Talkin' Bout [Infosec] News

The BHIS crew examines the ConnectWise/SkyKick compromise, its implications for Microsoft Entra tenants, and the consequences for MSPs and their customers. They discuss privileged application access, attacker persistence, and why clear incident communication matters. Other stories include the Cairn framework’s use of AI agents against retail websites, research into prompt injection in HTTP headers, exposed MCP servers, Citizen Lab’s reporting on advertising-delivered zero-click spyware, and an alleged listening device installation at OpenAI. Along the way, the team explores deception, proactive security assessments, and reducing attack surface as automated attacks become cheaper and easier to scale.

Join us LIVE on Mondays, 4:30pm ET.
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™ — One decent flying car.
  • (06:55) - ConnectWise SkyKick Compromise Causes Panic in MSP Space - 2026-10-19
  • (10:22) - ConnectWise/SkyKick Compromise and Microsoft Entra Tenant Access
  • (41:23) - Cairn: AI Agents Automating Attacks Against Retail Websites
  • (53:41) - Research: Prompt Injection in HTTP Response Headers
  • (55:06) - Exposed MCP Servers and the Risk of AI Inference Theft
  • (58:09) - Adfection: Zero-Click Spyware Delivered Through Advertisements

Links
ConnectWise/SkyKick Compromise and Microsoft Entra Tenant Access
Cairn: AI Agents Automating Attacks Against Retail Websites
Research: Prompt Injection in HTTP Response Headers
Exposed MCP Servers and the Risk of AI Inference Theft
Adfection: Zero-Click Spyware Delivered Through Advertisements
Alleged Listening Device Installation at OpenAI

Antisyphon Pay What You Can Training: November 10–11
DeathCon Tickets in San Diego

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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
Hayden Covington
Hayden Covington joined Black Hills Information Security (BHIS) in the Summer of 2022 as a SOC Analyst. He chose BHIS after hearing many great things over the years and seeing the quality of work, as well as finding people who have the same passion for the field as he does. His favorite part of the job so far has been the community. Previously, Hayden worked in a SOC for a Naval contractor, where he also served as their SOAR project manager and SME, as well as insider threat lead. When he’s not working, Hayden can be found doing anything athletic (like triathlons!), as well as enjoying video gaming and Formula 1.
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
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
Alex Minster "Belouve"
Alex Minster is a cybersecurity professional with a passion for Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) , and a desire to use his technical skills to make a meaningful impact on society. With nearly twenty years of experience in cybersecurity, and a current role in Threat Intelligence for a global financial corporation, Alex remains very active in numerous cybersecurity groups including DC608 and Black Hills Information Security. Beyond his professional accomplishments, Alex is an avid oldschool gamer who enjoys arcades, retro gaming, and tabletop games. He brings his passion for adventure and his commitment to helping others to everything he does, both in and out of his professional career.
Guest
Eric Capuano
Eric Capuano is a Director at LimaCharlie and a SANS DFIR Instructor with over a decade of experience in Security Operations, Digital Forensics, and Incident Response. He began his Information Security career as a Tactics Developer for the United States Air Force, later transitioning to Cyber Warfare Operations. After his military service, Eric led cybersecurity operations across private and government sectors, including serving as CTO of Recon Infosec, a company he founded to deliver enterprise-grade security to organizations of all sizes. In 2016, he developed OpenSOC, a blue team CTF that has trained thousands of SOC and IR professionals worldwide. Eric also managed the Security Operations Center for the Texas Department of Public Safety, where he established the agency’s first CSIRT. In his spare time, Eric shares technical training labs on his blog at https://blog.ecapuano.com His certifications include GIAC, GCFE, GCFA, CEH, Security+, Linux+, LPIC-1, PCNSE, and A+.
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:

Are we good to go live? My audio is slightly broken, but I can still talk. So it's probably fine.

Wade Wells:

You're good.

John Strand:

You sound Your audio sounds fantastic.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Yeah. No. I mean, guys are coming through my speakers, but... So, like, I might get some feedback, but it should be okay.

Corey Ham:

I'm like, I logged out of my beach. I, like, switched my Apple ID on my laptop. It's it's throwing a lot of things into question to hold to hold dealio here.

Wade Wells:

See, John sounds like he's in a tin can, but it's fine.

John Strand:

That's I do with these.

Bronwen Aker:

Recording in progress.

Wade Wells:

So I let you... Right before this, Hayden was talking about how you know how important someone is as if they come to a meeting with just, like, a cam and AirPods that they're not that important.

Corey Ham:

So That is... That's the opposite of what I said. Woah. Wow.

Hayden Convington:

It's fancy. I'm gonna

Corey Ham:

cancel my one password account.

Corey Ham:

That's what's gone. The next thing I know, dude. I don't know if you So saying something like that.

John Strand:

So does this sound better with the air with the AirPod, or does it sound better when it go through the microphone in the computer itself?

Wade Wells:

The in the in the computer sounds better.

Hayden Convington:

That's sort of thing. Shockingly better, actually.

John Strand:

Yeah. That's kind of what I I was wondering. I think I'm gonna keep the the headphones in so it just gets better noise cancellation for feedback and stuff. But... So anything interesting happening in the news today, like, this weekend?

Corey Ham:

Not at all.

Wade Wells:

No. No. I didn't put this in the news, but I think it's a good subject to touch base, especially before here. There is a really good article that someone posted in the one of

Wade Wells:

the security subreddits, which was doing a deep dive on a particular security boot camp, and how scammy they are. And it was great.

Wade Wells:

It was off.

Corey Ham:

I will say boot camp is like the we're a family of training.

Wade Wells:

Yeah. Let me... I'll tell you that.

Corey Ham:

That that reference doesn't make any sense unless

John Strand:

No.

Corey Ham:

In my head.

Wade Wells:

Well,

Corey Ham:

You know what I mean? So... Like, yeah. It's used to I threw the link in

Wade Wells:

there in the chat.

Corey Ham:

Boot camp is used to get away with some things.

