty. Right? If you're trying to teach a concept, you should make show that somebody can visualize that concept, and that is, like, what the real value is.

Corey Ham:

That's awesome. Alright. If anyone else have anything to plug, John, what do you got? You got anything?

Wade Wells:

I've got nothing. I've got a pay

Corey Ham:

with 10 plus coming up.

Wade Wells:

We... Oh, by the way, Black Hills information security.

Corey Ham:

We do the sock.

Wade Wells:

As I like to say.

Corey Ham:

We do.

Wade Wells:

If you need to get hacked, we're your company. If you're afraid of getting hacked, we're your company. If you are hacked and you need help, we're your company. We're here for all of your hacking needs. And, you know, we're we're using AI like everybody else.

Wade Wells:

The difference is we're putting badass humans in the loop

Corey Ham:

as got Mythos. So Yeah. We did. Got Mythos.

Ralph May:

Oh my god. You guys are gonna kill it.

Corey Ham:

Hey. Hey, Bronwen. You got anything to plug? Everyone else has plugged something.

Bronwen Aker:

Not yet, but I have some things in development. Stay tuned for

Corey Ham:

What about your... What was it? Pumpkin something recipe? You got that?

Bronwen Aker:

No. I I did bring pumpkin spice cookies to Well West Hackin' Fest, but I failed at getting them properly distributed.

Corey Ham:

And you're not going to share the recipe. You're not They were trained in Chef's source. I will reverse engineer.

Wade Wells:

They're trained.

Corey Ham:

Gonna reverse engineer Smith. I'm gonna reverse engineer the recipe using Claude. Okay? It's possible.

Wade Wells:

Bronwen, are you gonna do more local LLM stuff? Is that what you got coming?

Wade Wells:

You can't

Bronwen Aker:

talk about it. Okay.

Corey Ham:

Darren, it's

Wade Wells:

out it's out of the cat's

Wade Wells:

been working on that stuff all the Everybody knows. I

Bronwen Aker:

I just, earlier today, submitted the, workshop request for redoing the LLM... Local LLM workshop that was part of the AI summit. It has not yet been approved, which was why I was not going to mention it.

Wade Wells:

It will be. It will be. But it's it's gonna be awesome. So

Corey Ham:

Yep. Alright, everyone. Well, thanks for coming. This is recent. You know, we we just did this on Wednesday, but we're doing it again.

Corey Ham:

We gotta get back on schedule. So Feels

Wade Wells:

like a week actually. Happened. Feels like

Corey Ham:

Feels match bye. Bye.

Wade Wells:

Later. See you. Thanks, everybody.