Talkin' Bout [Infosec] News

The BHIS crew breaks down PHP2Shell, the challenges of emergency patching, and how AI-assisted vulnerability discovery is changing incident response. They discuss weak eMudhra certificate keys, Node2Shell and Brotli vulnerabilities, and security issues involving Plex, LiteLLM, GitLab, Broadcom Wi-Fi, and Popcorn Time. Other topics include AI agent frameworks used in attacks, research into self-propagating agents, context bombing as a defensive tactic, and the security and privacy implications of AI-assisted smart TV hacking.


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A weekly Podcast with BHIS and Friends. We discuss notable Infosec, and infosec-adjacent news stories gathered by our community news team.
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Chapters
  • (00:00) - PreShow Banter™ — Ryan Fixes Audio
  • (04:57) - PHP2Shell Causes Hell on a Friday 2026-10-26
  • (07:12) - PHP2Shell: AI-discovered vulnerabilities and emergency patching
  • (16:47) - Azure incident response workshop and Denver training
  • (25:19) - Weak eMudhra certificate keys and certificate trust failures
  • (31:08) - Doc Blackburn’s encryption fundamentals workshop — December 4
  • (37:13) - Rapid-fire roundup: Plex, LiteLLM, and GitLab
  • (38:37) - Storm-0940: AI agent frameworks and the ConnectWise compromise
  • (40:23) - Research into self-propagating AI agents and botnets
  • (42:34) - AI-assisted smart TV hacking and restrictions on security research
  • (47:59) - Context bombing: Triggering AI guardrails to disrupt attacks
  • (51:46) - John Strand’s Information Security Core Skills in the Era of AI — November 10–11
  • (52:02) - December Antisyphon summit: What in the Actual Cyber
  • (52:46) - Broadcom Wi-Fi flaw: WPS memory exposure and stolen passwords
  • (54:15) - OpenAI agent incidents and containment challenges
  • (56:54) - Popcorn Time updater and supply chain attack risks

Links

PHP2Shell: AI-discovered vulnerabilities and emergency patching
Azure incident response workshop
...and Denver training
Weak eMudhra certificate keys and certificate trust failures
Doc Blackburn’s encryption fundamentals workshop — December 4
Node2Shell: Brotli vulnerabilities and downstream patching
Rapid-fire roundup: Plex, LiteLLM, and GitLab
Storm-0940: AI agent frameworks and the ConnectWise compromise
Research into self-propagating AI agents and botnets
People are vibe coding their way to better TVs
Context bombing: Triggering AI guardrails to disrupt attacks
John Strand’s Information Security Core Skills in the Era of AI — November 10–11
December Antisyphon summit: What in the Actual Cyber
Broadcom Wi-Fi flaw: WPS memory exposure and stolen passwords
OpenAI agent incidents and containment challenges
Popcorn Time updater and supply chain attack risks

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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
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.
Guest
Ched "cheddar" Wiggins
Guest
Doc Blackburn
Doc Blackburn is a seasoned (old) cybersecurity instructor with decades of experience in IT, security, and compliance. Over his career, he has worked in many areas of IT, including systems administration, programming, network design, cloud services, web development, and risk management, bringing a broad technical foundation to his teaching. For more than 13 years, Doc has trained students and professionals to understand, implement, and maintain effective security practices, drawing on real-world consulting experience in compliance frameworks such as NIST SP 800-171, CIS Critical Controls, and MITRE ATT&CK. Known for making complex concepts accessible to all audiences, he blends technical depth with practical insights, preparing learners to address today’s evolving cyber threats.
Guest
Gerard Johansen
A cyber security professional with over a decade of experience specializing in digital forensics, incident response, and threat intelligence. After a decade in law enforcement, transitioned into the private sector working in large enterprise and consulting. During my tenure in cyber security, I have been fortunate enough to work on complex digital investigations as well as develop training and enablement programs for cyber security defenders all over the world.
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.

Corey Ham:

I will say for my entire career, PHP has been vulnerable, whether it's just how people programmed in it or the way... Like, it was bad from the very beginning. It was Well,

Ched Wiggins:

I remember an offhand remark about when some threat group's infrastructure got breached by law enforcement and somehow dropped it, like, PHP was the access vector.

Corey Ham:

Oh, yeah. I think even from the beginning, it was, like, difficult to securely program in PHP. Like, all the different text comparison options that were available from the beginning. Like, it was always kind of a, like, tool, so to speak, to use from a programming perspective. You know, like, I don't know.

Corey Ham:

I'm thinking of, like, a woodworking metaphor. It was like the table saw of programming. It's like, yeah. It's great, but it will just chop off your finger if you aren't careful.

Ralph May:

Well, yeah.

Doc Blackburn:

I I mean It had to have been... It must... I think Corey is absolutely right because I was I was... For the most part, I was programming everything in Pearl until I discovered PHP. Classic.

Doc Blackburn:

And I was like, this is so much easier, which then Corey says, yeah, because it was less secure.

Bronwen Aker:

Of course. Anything that's easier to work with is inherently

Doc Blackburn:

less secure. Yeah. It must be it must be less secure.

Corey Ham:

The two things that I Flash. Yeah. The

Ralph May:

two two two web apps that I ever see that I know is vulnerable for sure. Number one, Java. If I see

Corey Ham:

a Java web

Ralph May:

app Yep. That thing is going down.

Corey Ham:

What, dude? Okay. Honestly, in 2026, every web app is vulnerable. Again. Sorry.

Ralph May:

Yes. Corey is not a web. It's vulnerable. Saying, like, ones that are, like, weaker, like, the lambs Yes.

Corey Ham:

Know? Dude, don't forget. Yeah. Yeah. You're, like, Apex.

Corey Ham:

I will say it is interesting. Like, one of the... You know, basically, where we're at in security is, like, I type your, you know, all your attack surface into AI, and it chose this target. Like, it's like, hey. You know, that...

Corey Ham:

That's, like, the the fun thing. And and based on, like, the tech stack and and the stuff, the vulnerabilities, it is Most likely,

Ralph May:

I mean, that's literally what AI does every single token is the middle prediction. Like, it... It's the middle. Right? It picks the most likely candidate right in the middle.

Ralph May:

So, yeah, it wants the

Corey Ham:

Java's bad. I mean, dude, but also, like, Telerik. How many Telerik servers have you popped over the years? It's like if I see Telerik, I just know I'm about to deserialize something straight into their back end or what. Like, it's it's like there's so...

Corey Ham:

Like, ASP dot NET components, Java's bad, ColdFusion is really bad. ColdFusion was bad for a while. Dude, back in the day

Bronwen Aker:

Yeah. Last web job was a cold fusion shop. Oh my god.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Dude, you you go in Metasploit framework, and you look at all the exploits for cold fusion. It was like a decade of, like, every day there was another exploit for cold

Ralph May:

Yeah.

Corey Ham:

And then I think they decommissioned it, like, by

Ralph May:

the time I they think it's I don't

Corey Ham:

think it's actively maintained. Could totally I bet you here. Okay. But I bet you it still exists. Like, they just call it something else.

Bronwen Aker:

It's still live on the Internet. I'm sorry. It's it's still out there.

Corey Ham:

But... Yeah. But but supported?