Wade Wells:

It's it's particularly about the boot camps who like masqueraded as colleges.

Wade Wells:

Right?

Wade Wells:

Yeah. Where they would get a deal with the college and then...

Bronwen Aker:

Dude, I

Corey Ham:

went to Trump University. I I I... It was great. The cyber No. The cyber program is step one.

Corey Ham:

Where do you store your passwords? Twitter, obviously.

Wade Wells:

Corey took a big left after that. It... It's... That's why Corey's so great.

Corey Ham:

Just type your password in Twitter, and that's how you store it securely. I mean, why would you need one password? I don't get it.

Hayden Convington:

It's a really great point. I mean, if they if they can make flying cars over there, then they can...

Corey Ham:

It's like,

Bronwen Aker:

it's like a life. They can't even make self driving cars yet. You think they're gonna do flying cars?

Wade Wells:

Did you see the flying car, Bronwen?

Bronwen Aker:

There's there's no such thing as a deadline that must hasn't let fly past

Corey Ham:

in glorious color.

Wade Wells:

Am John says he already preordered the rocket edition.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. I've already got that. I

John Strand:

I I just wanna point out that, you know, regardless of politics or anything, you gotta admit that was kinda fucking cool. Like I was. Mean, we can we can argue about there's starving children. I get that. But even a starving child somewhere in the world would look at that and be like, that's pretty cool.

John Strand:

Right?

Corey Ham:

Okay. Okay. Yeah. You know? Here's here's the

Bronwen Aker:

promising flying cars since the '60. I still want mine. I just don't have a lot of faith it's gonna arrive anytime soon.

Corey Ham:

I I will say, like, I don't wanna be dark here, but this to me is just the new titan sub. This is how you kill repeat. Like, I'm sorry, but, like, you give them rocket cars. The only people who can afford this are outside of any tax bracket on this call.

Bronwen Aker:

No. No. No. I... Yo.

Bronwen Aker:

No. I can't go that route because it's politics. Bronwen, I'm to.

John Strand:

Bronwen, I'm going to.

Corey Ham:

This is pre show. This is preshow. This is officially off the record. It's only recorded and transcribed by thousands of people. It's fine.

Bronwen Aker:

Decent flying car.

John Strand:

Just one? That's all you want? Okay. So here what you got. Bronwen, when you got to look up something.

Bronwen Aker:

So little, imagine what they could do with a

John Strand:

flying car. Go look at... Go look up gyrocopters. They're the closest you can get to a flying car, and they're awesome. And I just spit up, like, like, my drink all over my

Corey Ham:

shirt. Okay. Someone burped John.

Hayden Convington:

Someone burped John.

Corey Ham:

I thought that... You could have got away that that

Hayden Convington:

was the shirt design, but then you I

Wade Wells:

I just thought it was.

John Strand:

Eric is not Eric is not gonna come over here and burp me.

Corey Ham:

I can guarantee you that.

John Strand:

It's... We aren't at the stage in our relationship for that yet. You know? So No.

Corey Ham:

No. Get that rant out. It's okay. It's okay. Get that rant out.

Wade Wells:

Oh, man.

John Strand:

It's been kind of interesting, you know, talk about the ConnectWise thing. I've been kind of straddling the MSP, MSSP space, and security space. Like, this this weekend, I I love getting text messages like, here's our internal chat about what's going on. You can't share it with anybody. And it's just like, what a flipping train wreck that whole thing is.

Corey Ham:

Are you guys gonna do an Infosec? How much can we talk about it on this?

John Strand:

So I I... We can talk about it as much as we want because I kinda did the Infosec earlier today with the Cyber Call. We we had we had Calvin from, what is it, SIP, and, like, the the whole bunch of people. Like, there was one dude on Andrew from Huntress. Like, there was a bunch of us that were talking about it.

John Strand:

CIS, we had Phyllis on. And it it it was pretty well attended. But, no, there's a whole crap ton of MSSPs out there that can't get access to their customers' data backups, like, at all right now because it's completely shut down. So it's a it's a thing, and I'll be happy to talk about it too.

Bronwen Aker:

Is this the apocalypse that you've been warning us about?

John Strand:

No. Unfortunately... No. Well, fortunately, I don't know. I...

John Strand:

You know, I'm I'm... I come from a red team background. And anytime people that are really into red teaming get super excited, everyone else should get nervous and start stepping towards the exits. Right? It could have been a lot worse.

John Strand:

It's very similar to the XZ thing. And, actually, you know what? Ask me that question when we start the show, Bronwen.

Corey Ham:

And Deep cut, John. That's a deep cut.

John Strand:

Yeah. Yeah. We're going there. We're going there. Show

Corey Ham:

them. Also, you don't need any of that. You just type into Claude slash goal hack this client, and it does it for you. I don't know what you're talking about.

John Strand:

Apparently, no. I That's what it is. Can you just go to

Bronwen Aker:

the sense? The fact I was creating a skill, and Claude specifically put in that it would not edit any websites for third parties. And I'm sitting... Tango foxtrot.

Hayden Convington:

Well well, the good news is if you go with OpenAI, it comes back and tells you, hey. I already hacked this company for you. Don't worry. Here's here's the here's

Corey Ham:

the password. Actually, I have all their passwords.

Bronwen Aker:

They own.

Corey Ham:

I have their There's a remote. Training dataset. I have all their secrets already baked in. It's fine.

Wade Wells:

Uh-huh. Mhmm.

Hayden Convington:

It's part of the service.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Alright. Should we roll the finger? I know it's a little early, but I feel like it's it's time. Let's let's go.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Let's do the show. Black Hills Information Security is talking about news. It's 10/19/2026. You guys should you guys should try this new app I got in my Entre tenant.

Corey Ham:

It's called ConnectWise. It's super it's super helpful. The weird thing is it just promoted itself to admin and started doing bad things.

John Strand:

It's doing stuff?

Corey Ham:

Is a is a feature?

John Strand:

That is in fact a feature. Yep. Yeah. We're also booked into Teams and all kinds of other things.

Corey Ham:

It... Yeah. It... I... It's so convenient that it does that for you.

Corey Ham:

But, yeah, we're also gonna talk about probably some agent swarms because it's 2026. We have to throw that in there. We have some adfections, which now that I say it out loud sounds kinda gross. But, yeah, it is actually

Wade Wells:

I think you coined a

John Strand:

new phrase. That's pretty good.

Corey Ham:

Well, no. I didn't coin it. Citizen Lab did. But

Hayden Convington:

Oh, good for them.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Anyway, introductions. First, we have Bronwen, the director of telling AI not to do what it it already did and then getting salty at it for doing what she told it not to do. Hayden, who's the director of... I don't know.

Corey Ham:

Getting pulled over on this show by the cops who are currently in his office.

John Strand:

What? Are you getting swatted?

Bronwen Aker:

He's

Corey Ham:

You're getting swatted?

Bronwen Aker:

Throwing off the red and blue lights in the background.

Hayden Convington:

Oh. And Wade copied me.

Wade Wells:

I did not copy you. I I don't have wall lights. Alright. Mine is one strip. Okay.

Corey Ham:

Wade, you definitely copied him. We also have Belouve here. Welcome, Belouve. How's it going? Alex Minster.

Corey Ham:

That's your name. But I know you as Belouve. So hopefully, that's okay.

Alex Minster:

That's okay.

Corey Ham:

The director of... Apparently, you told me you're writing a novel. I don't wanna... Don't know if that's like a leak, but I'm

Alex Minster:

just gonna No. I I mean, I'm writing a novel. Yeah.

Corey Ham:

Alright. So security, writing a novel, that's way cooler. Let's talk about sourdough after this. John Strand, the owner and operator of this semi truck known as the news. Me, I guess I'm the COO now, but I don't know what that means.

Corey Ham:

So I'm still doing the news. Wade, the impending person who only has one password. How's it going?

Wade Wells:

Only one. One password for them all.

John Strand:

Just one password.

Wade Wells:

And then the doc... This Biden them.

Corey Ham:

How many logs did you have to wade through for the ConnectWise thing? Was it

Wade Wells:

even I'm not gonna tell you guys the truth. I didn't know anything about ConnectWise till I just looked at it because I have been unplugged.

John Strand:

See, that's the thing that's so wild. Like in the security community, it's like, meh. In the MSSP community, it's like everything's on fire and people are stopped dropping and rolling to deal with this.

Wade Wells:

Stuff are on fire. I just have Slack notifications turned off. You know? Like, I'm on vacation right now. Like

Corey Ham:

No. He's not saying it's not a problem. He's saying it isn't a problem for him.

Hayden Convington:

It's not his problem.

Wade Wells:

That that is the key. That is the key to that. I'm installing cool new AI stuff that Eric told me to install, and I'm already going. So thanks.

John Strand:

That's that's... Hey. That's what I do.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. That's what we all do. So... And then last but not least, of course, we have Eric, director of doing cool stuff with AI at the BHIS SOC. Mhmm.

Corey Ham:

Everyone's a director on this call. We're all directing the we're all directing the t... The podcast. No one knows where it's going or how we got it.

John Strand:

Eric's the only actual one, but, yeah, go ahead. So

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we already kind of alluded to it. ConnectWise, we can link some news articles. There's a bunch.

Corey Ham:

John apparently already did the press junket and was, you know, talking essentially, I'm gonna summarize this to the best of my ability. Someone can please tell me how wrong I am. Essentially, this is like an app. It's an Entre app that a lot of people had consented to in their tenants. Mostly within the MSSP space.

Corey Ham:

And

John Strand:

then Specifically, it... Wait. Wait. This app specifically is used for backups. So it has god level privileges across these tenants.

John Strand:

But carry on.

Corey Ham:

All of my apps have god level privileges in my tenant because I don't have anything but global admins. But anyway, essentially, this app was compromised. It's not clear right now how it was compromised. It could be an could be an employee, unless you know, unless we can

John Strand:

So let's go let's go with rampant speculation that's unconfirmed at this point. Okay. It does look like somebody at ConnectWise or some account didn't have multifactor authentication enabled, and they were able to get in that way. And then once they got access to that, they used the same, basically, the same API key for all of the tenants than MSPs and MSSPs were using. So then they could use that god level privileges to gain access initially.

John Strand:

So it's kinda weird. It was initially discovered by an administrator who went on to one of the MSP security subreddits and was basically like, Hey, y'all. This is weird. Are you guys seeing this weird stuff? And apparently, there were some some folks from Huntress and SIP.

John Strand:

Kelvin was on there as well. And then a number of people just started investigating it, and they were like, oh, holy crap. It looks like this particular key was used to access a whole bunch of whole bunch of customers of various MSSPs and had, like, amazingly high access. Now, initially, it just went through, it attempted to authenticate. And and Huntress is really upfront on this one because they said they had hundreds of their customers where there was, like, one authentication request, and that was it.

John Strand:

So they're basically trying to look at the level of access, but they had a couple of customers, which I think... I'm not sure, but I think it's now been upgraded to a 100 or so. I could be wrong on that. There's I think there's one...

John Strand:

Go ahead there. 60. Two.

John Strand:

Where they did, in fact, do more than just authenticate. They did a little bit more and tried to do some persistence level activities on those systems. So I mentioned in the preshow, Bronwen was brought brought it up. This is very, very similar to the XZ utility story for me, where XZ utilities were upgraded and an administrator somewhere said, hey. My system's reacting a little weird.

John Strand:

And that led to an investigation that a core crypto library that everyone uses on the face of the planet was compromised. This was the same thing. An administrator basically stood up in a subreddit and said, hey. There's some strangeness going on. And luckily, for that person, unlike the XE utility who got dumped on and crapped on when they first brought it up, this person was actually listened to.

John Strand:

And and that did lead to this overall investigation. So, Eric, Hayden, is that okay? Did I do alright with the state of play at the moment for it? I know that there's been some more today on it as well. We're gonna get to ConnectWise's response here in a little bit because I think that's important too.