Ralph May:

No. I don't think it's... I think Adobe dropped it. I don't think Adobe supports it.

Corey Ham:

No. They've... What they did, Ralph, is they probably just... They rebranded it.

Bronwen Aker:

Yeah. No. They they they bought it. Let's see. First, was Alert, then it was Macromedia, and Adobe bought it.

Bronwen Aker:

And, of course, I know all about this because I used PHP and and all of these different things that turned into ColdFusion later on when they were being invented. And then in the... Well, like I said, my last web gig, we had a pre Adobe version of ColdFusion on our systems. Mhmm. And Adobe decided, well, we're going to discontinue all SSL support for all pre Adobe versions.

Bronwen Aker:

We wound up jumping three entire integers on on the cold fusion infrastructure. And I I talk about it in one of my, why why developers hate Infosec talk. It was the most grueling six months of my development career. Wow.

Corey Ham:

Alright. I just In that case, think the audio is fixed. It is. Go ahead.

Ralph May:

I know. I was just gonna say, I opened it. Yeah. Looked it up.

Bronwen Aker:

Cold fusion. Round of applause for Ryan.

Ralph May:

Twenty twenty five. Delicious.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. So I was gonna say cold fusion is still a thing. Alright. Roll On a that note, I'm gonna send a Claude agent to go with that cold fusion.

Ralph May:

Find your cold fusion.

Corey Ham:

Roll a finger.

Ralph May:

I need a moment. Need a moment.

Corey Ham:

Oh, sorry. We're not ready.

Doc Blackburn:

So sad.

Ralph May:

And then I'll roll the finger.

Corey Ham:

Do we need like me

Bronwen Aker:

on the subluxury? Okay.

Corey Ham:

GIFs, though. Well, I have four Discord,

Doc Blackburn:

Go wild.

Ralph May:

I'm gonna count down five four three

Corey Ham:

Hello, and welcome to Black Hills Information Security's Talkin' Bout News. It's 10/26/2026, and we're here to talk about PHP and why you're running PHP and why you aren't running PHP anymore. I have all my friends here. There's six of us, including myself. My name is Corey Ham.

Corey Ham:

I'm the... I guess I'm the COO now at Black Hills, which is crazy to say. We have Bronwen. You wanna introduce yourself, Bronwen?

Bronwen Aker:

I'm an AI researcher and general geek.

Corey Ham:

Gerard, you wanna introduce yourself?

Gerard Johansen:

Yeah. Hey. Gerard Johansen, incident response and readiness professional.

Corey Ham:

And best dressed. Like, I'm sorry. Just not even

Gerard Johansen:

Every time I'm trying, you know?

Corey Ham:

It's not... I'm I'm sorry to anyone else. It's not even close. Doc, you wanna introduce yourself?

Doc Blackburn:

I'm Doc Blackburn, and you're not. Just

Gerard Johansen:

Was aggressive.

Corey Ham:

That wasn't. I'm sorry.

Doc Blackburn:

That's a Chevy Chase. Chevy Chase used to say that in that Saturday Night Live evening news. I'm Chevy Chase, and you're not. And so I started saying that Doc Blackburn, and I've been around these computery things for for longer than I care to remember, and I'm just here to react to the news. I don't read the news, and so, you know, everybody else says the headlines, and I go

Corey Ham:

But you do know about PHP two shell because everyone in their grandmother knows about it.

Ralph May:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Corey Ham:

Ched, introduce yourself. Best mustache, by the way.

Ched Wiggins:

Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah. Ched Wiggins, aka Chedder, and sock lead here at State University.

Corey Ham:

Awesome. Ralph, last but not least.

Ralph May:

Yeah. Ralph May, professional gator hunter and amateur AI wrangler.

Corey Ham:

Nice. Nice. I like that. Alright. I mean, I think we have to get started with PHP2Shell, like, legally required.

Corey Ham:

For those that have been living under a rock, the the summary is this. AI finds vulnerability in twenty year old software. Chaos ensues. PHP in particular was a bad one because there was actually a little bit of drama around how this vulnerability came out. I guess my understanding is the vulnerability was in responsible disclosure.

Corey Ham:

This is on Wednesday, October 20. It was in responsible disclosure. But I don't know if someone just mentioned at this point, like, if someone just leaks whatever you have to type into Claude to find this, that still counts as a leak. Right? Like, I don't think the vulnerability details were leaked, I think someone maybe Yeah.

Corey Ham:

Just won't

Ralph May:

like Just saying there's some CVEs out there as well.

Corey Ham:

Right? But... So basically, then it kind of got out soon, and then the PHP team had to patch it a little earlier. And there was essentially a billion dollars in tokens were burned to everyone reverse engineering the same vulnerability at the same time. So, basically, this...

Corey Ham:

It it came out mainly on Wednesday or on... It kinda broke late on Wednesday. I think it was, like, 11PM Wednesday for me. And then Thursday was just the d day. It was...

Corey Ham:

The the CVEs are listed there. Essentially, they're all RCE, but they're all memory corruption. And so the actual exploitation of this is hotly debated. Like, there's even a person who set up a bounty. They basically said, this site is vulnerable to PHP2Shell.

Corey Ham:

It has $500 of Bitcoins. Hack me if you can. Because they're basically suspect... Or they're positing that this isn't actually as easy to exploit as it looks. From what I've talked to people, it's like there...

Corey Ham:

It... That is somewhat true, but also you can't just not patch it because there is a chance it it succeeds.

Ralph May:

The Bitcoin did get taken.

Corey Ham:

It did? I thought the site was down.

Ralph May:

No. Yeah. The Bitcoin did get taken. I I read that this morning. Yeah.

Corey Ham:

Okay.

Ralph May:

The the Bitcoin got taken. But, yes, to to your point, though, Corey, I also read kind of the same thing, like, back and forth about how easy it was or whatever. So, essentially, there wasn't necessarily a reliable POC depending on the operating system you had and all the other fun stuff. Right? But there is, I believe, a more reliable POC that's kind of being circulated public.

Ralph May:

And so, yeah, that... It it is...

Corey Ham:

It's exploitable. Let's just put it

Ralph May:

that way. It is exploitable. So not not patching is not the greatest idea. But as with all vulnerabilities, there usually is a couple gotchas. Right?

Ralph May:

Like, not everybody is vulnerable just because they have PHP.

Corey Ham:

Correct. And I think this... My prediction is that this vulnerability will have a very long tail. A lot of sites took... Like, a lot of things were down.

Corey Ham:

A lot of people in my personal life messaged me and just said, like, what's going on? Why can't I use insert, like, 5,000 different websites here? And a lot of sites self took themselves down, especially... It it kind of fell a lot on the hosting providers to fix this. The main, like, commercial use cases for this are, like, WordPress, you know, all these, like, managed and hosted service providers of websites.

Corey Ham:

And, basically, everyone had to figure out on their own how they're gonna patch. Notably, the PHP team decided not to release patches for anything below PHP's eight, which is like the... I believe the current supported version. But there's many, many apps running five, six, and seven. And so then it was left to each hosting provider to come up with a patch on their own or to come up with a back port.

Corey Ham:

I think some distros did back port stuff. It was basically just pandemonium. I think we had only a handful, maybe five customers that were not affected. Every single other customer was. And especially the, like, potential downstream impacts of all the vendors.