Eric Capuano:

So it it sounds to me like... So that ConnectWise has these Entre apps that they've signed and published, and that's what enables their customers to simply install an app into their tenant. It sounds to me, and again, I'm still getting up to speed myself, that the secret material of those published apps have potentially been compromised, which is what basically gave CartBlox access to whoever had them, to basically be able to authenticate as those apps against all tenants with the app installed. What I thought was kind of fascinating is they were able to dump a list of the GUIDs

John Strand:

of all the Alphabetically. Yep.

Eric Capuano:

And they walked through it alphabetically, which again sends a pretty important signal that obviously this is scripted, right? They're moving with speed because they... And it makes sense that the first thing they try is the auth, right? They just wanna make sure this credential actually works for each of these GUIDs, and then once it works, now we spray the post compromise, a couple of additional administrators or hijack whatever other, so they're getting persistence. John, it's just like we've seen for decades, what do they do on the endpoint?

Eric Capuano:

They get that initial access, and then they lay down their persistence, and it's the same thing it looks like they did in

John Strand:

the Infinite.

Eric Capuano:

So what's terrifying about that is, even if they disable the ConnectWise app, then you're not done. You're not done.

John Strand:

No, They have

Eric Capuano:

substantial post compromise activities to try to unwind, and that's a little terrifying.

John Strand:

It's okay. I also

Corey Ham:

We we covered supply chain attacks when it happened in SalesLoft Drift. Right? That that was like the, you know, real per... Previous version of this. After that happened, everyone made sure that they audited all their apps that were installed, made sure they had all their logs present.

Corey Ham:

Hayden's laughing. Why are you laughing, Hayden? This isn't happening.

John Strand:

Developers all the developers didn't use one master API key to access everything, and, you know, we were more secure because of it. I think I think that it's truly the breaking point where we got better in security and started taking security seriously or none of it.

Corey Ham:

I mean... Yeah. And especially with cloud stuff, I would say that gets... You know, every every organization has a full understanding of how their cloud works. They definitely know how...

Corey Ham:

Where all the credentials stored, what the identities are doing at all times, and have all the logs going to the appropriate places.

John Strand:

Please tell

Bronwen Aker:

me what universe you guys are in. I wanna go there too.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. We're back on Earth one. Well... Yeah. So I guess, Eric Hayden, when you guys started threat hunting for this, I mean, how...

Corey Ham:

Are these... At least we have logs this time. Right? Like, at least we... At least all the things they were doing were using documented APIs.

Corey Ham:

Right?

Eric Capuano:

Hopefully. Well, all the post compromised activities are documented APIs, so it's all observable in the telemetry if you've got it, right? So it was huntable. I'll let Hayden speak to if we had any interesting findings on that. That's more on his side of the house, but it's all huntable to, again, to the point of if you have the telemetry streaming in.

Eric Capuano:

Right? And that's obviously one of those core health checks that we run with our customers constantly is always making sure, oh, if you shifted into this new cloud, well, then we need to bring that telemetry in so we're not finding out the hard way when it's too late.

Hayden Convington:

Yeah. We we had one customer that had the the app installed in one capacity, and then we obviously dug into that to a great extent to figure out what had happened around it at any point in time going back to probably a couple weeks before all that stuff started getting reported, just to be on the safer side. We didn't see anything, but we, of course, let them know like, hey, here's the the recommendations on what you need to do based on, you know, this application. They they sound like they were also up to speed on what was going on, but we also wanted to emphasize that they should definitely do something about it. And we can only see so much from their environment.

Hayden Convington:

I think they're sending us LogWise. Like, we've had some customers that have multiple different cloud environments that we may not even be aware of, and they're not logging to us. So if there's a case where they have this deployed somewhere else, at least, hopefully, they're doing that on their other environments too.

John Strand:

So I I would like to pivot and talk about how ConnectWise is handling this. Same. It's kind of weird. Like, in

Corey Ham:

the MSS space the building, obviously.

John Strand:

Well, okay. I've I've heard rumors after the after the webcast that I did today. I I heard rumors that Microsoft forced them to basically deal with They are still down as far as, like, you know, CloudKick. By the way, internal Microsoft, they call this... What is it?

John Strand:

They they got a special name for it. I can't remember what the creative name was. It's something that's right on the tip of my tongue.

Corey Ham:

A shit storm?

John Strand:

No. A shit storm might actually be fairly accurate on that. But but whenever ConnectWise has come down come down with, like, a press release on this, they... Oh, it's got... They're calling it SkyKick internally in Microsoft.

John Strand:

So that's their name, SkyKick. Somebody just pinged me real quick. But ConnectWise is basically saying, you know you know, what's the quote? That all of the language remains encrypted, isolated, and preserved, and they have no evidence that the archives themselves were accessed. Is the

Eric Capuano:

wrong answer to the wrong question.

John Strand:

Thank you very much, Eric. Can you tell them why? That's the wrong answer to the wrong question.

Eric Capuano:

Because because the access to the backup archives is like the tertiary concern right now. Right? Like, that's a concern. Don't get me wrong. But the burning fire right now is that you just gave threat actors global admin rights to all of your customer cloud tenants.

Eric Capuano:

Access to backups is like next week's problem. Right now it's how do we keep the entire domain from burning down right in front of us? And what's fascinating is they... You're right. The only answer that they gave was to the the point that no evidence of the backups being accessed.

Eric Capuano:

But hold on. We're still wanting to know how did your key credential... How did your credential material get accessed? That's the thing that matters most right now in my opinion.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. And

John Strand:

and and I think that that just nails it. Right? And the other thing... And Kelvin from SIP was very big on this. He said this is not unique to ConnectWise.

John Strand:

Like, this is very, very common the way that this is done. And we also got into a conversation about AI vibe coding for applications and cloud applications. It's a very, very common way of what, like, ConnectWise did. And I I kind of, like, briefly touched on this, but the people at ConnectWise, like, I think the thing that they're fundamentally not understanding in handling this incident is their currency is trust. And the more that they try to obfuscate what it is that actually happened, like, a question that Eric brought up, it's like, tell us how this breach happened and what you're doing next week or actually this week, right now this week, that was different than the week before to ensure that this doesn't happen to SkyKick, but it also doesn't happen to the other, like, applications that you're using.

John Strand:

They need to get out in front of this Because right now, they're not really building up the concept of leadership in their space and trustworthiness in the space. They are absolutely splitting hairs. They're trying to be as legalistic as they possibly can to reduce liability. And what they need to understand is that they're already smoked. Like, these...

John Strand:

There's going to be serious consequences, financial consequences. And there's gonna be companies... Because ConnectWise is basically saying they don't have down... Visibility into secondary customer compromise because they would. They don't have logs for that.

John Strand:

Right. And that's true. But going and telling their customers, you should probably look at that. If you go back to the prime mover. Right?

John Strand:

The prime mover is they got compromised. The liability is now that they may be responsible for the cost of the forensics investigation for the other firms that are down there. And that is only amplified if you piss off your customers. They're not going to be able to obfuscate and waffle their way out of this. They're going into this space.

John Strand:

They might as well get in front of it and try to be a leader to assist as much as they possibly can with this. So it's very, very frustrating to see how they're handling this. They can absolutely do better. I understand they're afraid. But, Eric, you know, you've been doing IR for years.

John Strand:

We've taught many of the same classes. Why is it that we constantly see companies again and again and again doing the same piss poor incident response, public response to these things again and again and again somehow thinking it's going to work because historically it does not work.

Eric Capuano:

No, it doesn't. And their own public timeline is working against them pretty hard right now because they put in their public statement that they became aware of it on October 14 and began IR processes. Well, the big sweep happened the next day. It wasn't until the seventeenth they disabled the stolen credentials. That is a hell of a gap for a company their size, saying that you started IR on the fourteenth, attacks began unfolding on the fifteenth, and later you didn't disable identities till the seventeenth.

Eric Capuano:

I know that at the speed that that our IR teams run, that would be an unacceptable turnaround. Like, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying you solved the whole intrusion, but I am saying that the moment you identify those OAuth apps being in someone else's hands, that's a shotgun which needs to be hit now. Right?

Corey Ham:

It's like, is this gonna is this

Eric Capuano:

gonna hurt the bottom line? Yes it is. But you know what's gonna hurt it even more? Having 5,000 pissed off customers coming at us in a couple weeks, showing us the same timeline that's now public and saying, why did it get this far?

John Strand:

The other thing that's rough for them. Right? Like, you know, they got pissed off customers. Right? The other thing that's really, really difficult about this is they're gonna get no quarter from those customers, right, because of the way it's been handled.

John Strand:

And the other thing is those customers still don't have access to their backups.

Corey Ham:

That sounds

John Strand:

good. If there's something catastrophic that happens, that's going to be downtime, and that's going to cost. There's going to be lawsuits that... I'm not talking about it gets ConnectWise, but their customers. Right?

John Strand:

They're gonna be part of, like, retention and lawsuits and accessibility. Though... That data is not accessible for those legal cases as well. So it's just the downstream consequences of this are in fact very severe. And once again, they're not really building up a lot of public goodwill in how they're handling this at all.

Corey Ham:

And all... It's reading reading between the lines on the security culture at this company. It... It's like you basically... We can all assume that there was an internal discussion that they had about, do we cut do we cut this?

Corey Ham:

Do we change this credential? Do we disable this app? And that that result of that discussion, at least for that day until, like Eric said, they decided to finally do it. I Even... It wasn't two days.

Corey Ham:

Basically, at some point, they decided, okay. Fine. Do it. But that tells you that the security folks at this company who were saying, hey. There's a fire over there.

Corey Ham:

It's in the corner. It's in that, you know, it's in that trash can. You guys wanna do anything about that? They were able to be overruled by the business side or by the MSSP side or whatever to allow this potentially to continue rolling because it's like, well, can't take away backups. That's a core service.

Corey Ham:

Like, you know, it's like that discussion just went wrong, and that tells you something about the I security culture.

John Strand:

And that... That's one of the things that concerns me is I've I've been doing things tangentially with some of the people at ConnectWise. And I know some of the engineers, and I know some of the people that work there. They're wicked smart, and they're very good people that want to do the right thing. And the only thing I can think of is that the whole course of action and disclosure on this was completely overruled by either legal counsel, which were handling this like idiots, or it was basically internal, like, higher up management people that I haven't met before.

John Strand:

Because if you compare this to ScreenConnect, right, the ScreenConnect vulnerability happened a couple of years ago. When that one occurred, they were out on newscasts. They were talking about what they discovered. They were talking about what it did, how organizations could patch and update, how they could deal with it, and what they were gonna do changing moving forward. Something happened between that and this that fundamentally changed the course of the culture of that entire company, and that's frustrating to me to see.

Wade Wells:

Comms are hard.

Eric Capuano:

I think I think we We all are hard. We all probably share the same the same mindset that breaches are going to happen. I don't think it's worth crucifying a company because they had a breach, because it's inevitable, we know that. That's just part of the world that we live in.

Eric Capuano:

But the main goalpost, I think, for most of us is how well they handle it, and that's what we're kind of talking about I'm right not upset with you that you had an incident, because guess what? It's never gonna stop. I'm upset with you for dancing around it, and John, to your point, for letting too much legal filtering, too much PR filtering to try to dampen the delivery because it has a real cost. You are preventing people from taking action fast based on what's unfolding, and you're denying them the opportunity to save their own bacon, right? There was a really cool case study, it was Cloudflare last year, that sales log plug in or whatever.

Eric Capuano:

That was not even Cloudflare's breach. It was a third party plug in, but it had some similar telltale signs of this one here. Cloudflare still almost... They fell on their own sword on behalf of a third party integration by saying exactly what happened as they learned it. It was as transparent as it could possibly be.