Corey Ham:

So, like, just off the top of my head, there's like Palo Alto, for example, uses PHP on their management interfaces. Mhmm. You know, BeyondTrust or whatever uses it for whatever components. It's a lot of, every single vendor had to do their own investigation on whether this was actually affecting them or not. And I think this will be the gift that keeps on giving of, like, you know, while we're doing pen tests for the next five years, we'll probably be like, by the way, PHP two shell?

Corey Ham:

Like, it's kinda like Log four j dried up so fast. I feel like this one is not gonna dry up as fast. What what what is everyone's predictions? No. Like, what do you think?

Bronwen Aker:

As a former web developer, recovering web developer, I absolutely believe that this is going to be the gift that keeps on giving because web developers suck at patching things, not necessarily because it's them, but often because management won't let them take the downtime necessary to apply the patches. And this is where I wanna give a huge shout out to my hosting company, HostDime. I've been using them forever. They were all over this so fast, and it's one of many reasons why I have used them for as long as I have. So, you know, just they they sent out the notices.

Bronwen Aker:

They said what they were gonna do. The options were there. I definitely went in and double checked my hosted servers, and everything was was good. But it's it's just nice to see a a hosting reseller that takes this stuff seriously. And I wish that there were more companies like them out there.

Ched Wiggins:

Well, it's interesting because, yeah, recently, John Strand put out a video talking about the complexity of deployed technology out there, and just think about how many lines of, code are out there running on cloud, virtualization, operating systems. I looked up how many lines of code were in Chromium, the web browser. It's it's somewhere between thirty one and fifty million. So PHP is just one technology. So Mhmm.

Ched Wiggins:

Yeah. Future looks to be kind of interesting.

Corey Ham:

Does anyone else have a take on PHP before we move into the next large Internet framework that also got hacked on other one?

Doc Blackburn:

There's one there's one point that I'd like to make is that I personally was was just horrified by when these two vulnerabilities were were released, that the CVE was a six digit number that were already in the 100 some thousand. And I was just doing a little bit of research, and just ten years ago, we had roughly 6,400 published CVEs Yeah. Just ten years ago.

Ched Wiggins:

Well, also, NIST NVD has been under a backlog for some time now.

Ralph May:

Yep. Yeah. It's not going away.

Doc Blackburn:

Yeah. Yeah. It's got We're looking at... We're we're around 87 to 89,000 so far this year. And so, I mean, we're gonna easily hit over a 100,000 published, not just necessarily a number assigned to it, but

Corey Ham:

then people are just holding on

Ralph May:

to CVEs too right now?

Corey Ham:

Just like

Ched Wiggins:

meeting. I was glad to see that five nine CVE because at least some platform can have five nines.

Ralph May:

Yeah. Nice.

Bronwen Aker:

Nice. Wow.

Corey Ham:

It's a myth. It's myth. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds about right.

Bronwen Aker:

Well, and and I know that John's touched on this before. It's easy to find the flaws in things, but finding people who can go back into the original code and fix the problems, that's a much bigger lift. That's that's a much harder thing to do. And so I... I'm glad that we're now using AI to find all these vulnerabilities, but I wish that there was more support on the other side of how do we get these things solved?

Bronwen Aker:

Great. We found them. Now let's fix them.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Well, I think that's kind of the the unfortunate reality is, like, if last week was hard for you, I have bad news. This is just the new norm. Yeah. This this is...

Corey Ham:

Like, you... Whatever... Take, like, take this week. Let's hope there's no critical vulnerabilities and whatever. You know?

Corey Ham:

Let's pretend like it's not gonna happen. Yeah. Do an after action review on whatever your incident response or whatever your patching or whatever your security... For us, was pen testing. Whatever thing you did with PHP2Shell, build a playbook that you can repeat because this is gonna keep happening.

Corey Ham:

Like, it wasn't even the only one that week, let alone that month, that year. Like, these, like, quick rapid response vulnerabilities with rapid patching is gonna be the new norm because you're racing RTX and Cairn and all these other threat... Agent frameworks piloted by Chinese threat actors or Russian threat actors for all these vulnerabilities.

Ched Wiggins:

It's a good time to pivot into IR.

Gerard Johansen:

Well well, the the other thing is is this really this really eclipsed, you know, recent Microsoft where you're talking over a thousand vulnerabilities coming out on a patch cycle or, you know, close to 900. This is the new normal. We're going from spit. You know, I remember when it was 30 or 40 and now we're talking, you know, four figures in terms of vulnerabilities that Microsoft is dropping every month and it's like, yeah, this is the this is this is what we're going to have to to contend with as as we move forward.

Corey Ham:

So while we're here, let's do a quick plug Gerard for your your workshop you're doing on Azure IR. So so Ched said everyone should get into IR. What if I what if I have connect wise in my Azure tenant was popped? Is there anything you could do to help me with that?

Gerard Johansen:

I'm gonna give you the stock IR answer if you wanna work in IRs two words. It depends. Yeah, long answer. Yes with a maybe short answer. No with a but no, it's it's really around you have to kind of change your viewpoint when you go from on prem into cloud because a lot of it is your own visibility into what you're doing.

Gerard Johansen:

So Azure is a very tough in terms of public cloud in my view because there's just so much that you can do in Azure. So if for example, I'll give you a little little preview we look at, you know, a threat actor getting into your Azure deployment spinning up a small little cluster of Kubernetes AKS service your ability to spot that is largely dependent on if you're logging for that if you're looking for that. It is kind of one of these very tough, you know, as we start to move into more of these services agents. For example, again, we're just starting out once logging. So it's a lot of a lot of understanding what you have visibility and observability into.

Corey Ham:

Nice. I I mean, I know we have all these metrics, and I know you have a live training training in Denver as well if people are interested. Mhmm. You know, we have all these metrics for incident response, but I feel like one of the most important ones to me is, like, how long until pizzas get delivered to a corporate office? Is that, like, is that considered, like, a a defining metric?

Corey Ham:

Like, if... Is there an incident that's so bad that you start with pizza delivery, or is that typically, like, a lever you pull partway into an incident?

Gerard Johansen:

So it is one of those, you know, if you look at it kind of the the five stages of of grief is like it's not that bad. And then it's like, so you've got denial. You know, you've got, you know, it takes So your metric is how fast can you get from incident to accept incident acceptance? That's that's the key metric that you want to pivot off of. Yeah, it's it's interesting because I I've what I find interesting about IR in particular as you'll have this rush of people into it because they want to see something cool, especially if it's new.

Gerard Johansen:

So you've got your, you know, ops to, you know, network ops desktop ops cloud ops identity acts. They're all flooding in. When you get to the pizza stage, that's when everybody's just kind of like, okay, I'm not needed here. I'm gonna go. I don't want to be involved in this because this is gonna be a multi week, you know, kind of reconstruct the entire entire infrastructure.

Gerard Johansen:

So yeah, the pizzas are really that that generally is your impact. That's how you define your impact. Is this a is this a 12 large six large, you know?

Corey Ham:

Yeah, that could be bad if you start with a 12 large like that's like you're basically just... You call the, you know, call the overnight This cops

Gerard Johansen:

may not be a popular opinion.

Doc Blackburn:

I will gotta... When somebody orders a Hawaiian pizza, does that mean we brought in a specialist?

Gerard Johansen:

No. That person gets kicked out.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. The town

Gerard Johansen:

town town town town town town

Doc Blackburn:

that's great.

Corey Ham:

I know. I'm out

Bronwen Aker:

there with eat any pineapple on your pizza, but don't diss mine. Okay? No. No. No.

Bronwen Aker:

Yeah.

Doc Blackburn:

I like I like pineapple on my pizza. I

Ralph May:

want to do that.

Doc Blackburn:

The one thing I learned about about IR is that I love being in risk and compliance because there's no such thing as a compliance emergency. 05:00 rolls around. It's like, I'm out of here, folks.

Gerard Johansen:

I'm much fun. Here. Well, it's it's funny where GRC generally comes in. I I I recently did a talk at a conference about two weeks ago about root cause analysis about digging outside of the just the technical and really getting into. Woah.

Gerard Johansen:

How do we get to this position where we didn't have patches for our web infrastructure? Somebody already brought it up. We don't like to patch because we don't like the downtime. So, you know, it's it is one of those GRC gets in and says so who was the one who signed off on this risk and it's well that person doesn't work here anymore. It's like, oh, I think I found a part of the problem here.

Gerard Johansen:

So I you know, of the things I like to say about incident response now is is if I could put put a Kind of prediction it's going to have a much larger scope than kind of the traditional drop in do forensics get us back up and running and moving. It's literally moving into let's start thinking about this from a, you know, for example. Yep, that's exactly it. One of the one of the key things to think about is and somebody brought it up is are we going to treat these kind of widespread impacting vulnerabilities as an incident? And I think so I think that's going to be part of the scope and I think we're also on the back end when we start to do really try to find out why we're having systemic problems.

Gerard Johansen:

Why do we keep finding ourselves in the same position quarter after quarter after quarter? That's where I think we're going to start to see the left and right limits of IR really start to expand and just really put expertise on these issues.

Corey Ham:

Nice. Gerard. Alright. So on to the next fire. Oh, sorry.

Corey Ham:

Go ahead.

Doc Blackburn:

I just got... I got one one other questions for Gerard here because he had mentioned these instances where somebody who accepted the risk is no longer with the organization. I think the problem's even worse than that. I think Gerard would agree with me, and maybe you've got some thoughts on this, is that rarely, rarely is the person who accepts the risk, rarely are the one... They the ones that have to stay after work to clean up the mess.

Gerard Johansen:

Yes. And that that is one of the one of the issues going back to this discussion about and I'm trying to put a series of blog posts about root cause because a lot of root cause, if you're familiar with the miniseries Chernobyl, the root cause of that wasn't just what happened on April 26. It happened years before. And it is one of those things that people that make these decisions about risk about, oh, we're just going to let it, you know, we're not going to patch. You you see this in ICS and IoT environments.

Gerard Johansen:

We're not going to patch because we can't take it off the line. So we're back three or four or five years. That leadership doesn't even know that there's an issue until Monday morning they come in and the problem is we're not we're not here to blame. I like to say investigate. Identify but don't indite.

Gerard Johansen:

You know, we're not here to say it was it was John. He made a bad call so he should be fired, but it's like no, we have to look at how we accept risk, how we transfer that risk, who owns it from identification to retirement. Lot of those a lot of those processes a lot of those back ends just reviews are not done and we I think PHP and these other things are going to highlight where we have a lot more broken processes.

Corey Ham:

I agree. So, basically, when everyone patched PHP, they actually hit a zed five, and they broke all their web apps. I actually don't really that. Yeah. I I literally saw one client app that we had been testing before, and then this whole PHP two shell thing happened.

Corey Ham:

And I went back to test it, and it was like, alright. They patched it, but they broke, like, half the endpoints in the app. Right? Like Oh, shit. Like Yeah.

Corey Ham:

It's like, honestly, like, whatever. They had to patch it, but it is like, I wonder how much of this will get rolled back. Like, it is like everyone assumed, oh, you just patch it. It fixes the vulnerability. You push a zed five, and it shuts down the reactor.

Corey Ham:

Right? Or you just break your entire web app. Yeah. Anyway. So I think let's let's go through some other quick fires that happened last week, not just PHP2Shell, which was by far probably the biggest vulnerability of the year from my perspective just in Impact.

Corey Ham:

So far. Yep. Yeah. So far, you know, knock on wood. That'll be the high water mark.

Corey Ham:

We got a couple more. It's... Yeah. God. So the...

Corey Ham:

Also, the Edmura... Edmuda? I don't know how to say it, but basically, the... There was a

Bronwen Aker:

E mudra.

Corey Ham:

E mudra. There was

Ralph May:

Great a name.

Corey Ham:

Intermediate intermediate certificate authority that had the idea to... They were they were doing some testing of SSL certificates and private keys, and they decided, you know, to use the password or the key value of 4 for their testing. And then they accidentally forgot to switch to the production versions of the certificates before they just published them. And so someone just happened to figure out, hey. The key is 4.

Corey Ham:

And then this resulted in a ton of back and forth, a little bit of drama between them and Mozilla. Mozilla being like, guys. And them being like, no. It's fine. And then them being like, guys.

Corey Ham:

No. It's not fine. I think at this point, this company has announced that they are... They tried to like retire. They were just like, no, we're not doing SSL anymore.

Corey Ham:

Which is very confusing because it's like, guys, what else do you do? It's like your whole thing.

Ralph May:

Yeah.

Corey Ham:

But, yeah, basically, these certificates are compromised. They're, you know you know, they're they're they're popped. They... They've been How

Ralph May:

did someone find out the key was just four? Like like, who was scanning for That's that's my

Corey Ham:

That's a great question. I don't know. I mean, because that's a

Ralph May:

You wouldn't know... You wouldn't see the private key. Right? Like, wouldn't see the private key. So you would just be like...

Ralph May:

But the input for the private key was just... Like, I'm so confused.

Corey Ham:

I mean, certificate

Bronwen Aker:

It's actually worse than that. It wasn't just that there was one private key that was for Uh-huh. The private keys that were there, 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, and 237.

Ralph May:

Me over here with my hashtag rig. Whoo. I'm gonna kill it.

Corey Ham:

Dude, okay. That's that's where

Gerard Johansen:

I was gonna go.

Ralph May:

It's like similar to building a rent...

Ched Wiggins:

Rainbow table where, like, maybe you dump some hashes and you can't trivially reverse them. What you can do is take very common passwords and then run those through a hashing algorithm to see if anything matches. It could have been something that that year.

Corey Ham:

To a

Ched Wiggins:

private start... You notice they start at zero and get up to about 200.

Corey Ham:

So if you're wondering how it was detected, it was actually detected by accident. So, basically, the researcher that found it was running a library called Google. It's Google library called Paranoid Crypto, which Okay. Does check... It checks for weak keys when it, like, starts up.

Corey Ham:

Oh. So literally, it would be like the equivalent of you walking into a building, and there's just a fire in the corner, and you got... And you're just like, hey. Is is anyone gonna do anything about that? Like, the the intermediate CA from an upstream authority got flagged in this library as a weak key.