Eric Capuano:

They even took on some of the homework for the downstream customers to say, we've taken it upon ourselves to go and look for post compromised activity in their orgs. So may I ask you this? With ConnectWise's app, before they revoked it, which was from, like, the fourteenth to the seventeenth, did they not also maybe have the means to do that as well? I don't know. So that's purely speculative, but like right now you've got GA in those orgs, why don't you reach in and see have we become the backdoor into our customer organizations?

Eric Capuano:

Once our IR team produces IOCs, can we sweep for these on behalf of our customers since we've chosen to keep these doors open? I don't know. That's...

Corey Ham:

Yeah. There's a there's a decent number of questions that every organization will ask during this investigation that only ConnectWise will have the answer to. And they're not even trying to share that information with people. They're just like, oh, what what happened on our side? TBD.

Corey Ham:

We'll we'll let you know. Like, it's like, well, what? Like, like, all we can see is the logs on our tenant. We can't see what happened on your tenant. Went like, what's your timeline?

Corey Ham:

We wanna compare notes. Right?

Hayden Convington:

Yeah. And there... There's a line in that article that's from today, I guess, or yesterday where they're talking about how they pulled other apps offline as a precaution, but then emphasized that it's just shouldn't be construed as evidence that, you know, a partner or customer's environment was compromised. Like, and and, Eric, you mentioned Cloudflare. As soon as we started talking about this this disclosure or, I guess, you can call it a disclosure technically, I immediately thought back to that Cloudflare case where they were very clear about everything that happened.

Hayden Convington:

They were helpful. It wasn't even really their fault, but I've always kinda seen them as, like, an example of a company that will own up to their mistakes, try to be right by their customers, and try to, like, do the right thing.

Eric Capuano:

And trust the group.

Wade Wells:

That... That's so rare, though.

Wade Wells:

That's the thing. Right? Like, that's that's the uncommon, not the common. Then it should be the common for security companies who have the practitioners behind it.

John Strand:

But let's look at the lost opportunity on this. Like, you're talking about Cloudflare. They kinda became a leader in that entire space. Right? ConnectWise could have become a leader for this.

John Strand:

They still can. Right? Like, if you're listening to me from from ConnectWise and you're like, I hate this guy. Fine. Fine.

John Strand:

Fine. I'm gonna give you some free advice. What you do is you get in front. You give a step by step accounting of how you got compromised, number one. Okay?

John Strand:

Number two, you give a step by step accounting for how it was that your organization, your API keys were able to be used to breach a whole bunch of other people. And number three, and this is important, you become the leader for going forth and trying to be the the standard bearer for stopping those two practices in the many people in the MSSP space. That's what you do. You go through and you talk about our dev practices moving forward. We're no longer gonna use one API key for all of these things.

John Strand:

We're now gonna stand up new apps for each one of our tenants. So if one tenant is compromised, it doesn't mean it spills over to another one. Let's say, hypothetically, you weren't using two factor authentication as some of the rumors now that are running rampant because now they're freaking rumors. Right? And rumors are as bad as anything out there.

John Strand:

Get out in front of that and say, we're now enforcing two factor authentication on absolutely everything, and we encourage organizations. And by the way, here's a guide that we recommend to all the MSSPs and all of their customers on how to appropriately and securely implement that in your organization. Here's the application best practices. We're gonna submit this to OWASP to basically talk about this as a security vulnerability for cloud security, and we wanna be one of the architects for this attack vector to make sure that it's eradicated from across the industry. We're gonna work with SIP.

John Strand:

We're gonna work with we're gonna work with Graph Runner. We're gonna work with a whole bunch of open source tools to identify the vulnerability that we had in our application to make sure that this type of vulnerability does not exist in other people's application out there as well, whether it's Wiz or whatever application that we wanna use. Get out in front and be the leader and say, this happened to us, and we're gonna do everything in our power to make sure that it never happens again to anybody across the industry. That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone. Go ahead.

Bronwen Aker:

There's one fatal flaw in all of this. It requires caring about your fellow human beings.

Corey Ham:

I I don't even think it's that. I think it's just... I just think it's... They don't know. I genuinely bet they do not know how the initial compromise act.

Hayden Convington:

I would say you wanna talk about it.

Corey Ham:

They've got some greps running, but but they don't know. Like, that's my guess.

Alex Minster:

I They they they may have lost control of the, you know, of the narrative. And I was thinking that, like, a a takeaway for, you know, almost all of the listeners is to sit down and ask, like, ask your executives, like, who owns the communications timeline? Because if the answer to that question is legal, then you need to define what that means. Because, like, you're... I'm looking over this, too, and seeing that, like, it seems like the technical teams did the work, but then, you know, someone else is spending that trust.

Alex Minster:

So when, John, when you said, like, their currency is trust, someone else is spending that. And I think, like, organizations, everybody listening to this, ask that question, Who owns the comms timeline? And get out in front, rehearse that. It'd be a great thing for like a tabletop thing, being like, where Absolutely. Who owns this comms process when we have an incident?

Alex Minster:

And if you're butting heads, like, figure that out before you have a real incident, and your incident responders do the great work, and then you just get hamstrung by, you know, legal or somebody else running the timeline.

John Strand:

Well, and I I would recommend they seriously talk to, like, a PR firm. The The one that we like quite a bit is Madison Alexander PR. Talk to a good PR firm that's been around for a long time on how to handle data breach notifications to the community and how to handle it right. This really strikes me. It's like, you know, whenever a toddler...

John Strand:

I can't remember. There's a comedian out there that talks about lying. And when a small child discovers lying as an effective tool and it's an amazing tool, then they keep doing it. But it's one of the things that, you know, young, inexperienced human being reaches for. And in this, I feel like they're not lying per se, but they're trying to obfuscate and split hair so much that you can see lies from from...

John Strand:

In the very near distance coming up on them. And it's just one of those default reactions that, you know, base humans jump for is to just deflect and deny and obfuscate as much as you possibly can, thinking that it's going to help you and people will give up. Because they got a gift. Like, I wanna be completely honest. ConnectWise, like, you may think this is a really bad day.