Corey Ham:

So he literally was just like, read the warning banner.

Ralph May:

That's how it got discovered. Wow.

Corey Ham:

But... Yeah. So... And then, you know, chaos ensued. Mozilla recovered the keys on their own in about two hours, by the way.

Ralph May:

So so so just for context. Right? So the website would have to have been signed by this intermediary CA for you to even get this warning, assuming you're running this plugin or whatever. Right? So, like,

Corey Ham:

you Well, know no. So it checks... It... So, no. It checks...

Corey Ham:

Basically, this library checks all public trusted CA certs. Basically, it's like it... So so it was checking them all, essentially. That makes sense.

Ralph May:

It was checking all the intermediary CAs.

Corey Ham:

Correct. Yeah.

Ralph May:

Yeah. So it just showed up on the... Like, this isn't like an email warning for

Corey Ham:

No. No. It's like he started out... He was programming. He went to compile something, and the warning said, warning, untrusted CA in Mudra or whatever.

Corey Ham:

Like... And then he and then he, like, investigates it, and he's like, oh, this is like a real CA. And then he starts pulling on this thread and, you know, then he ended up just signing his own message with the private key here that being like, you can't argue. You cannot argue.

Ralph May:

Yes. But because it's the intermediary CA, everybody trust it because that true... Is trusted by everybody. So essentially, you're just coining certs for anybody.

Corey Ham:

Like Correct. So at this point You know? Yeah. Correct. So at this point, those...

Corey Ham:

You know, I will say, to be honest, the the system, the whole encryption of private key, public key encryption was set up to, like, to accommodate this type of failure. Like, this is like... People should be checking

Ralph May:

only problem the only problem with this though is that the certificate revocation list, this whole thing. Right?

Corey Ham:

Yeah.

Ralph May:

Yeah. You... They can't even really use that. Right? Like, it exists.

Ralph May:

Don't get me wrong. And you can go look it up. But most of what people are doing right now with their software is rolling out detections for this exact search because they can't trust that immediate... Intermediary CAs are gonna get on a revocation list or that your operating system's gonna stop it. So, like, you'll see patches from all of this software that says, hey.

Ralph May:

We added this to, like, the bad list.

Corey Ham:

Correct. It's just like every other vulnerability where, like, yes, there's an easy fix, but no one actually knows how to implement it. And so every vendor has had to implement their own Yeah. You know, their own version of their own fix. And and, basically, I think this did have pretty limited impact within the Western world.

Corey Ham:

Specifically, these certificates were used mostly for apps. It was an Indian company. I think they're mostly used for apps and websites and infrastructure within India. So at least in the Western world, I don't think we saw a ton of impact from this. Billions of people were probably still affected, but Yeah.

Corey Ham:

Definitely didn't... It didn't hit any of the major tech companies or vendors or anything like that. But like you said, trust is trust. Right? Like, cryptographically, the certs are still, you know, invalid, but whether they'll be actually marked as invalid by every piece of software.

Ralph May:

Software will depend on an update to actually be able to stop this. That's really

Corey Ham:

Correct. Yeah. So I guess while we're on this topic, if only someone could teach us a little bit more about encryption. I think if you work at eMudra, I think you should definitely go to this doc. You got anything for us?

Corey Ham:

What you got?

Doc Blackburn:

Well, let... Let's take a look here. Yeah. This December, I have a a four hour workshop where we are going to talk about encryption. And

Corey Ham:

Do you... You're not using 4 as your private key?

Doc Blackburn:

You know, what really strikes me about this situation is of all of the numbers that Bronwen had just stated with these keys, none of them were prime numbers. And so it wasn't even like somebody was trying to creatively troll us or something. They could have at least used a fun prime number like 8675309, which, by the way, did you know that? Wow.

Ralph May:

Is a very deep prime number.

Corey Ham:

That is a that's a that's a that's a fun tip. Anyway, so when's your your workshop?

Doc Blackburn:

It's December 4. It's fourth. And here's the thing is, last time I ran it, I I I feel like I lied to folks because here's the thing, is that when it comes to encryption, people widely misunderstand the fundamentals of encryption. And and so I had said, well, the course is for beginners and intermediate people, hoping that some people with some experience in cybersecurity would also enjoy the course. Folks, I really marketed that wrong.

Doc Blackburn:

I have now changed everything. This is what I'd like to call a no experience required course. So you don't need to know math. You don't need to understand anything about your computer other than how to turn it on and open up a web browser because you're gonna need that in order to take the class. I will teach you everything else.

Doc Blackburn:

And so... Then there's lots of hands on demonstrations. We're going to do some exercises where where you will get to touch the keyboard and encrypt things, decrypt them, understand the difference between... Because this panel here has been throwing around terms like private key, and a lot of people don't even understand what the difference is between something like, say, a private key and a secret key. Because those are actually two totally different types of encryption.

Doc Blackburn:

And by the end of my four hour workshop, you'll not only understand that, but you'll know what an intermediate an intermediary is. You'll understand what trusted root certificates are. We will actually... By the end of that four hours, we will have the attendees opening up certificates and not just reading the contents of them, but understanding what those contents say. And that's the best that I can sell it.

Doc Blackburn:

And, yes, the people from this company definitely needed to take this course before they issued any public private key cards.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. We would recommend if you're considering starting up an intermediate CA authority that you go to basic training for how encryption works, or just use four as your key. It's fine. So not only was there PHP2Shell, there was also Node2Shell.

Ralph May:

Oh, yeah. I kinda like... Couldn't couldn't leave Node out of this, honestly.

Corey Ham:

I think the... Yeah. I couldn't leave Node out of this because it's like, oh, I don't use PHP. I use modern web frameworks that aren't vulnerable. Oh, wait.

Corey Ham:

They are. So, basically, this is a vulnerability in Brotli compression. Basic... Or Brotli. I don't know if it's Brotli or Brotli, but I'm gonna go Brotli because it sounds more

Ralph May:

like a Broccoli, so I'm gonna go with Broccoli.

Corey Ham:

So it's not Bro, like Bro. Why? But, basically, this is a cryptic... Cryptographic... Crypt compression library that is, I think, written by Google.

Corey Ham:

And, actually, now that there was this node two shell vulnerability or whatever Mhmm. More people have been digging into this and kind of being like, maybe we should just throw this away. Like, maybe we should use broadly compression. This is one of those things, like, I I did some sweeps of our customers on this broadly vulnerability. This is much more conditionally and harder to exploit than Yeah.

Ralph May:

You have

Corey Ham:

to the PHP two shell thing because you have to, like, reach... You have to reach the actual Brotli decoder, which, like, you're going through other intermediaries to send traffic to a target server, it's, like, difficult to... It's like a deserialized, I guess. But if you can't actually guarantee that the field that you're writing is a deserialized field, if that makes sense. Because algorithms...

Corey Ham:

Most web servers support multiple encrypt... Encryption algorithms, and this is only one of them. There's a bunch of caveats. But either way, patch your patch your brotli's. Go eat your vegetables, I guess.

Ralph May:

Just just to be just to be crystal clear, Google maintains this project. It's in their repo. It's Google fully maintained and owned. So, obviously, Google fudged it up.

Corey Ham:

Yes. But also, like Andy just submitted, there's also somehow this affects... Google came up with a compression algorithm. Multiple people implemented their own

Ralph May:

version Yep. Of

Corey Ham:

And then that different... There's... This vulnerability has... Will have downstream. It's just like PHP.

Corey Ham:

How people implemented this is unique and specific, and will have to be patched and fixed in its own way. But, yeah, dot net, I think, is vulnerable or, you know, needs to be emergency patched. I'm assuming Cloudflare's already taken this one on in addition to the PHP two shell stuff. I love it. I love this game.

Corey Ham:

But... Yeah. So that that was another vulnerability, and that that isn't all... That isn't even all of them. There...

Corey Ham:

There's more.

Bronwen Aker:

But wait. There's more.

Corey Ham:

But wait. There's more. Yeah. It's just... It's been a crazy week.

Corey Ham:

Have to wait to talking

Ched Wiggins:

about the Vollans instead of talking about the news.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Really. Plex had a critical. There was like a chained RCE to whatever. There was a Light LLM supply chain attack again.

Corey Ham:

You're saying

Bronwen Aker:

Light LLM server.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. What else? I mean, I need to find links for all these. Sorry, Ryan.

Ralph May:

Just rapid fire over here.

Gerard Johansen:

Yeah.

Corey Ham:

There... There's... It's so it's so much. There was also GitLab critical vulnerability last week. CVSS Or CVS.

Corey Ham:

10. Yeah. It was a

Ralph May:

long getting a 10 nowadays. It's pretty much the standard number.

Corey Ham:

It is crazy. I'll I'll just paste these links. There's so many. There's GitLab one.

Ralph May:

Oh my god.

Corey Ham:

Light LLM. Here it is.

Ralph May:

Shell. That to shell. Everything's to shell.

Bronwen Aker:

To shell. There's shell everywhere. Shell

Corey Ham:

is not

Ralph May:

You get a shell. You get shell.

Doc Blackburn:

Wanna find a a two shell vulnerability in, a digital toilet because then I would call it crap to shell. Oh.

Corey Ham:

I mean Yeah. I will say It's

Ralph May:

a Plex to shell one.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Plex to shell. Light l l Light l m to shell.

Ralph May:

GitLab. Jesus Christ. There's like... It's a CVE, like, waterfall right here.

Corey Ham:

It it it really is. Also, I guess we should probably talk about this because it's just breaking... It makes me very sad, but I'm gonna... We're gonna talk about it anyway. So Microsoft published a blog about storm zero nine forty or nine forty or whatever calling them, which is a Chinese affiliated threat actor using publicly available open source agent frameworks to compromise companies.

Corey Ham:

So this is something we've seen in the IR space. Like, we've seen lots of companies getting breached through, like, unknown agents. We talked about Karen last week, which is another open source agent framework that was used to compromise a bunch of companies. But this is a really interesting write up. Our text is public, and it is it is well, you know, documented and available for anyone to go use.

Corey Ham:

And, basically, people are... You know, Microsoft is attributing that it resulted in the connect wise supply chain compromise. So, essentially, the threat of everyone was worried about, like, OpenClaw or whatever. This... OpenClaw is not the worry.

Corey Ham:

The worry is these cairns and the r texes. I will say on the pentesting side, the reason it makes me sad is because I didn't get to it first. Because we are using these we are using these agent frameworks, and they are super powerful and super useful. And it... They just...

Corey Ham:

It's... They're making it rain, and it's a bummer that even companies like ConnectWise aren't, you know, able to respond and react quickly enough to patch everything before an agent swarm or whatever you wanna call it gets to them. But, yeah, it's it's a really interesting write up from Microsoft. If this isn't on your, you know, IR tabletop exercise of, like, an agent threat actor going after you, then it it should be. But...

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Let's see. What else? There was the... Bronwen linked to the autonomous agent thing, basically.

Corey Ham:

This is a re... More research. This isn't like a demonstrated threat. But Symantec, who I guess still somehow has a threat hunting team, I don't know exactly what they're hunting. Just...

Corey Ham:

But, anyway, they basically observed this AI. I I guess, Bronwen, do you wanna run through this? Did you... Do you want... Wanna brief us on this one?

Bronwen Aker:

Well, sorry. I I was trying to to back up what you were saying, but maybe I got the wrong link. I mean, the the Skynet related thing and RTX are one and the same. They're the same story. It's basically using RTX to, again, amplify and accelerate attacks by going up against a lot of bots, basically, just leveraging them so that...

Bronwen Aker:

I think some of the reported turnarounds for compromises under the deluge of bots was four minutes. It's it's pretty bad. And so, yeah, this is part of... I think it's part of the Yandex business. It's kinda hard to...

Bronwen Aker:

There's so many links. Yeah.

Corey Ham:

I think this is separate. I think this is this is symbol... This is basically someone demonstrating a worming LLM, basically.

Bronwen Aker:

Okay. Is like I might have used the wrong link then. My bad.

Corey Ham:

I mean, it's cool. It's basically someone trying to take over other LLMs. You... Like, it's like trying to design a worm. So it's essentially saying, here's a prompt.

Corey Ham:

If I compromise one LLM server, I want this LM server to now become part of the botnet and continue. It's someone trying to launch their own agent swarm, basically. This is terrifying, but also not nearly as terrifying as... I don't know if you guys read that anthropic blog about, like, self replicating models on on smart TVs. Yes.

Corey Ham:

Like, the biggest nightmare

Bronwen Aker:

glad I have dumb appliances.

Ralph May:

Yeah. I actually... Have you guys read about the other recent article that's kinda been blowing up? And this is, like, not a shocker, and it's somewhat related to security. So...

Ralph May:

But in essence, people are using Claude or whatever AI agent to go remove all the ads off the Yes. That everyone's getting sold. Right?

Corey Ham:

This is my favorite thing. Yes. We have a news article about this. There's there's

Ralph May:

more than a couple. Yeah. So... But, you know, essentially, they're like, hey. It's on my Wi Fi network.

Ralph May:

Can you connect to it? It's like, yeah. Sure. And then it goes and removes all the ads and makes a clean interface, you know. So...

Ralph May:

Yes. Get rid of all

Bronwen Aker:

the unwanted apps, all the garbage.

Ched Wiggins:

Well, what's what's what's disturbing is when they reverse engineer these smart TVs and they start to enumerate the sort of surveillance technologies

Ralph May:

that are down running on that on them and stuff. Yeah.

Ched Wiggins:

I didn't ask for this, bro.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. I know. It it genuinely is, like, I just wanna watch Netflix. Yeah. It makes me want to...

Corey Ham:

Like, the... Basically, this specific... I don't know if it's in this article, but the one that came up recently was the... A verb... Per...

Corey Ham:

A researcher did this to their Amazon... Or no. It was a Samsung TV, and they got their OpenAI account blocked or banned, and that was, like, kinda creating some drama. I don't know if necessarily if OpenAI has responded to it or what, but, like, it kinda makes sense. It's like you're basically finding zero days in TVs.

Corey Ham:

Like, you are kind of like... Like, that's like, to me, makes sense to, like, ban people who are doing that. They didn't know But, like, look

Ralph May:

at the traffic though. That's not... You're you're allowed

Corey Ham:

It's local. That.