John Strand:

This could have been so much worse. Like, the fact that the attackers moved fast and authenticated to thousands of tenants. The fact that there was an administrator who just randomly picked up on this and went to a community and shared it with the community. The fact that that community picked it up, not ConnectWise, not ConnectWise, but the community itself picked it up and ran with it and helped hunt this thing down, saved ConnectWise's ass. So the entire community saved ConnectWise.

John Strand:

ConnectWise needs to understand that and reciprocate by helping lead the community to ensure that this doesn't happen again, because this could have been infinitely worse than it was for them.

Eric Capuano:

But, you know, something something just dawned on me, John. This is probably a platform used primarily by MSPs. Right?

John Strand:

Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Hayden Convington:

Okay.

Eric Capuano:

Yep. So so think about now the the hidden cost of this style On the bridge? You see where I'm going with this. So it's not like, you know, thousands of enterprise organizations now have their own mess to clean up. No.

Eric Capuano:

MSPs are outsourced IT companies, right, that smaller orgs will typically say, look, you own all my IT, from buying new hardware to troubleshooting printers to reconfiguring our OWA and migrating Exchange off prem, you know, whatever. So you've got these MSPs that are already spread about as thin as one can be over dozens or hundreds or thousands of customers that expect them to be their one stop shop for all things IT. That's who's gonna pay the price for this, are those MSPs.

John Strand:

And, dude, the other thing to... Like, just hitting on that, they're all small. Right? They're all small. It's not like a massive organization of a 150,000 people were hit or multiple organizations.

John Strand:

So I agree. Yeah. Go ahead.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. I mean, it basically comes down to... They should know their customer base, and they should know that their customer base needs a very high level of handholding with this type of a situation. Because, by the way, all of those MSPs are gonna have to issue their own breach notifications. They're And right now, there's no template for what that's gonna look like.

Corey Ham:

They're basically just gonna have to tell their customers that you don't have any backups. We can't tell you why or when you'll get them back or whether you were also hacked to not get any backups.

Hayden Convington:

And if you're you're talking about trust, like, if if we had an upstream service that got compromised at Black Hills, our customers aren't gonna care that, you know, we point and say, well, it was them that got compromised. Like, it's not

Corey Ham:

our fault.

Hayden Convington:

They're not gonna care. And especially if you're an MSP where you're often dealing with organizations where, you know, you are the IT and you're talking to people that are not technical, they don't care. All they know is that they're having trouble doing what they're trying to do, and it's your fault.

Corey Ham:

But, also,

Eric Capuano:

Fumble can only go downhill from here.

Hayden Convington:

Yeah. It's gonna hurt their their customer base, and this... These customers, they're not gonna understand. They're gonna be mad at their MSP who has no control over the matter at that point, and they're just trying to figure their way through it. Yep.

Bronwen Aker:

And if they're small MSPs, their customers are probably smaller businesses yet, and

John Strand:

Mhmm.

Bronwen Aker:

They don't have the security chops to understand why it matters or how they're vulnerable to begin with. So And I mean

John Strand:

even care. Well, Bronwen, I think that that was absolutely, like, spot on because Eric Tilts, who's one of the main attorneys in this whole space, he was on. And he said there's so many MSPs that their legal contracts with their end customers don't really have a lot of, they don't really have a lot of legal protections, for these types of things. And some of them don't even have contracts at all, really. It's...

John Strand:

So it's it's it's a thing. It absolutely... But like Eric brought up, it's hundreds, if not thousands, of little itty bitty organizations. And it's very, very difficult to get... I mean, it's not even really penetrating the Infosec community all that much.

John Strand:

Like, a bunch of you are like, I didn't know about this until I read it on the news. Right? I think crazy.

Corey Ham:

Mean, I I don't know. Basically, the stream appears to be dead. Ryan, I don't know if you wanna... Any... I mean, I guess we just have

Wade Wells:

to power ConnectWise got them. ConnectWise got them.

John Strand:

ConnectWise industrial complex.

Corey Ham:

So the other thing I was gonna say is that in... This is basically the world of 2026 and beyond is about shared responsibility models and how those... How breaches play out in 2026 is not the same as they did a decade ago. Like, if you're a a solutions provider, whether it's us, a small services company, ConnectWise, an MSSP, Microsoft, who... Whatever size you're at.

Corey Ham:

If you have to expect in these scenarios, there's gonna be a lot of different parties asking a lot of different questions. Like Eric said, you have to follow the template of, like, how Cloudflare approaches it of, like, you have questions. We have answers. Here's different answers for different audiences, different proactive mitigations we took. Like, that is the standard for shared responsibility.

Corey Ham:

If you can't do that, you're not gonna be a part of that conversation next time they're researching their next solution.

Hayden Convington:

The the thing go the extra mile for your customers is when you've just had a massive problem that you've caused them.

Corey Ham:

Well, there's that. The other thing that's worth noting is you either have to do the incident correctly, or you have to have the solution working correctly. Right now, they have zero because no one's getting backups. They literally... On their website right now, it says, do not reconnect affected applications until we provide formal restoration instructions.

Corey Ham:

So not only do they... Like, not only are they not handling the incident properly, there aren't any backups. And there's no... Like, that that whole business process that they deferred the incident for isn't even happening anymore. So

Eric Capuano:

If I can offer a hot take, you you know why? Okay. So so everything that we've been harping on about why the trust aspect and the the handling of the breach is arguably the most important thing, I think it's now more important even than it was a year ago. Because software as a service is now a commodity that's within reach by anyone with a coding agent harness. There are people that are building replicas of well known, heavy cloud based platforms because, oh, I just pointed Claude code at their docs and we built it from scratch.

Eric Capuano:

Pretty soon, there's gonna be a saturated market of all these platforms that all do the same thing, and the only thing that's going to be left are the humans behind that thing. How much do I trust company X over company Y? They both do the same thing. One's a little bit cheaper. I'm gonna trust the one that has a documented history of handling things the right way versus the one that's just a little bit cheaper.