Ralph May:

Yeah. Yeah. It's like if you're not, like, actually attacking something, then I feel like you're kind of, like, you know, just broadly saying you can't do security. Right? Which, honestly, that's a whole other thing about security in the models that we're going to see more of that.

Ralph May:

Essentially, the big models being like, hey, you can't do that. Not because you're actually doing anything illegal or you're breaking any laws or that we can prove any of that. It's just that we don't want you to have that capability. Right?

Corey Ham:

Yes.

Ralph May:

It's not about the legality of the situation. Right? You could prove up and down it.

Ched Wiggins:

Well, it it might be under DMCA if I wanted to take, like

Corey Ham:

No. No. It's interoperability with this whole net. Yeah. It's it's...

Corey Ham:

He did it. He reverse engineered it for purposes of interoperability with other software, aka his agent harness. It's fine. Uh-huh. Either that

Ched Wiggins:

I agree with that legal defense.

Corey Ham:

Either way. We just don't...

Ralph May:

And that's other fun thing. We're not all lawyers, and neither is AI or the the the the companies. They're not they're not going to individually litigate each of those cases. Right?

Corey Ham:

But it's saying But I... It's like I see both sides. Yes. I see both sides. On one hand, this researcher definitely should be in a research, like, account that...

Corey Ham:

Where they're allowed to do this stuff and not, like... But also, I get, like, if you're OpenAI just banning people who are popping zero days at TVs, like

Ralph May:

Well... And and that gets and that gets to the last thing I'm I'm, like, kind of getting at here with the frontier models. Eventually, it will be, well, we don't want everyone to have this capability. Right? Like, not not just from a malicious standpoint.

Ralph May:

Like, we wanna control who gets that. Like, there's the ladder of, like, the information that is allowed to have on these models. Right? Like, being able to dictate who's allowed to be a researcher and who's not because we're the only ones that have that. Right?

Ralph May:

So

Corey Ham:

Well, the the best part about this... And the person... They're on... Their Twitter handle is log four j. So, I mean, that probably tells you exactly how that's gonna go.

Corey Ham:

But the the quote that the researcher or hacker published is hilarious, is, finally found a company that truly listens to its customers.

Doc Blackburn:

So I gotta chase the I gotta chase the rabbit down the hole real quick here because Ralph was bringing up the fact that smart TVs have microphones on them and bringing in something I said moments ago. And and I was actually... I was horrified by the fact that I said the words digital toilet, and nobody batted an eye. Just... Everybody's straight face is like, oh, yeah.

Doc Blackburn:

Digital toilet. And then then I just... I had to look up. Wait. So are there digital toilets?

Doc Blackburn:

And yes, now here's to bring that all back around. With some of them, they have wireless remotes. And it's like, How are you doing your business with Bluetooth. What? We'll go 10 meters in class two.

Corey Ham:

Wait, you don't have an AI enhanced toilet experience? But

Doc Blackburn:

the worst part is, I'm just about losing it over here, then I check to see, are there... Ralph, you ready for this one? Are there any digital toilets with microphones? And the answer is yes.

Bronwen Aker:

There are digital toilets with cameras that will actually take pictures of your poop and analyze it.

Corey Ham:

In AI. They use AI.

Ralph May:

It's a it's a shitty job, but someone has

Corey Ham:

to do it.

Doc Blackburn:

Can you imagine the person

Corey Ham:

being the person who did the AI training on that model? Like, being the mechanical Turk? Yeah. Like, you get a Captcha. You get you you get a Captcha.

Corey Ham:

It's like, what did this person have for breakfast? Doritos?

Ched Wiggins:

Contemplate data poisoning needs in this context.

Corey Ham:

I have to point

Doc Blackburn:

out, Ched is turning a different color red now. Oh my god.

Ched Wiggins:

No. That's because I walked four hours yesterday. That's I've always been this color.

Corey Ham:

That's just his inner rage. It's fine.

Ralph May:

That's right. That's funny.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. So, basically, you know, in the world of vulnerabilities, there's so many more. I don't even know if we can cover them all, but there's also... On... I guess I'll go on the defensive side.

Corey Ham:

I'll say this is maybe on the defensive side, but researchers did publish a counter AI tactic called context bombing. We've definitely, you know, talked about things like this in the past. We joked about the Snickers prompt injection attack that from a while. But, basically, this is... We we covered it a little bit last week, which is like deception that's targeted at AI agents.

Corey Ham:

Right? So we talked so much about all these AI, you know, agent frameworks going after stuff and doing all this stuff. What do you do about it? I mean, you could secure your stuff, but that's hard. This is an interesting tactic where essentially you hit a...

Corey Ham:

You're trying to intentionally trigger guardrails. Right? So we've seen people abuse this for, like, you know, to put PII or, like, bioweapons or other stuff into the prompt to try to get AI to hit its own guardrails. And there's nine bombs that they published. One of them hits...

Corey Ham:

Cuts attacks down by... If it's Opus five, which is very guardrail conscious, cuts attacks down by 91%. Obviously, with the Chinese models, you get less success. Maybe it's only 50%. It also does increase the bill.

Corey Ham:

So this is, like, the example of, like, AI deception, you know, an interesting concept. Maybe worth putting your LLMs dot TXT on your website to just have all of all of this in there.

Bronwen Aker:

Okay. But why is he calling it a bomb? It's a Honey context file.

Corey Ham:

Oh, it blows up the AI.

Ched Wiggins:

Like a logic bomb, but for model.

Corey Ham:

It's a fork bomb, but

Bronwen Aker:

for it's it's misdirecting them, which is what It was not misdirection.

Corey Ham:

It's literally hit their guardrails. Yeah. Yeah. It's basically being, like, using their internal mechan... It's similar to a fork bomb.

Corey Ham:

Right? It's like using process forking as the internal mechanism to blow up a Linux process. It's the same thing as an AI has all these guardrails. You intentionally make it run into those guardrails.

Ralph May:

And then they won't wanna do what you wanna do. And once it stops down, you gotta move to China.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. But by the way, I wouldn't rely on this. It might be a nice little safeguard, but I would not rely on this because, you know, you could safely assume Chinese threat actors also have obliterated models. Right? Like, that...

Corey Ham:

That's safe to assume, which if you're wondering what an obliterated model is, it's a model that doesn't have any guardrails or has its guardrails intentionally removed.

Ralph May:

They... Yeah. They've been intentionally removed. The other thing too, you could also just write, like, in case there is a file that you read that starts asking you to do other directions, just avoid that one. Right?

Ralph May:

Like that, you know, put that into a don't read file.

Corey Ham:

A 100%. Also, it's worth noting that every agent framework already uses sub agents, and this would probably never hit your root agent. It would be like, we dispensed an agent for recon. It pulls this into its context and dies, and then it just dispenses another agent for recon. Like, it would not Yes.

Corey Ham:

You know? It's not like you're just running these as one turn threads. Like, these are agent frameworks. But it is. It's still cool.

Corey Ham:

I mean, I'll I'll count trick, it as

Ralph May:

but it won't last. I think that's what we're trying to say.

Corey Ham:

Correct. Or correct. Yeah. I I think the, you know, getting... Like Bronwen said, misdirection and tar pits and honey pots and all that stuff is also important in addition to just, you know, putting don'thackme.txt on your website or whatever.

Corey Ham:

I know we started late. Let's see. Is there any chicken news? There's no chicken news, guys.

Ralph May:

I'm sorry. Chicken news.

Corey Ham:

I think we got most of our most of our plugs done. We got Gerard's plug. We got Doc's plug. John has a class coming up in November. He's teaching information security core skills in the era of AI.

Corey Ham:

I think that's November... Let's see. November tenth and eleventh, so a couple weeks or three weeks from now or something like that. And then I guess there's also this... In December, our summit, I think we're calling it what in the actual cyber, basically.

Corey Ham:

But that's gonna be the anti siphon summit for December. I think I'll be helping out with that one, so it should be fun.

Bronwen Aker:

That that should be fun. It'll be our end of year wrap up of, you know, what the heck just happened to us? And what do we have coming at us? Is that the light at the end of the tunnel?

Corey Ham:

And the same week that happens, I just assume there'll be some critical vulnerability in all software that we have to talk about on the news because that's just how it is. Yep. Yeah. I mean, there's there's so much more. Does anyone else have any, like, their own choice article of what they what they want?

Corey Ham:

There's a there's a Broadcom Wi Fi chip thing. Did you guys see that? That one's interesting.

Ralph May:

Yeah. You're talking about the the the sixteen year old bug? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ralph May:

And I thought that was interesting. And so it's it's a vulnerability in the way that they implemented the WPS code. So for those who don't know, that's the wireless privacy, like, security old ass Wi Fi.

Corey Ham:

No. No. No. That's... What you...

Corey Ham:

WPS, isn't that protected setup? Meaning, you push the button?

Ralph May:

Yep. That's

Corey Ham:

And then you, like, you push the button and then someone magically gets on your Wi Fi?

Ralph May:

Yeah. So... But that that actually has flaws in itself. But this is a vulnerability in how they implemented it. So you don't even have to use that at all.

Ralph May:

You can actually just tell it to connect to this, not even pressing the button or anything like Right? And then be able to exploit this to read memory. And then then in turn, you could get the password out of memory for the regular Wi Fi, like WPA two or whatever, and then connect to the device.

Corey Ham:

So, basically, if you have an old router or Wi Fi, you know, access point, it might be worth swapping it out if, you know

Ralph May:

Period. Effective even if it's not vulnerable to this. Because some dude in his basement is asking Claude right now if it... That's all I have to say.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Honestly, though, don't buy one off of Amazon. Don't buy a cheap router off of Amazon. We found out so many times those are backdoored and have, you know, all kinds of open doors in in them. I guess we didn't even talk about this.

Corey Ham:

Like, in a normal week, it would have been big news. OpenAI disclosed four more eight rogue AI incidents.

Ralph May:

Agents. Oh, no. They said they stopped their whole production. Another one? They stopped their whole production to figure out...

Ralph May:

To send out agents to find out how they're breaking out, and now they've locked them down so they can't break out anymore. Everything's fine. We're back in for GPT seven.

Corey Ham:

Oh, yeah. And by the way, we've achieved AGI again. Yeah. Oh, it's funny because it's scary. Yeah.

Corey Ham:

Wow. Yeah.

Ralph May:

They actually they did actually write a whole article.

Bronwen Aker:

Why does open... Why do open AI agents need data on hospital beds? They...

Corey Ham:

They're retired?

Bronwen Aker:

So I... I'm just... No. No. That was part of what they were going after.

Bronwen Aker:

Yeah. They actually many, many, many breaches.

Ralph May:

OpenAI ended up making a fake Internet for the agents to use to send them on a wild goose chase so they don't go out into the real Internet and do bad stuff. Yes.

Corey Ham:

I also think... Wasn't there? I saw an even more terrifying one that was like, the agents figured out how to transmit information by, like, CPU side channel attacks or whatever. Like, they figured out

Ralph May:

Yeah.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Basically... Yeah. If you give infinite typewriters and infinite agents or whatever, you're gonna produce a vulnerability one way or the other.

Bronwen Aker:

Yeah. Sweet.

Ralph May:

Yeah. But, no, it's it's cool, though. We're ready for seven AGI. It's

Corey Ham:

We're ready for seven AGI.

Ralph May:

Don't ask questions.

Corey Ham:

Mean, at this point, I'm just tapped out. Like, I can't I can't do another PHP two shell. I can't... I mean, we will this week. I'm sure.

Ralph May:

Yeah. But It's gonna be a lot of us.

Corey Ham:

I just

Ralph May:

Patch your servers. Auto update right now. If I can give, like, one recommendation, just auto update.

Corey Ham:

Unless it's Light LLM. Yeah.

Ched Wiggins:

Yeah. That's just supply chain infiltration speed run.

Corey Ham:

It's so... Yeah. It's so tough. Like, the balance between auto update everything and supply chain is such a risky... There was one more supply chain that I actually forgot about, and it just popped into my Like

Ralph May:

I guess I'll take it. Because most of the supply chain ones are, like, and the more exposed things you can, like, wait a little bit on. Right? So, like, having that first push. But that doesn't negate what you're trying to say.

Ralph May:

Some major vendor could get compromised and get the supply chain. But honestly, with how many CVEs are floating around there, it's probably not even worth your damn time. I mean, I'd rather just find the one CVE that affects everybody.

Corey Ham:

Did you... Speaking of supply chain while we're here, Ralph, did you see the popcorn time thing? No. Okay. So popcorn time, which I guess is like a...

Corey Ham:

I don't exactly know what it is, but it's a download client, which I'm assuming is, you know, for piracy purposes. What? But... Yeah. Basically, I'll I'll I'll post the blog.

Corey Ham:

It's pretty interesting. It's basically just someone who figured out how to shut down a supply chain attack in this client, which is used by millions of users. They were doing a threat hunt. They figured out that a lot of people were... There was a process called updater dot exe that was running, and they looked into it.

Corey Ham:

They discovered that it was popcorn time, which is this, you know, sketchy download client. Uh-huh. It had this wide open, you know, potential supply chain attack. They were able to figure out how the update worked and patch it, but it's super interesting to think about, like... I mean, it's again, like, if you're doing piracy, safe to assume you are at risk of being compromised, but this is a demonstration of how, you know, that...

Corey Ham:

An example of how that could happen with the supply chain thing. So I don't know. More nightmare fuel for the fire, I guess.

Ralph May:

Yeah. Don't download anything. Don't look at anything, and all of your SSL certs are fake.

Bronwen Aker:

Yeah. All your information I'm glad that I can go completely off the Internet grid by pressing one button.

Ched Wiggins:

The Internet was a mistake.

Corey Ham:

The Internet was a mistake. We hope that was good. Think better.

Bronwen Aker:

It was a good idea intended to solve a problem. Then it went mainstream, and all the bad kids came in to mess it up for the rest of us, and this is why we can't have nice things.

Ralph May:

Yep. That's basically it. On that note, I think

Corey Ham:

that's a good as good a time as any to end. I'll see you guys next week. Don't use 4 as your private key. Bye bye.

Doc Blackburn:

Use 8675309.