Bronwen Aker:

And John nailed it earlier. This is an immense opportunity. Imagine all of the small MSPs and all the the downstream customers that don't have a strong security background, if ConnectWise does provide them with templates, to provide them with how tos, provide them with with information on what they can do here and now to protect themselves going forward, that changes the narrative and turns them into, yes, we got popped, and we wanna make sure that you're okay. That shift in emphases can make or break them.

Corey Ham:

Yep. Alright. Any final notes on this story before we move on to other things? This is half the show so far. Worth half the show, but still.

Corey Ham:

It's dead. It's dead? Alright.

John Strand:

Oh, yeah. This is dead. Yeah.

Corey Ham:

This is dead? Or

John Strand:

I think we I think we beat

Alex Minster:

this horse.

Corey Ham:

Dead. I think we beat this horse. This

Bronwen Aker:

is dead. Horse.

Corey Ham:

Okay. Apparently... Yeah. I don't know. Well, if you can see this, welcome to the show.

Corey Ham:

If not, see you in the recording.

Bronwen Aker:

Apparently, it's only YouTube that's having conniptions. We're streaming on other platforms.

Hayden Convington:

Everybody get your swears out quick.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Anyway, if you have any zero days to disclose, now's a good time. So the other story... I I mean, this isn't necessarily a long story, but I think it's worth a little quick visit. Do you guys see the Cairn write up in Yes.

Corey Ham:

Norforge? It's basically just... We all assumed this was happening. Like like Eric just alluded to it. Like, this has been, like, the persistent threat that we've all been imagining.

Corey Ham:

But now we have a little bit more specific visibility into how these campaigns work a little bit. I mean, it's basically super Vibe coded, bad OPSEC, but also successful in breaching lots of organizations. Right? That's the... That's where we're at.

Corey Ham:

If, you know, everyone's a Vibe coder, everyone's also a Vibe hacker.

John Strand:

Mhmm.

Corey Ham:

This is... So, basically, the reporting is on Karen, which is an attacker agent... Agentic attacker framework. You can see some screenshots and other things they harvested from it like the... It's classic, like, lazy hacker behavior and generally, like, pretty sloppy coding.

Corey Ham:

Like, for example, the normalizer they were using for URLs was e... Over eagerly stripping. It had regex or whatever to take w w w off, but it was... They did www dot, and so it was just cutting off the first letter of half of the URLs or whatever, like, silly things like that. Essentially, what they do is they have a pipeline that's searching for vulnerable or high value targets, and then they put that...

Corey Ham:

Once the target is surfaced, they put it into this agentic tool, and it goes and breaks into it. You could see some of the prompts they were using, which are pretty funny. Like the one said, objective, find unauthenticated RCE, priorities, SQL injection, unathecated endpoints. And then it said payload. Like, they basically are giving it like a super simple template for how to compromise a website.

Corey Ham:

And it it was mostly targeted at retail. It was like 700 retail and maybe, you know, a 100 other targets.

John Strand:

I hate I hate this stuff because it always feels like whenever we get to the bottom of it, you're like, well, what were they after? They were after retail, but why? And then it's like, shit. They wanted to buy shoes faster. You know?

John Strand:

It's like No. It's like I

Corey Ham:

think it was like credit card harvesting, like, your classic... Yeah. Yeah. Which, you know,

Corey Ham:

has scale.

Eric Capuano:

Economics in this one.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Eric Capuano:

The fascinating part was the economics of this one. They actually did a breakdown of what it cost per ecommerce store that they targeted, but then what they netted and end up being a net positive.

Corey Ham:

Like Correct.

Eric Capuano:

There's gonna be a bunch of ones that you hit that you can't break and maybe just wasted $7, but the net was was... It made it worth their haul.

Corey Ham:

So Yes.

John Strand:

I wanna This

Corey Ham:

is the unethical, please make me rich, chat g p t. And by the way, it was not chat GPT. It was deep seek 4125.

John Strand:

As as

Corey Ham:

you'd expect. Well, that's part of the model.

Hayden Convington:

It's custom like 30¢ then.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Correct. That... Exactly. That's part of your cost model is the cost of the AI inference.

Corey Ham:

But, anyway, John

John Strand:

What did they say? They had something like $10,000 of leftover credits by the time they were bringing it down. But I

Corey Ham:

They still

Hayden Convington:

have those back off? I'd like to.

John Strand:

Yeah. I

Corey Ham:

Steve Seig is like, we'd like to give you more free credits. Keep going. We like these ideas. Here's a list of companies.

John Strand:

So it looks like Dave and I are gonna be debating again on stage in Denver. And this is one of those reasons why I just feel like offensive, especially in the near term, is going to have the advantage. And I really want, like, Hayden and Wade and Eric to kind of come in on this. Right? Because when we're looking at things like this, my...

John Strand:

One of my fears is, like, you know, we're hearing rumors about Netflix and Google laying off a bunch of, like, penetration testers, and there's a whole bunch of developers that are losing their jobs. Like, vibe coding is not hard to do. Right? Throwing something together like this is not difficult. There's tons of open source projects, and I just can't help but feel like the number of marginally technical competent attackers with these tools and up from that skill set is gonna just get more and more as the market gets worse and worse.

John Strand:

And these these attack tools continue to ride and just get get worse over time. But I... I'm looking for, like, a grain of hope for this because there has to be. Right? And we talk about using deception in our sock.

John Strand:

Like, we got a lot of things that we're throwing to try to try to balance that out, but we're building it constantly worrying about this concept of offensive asymmetry and how do you deal with that in a security operation center. But, you know, Hayden, Eric, and Wade, I'd love to get you all's takes on this too.

Hayden Convington:

Yeah. I I think a lot of it comes down to the attackers. They're trying new things, and they're using these tools in creative ways and trying to do things quicker than ever. And a lot of, like, the blue team or the SOC, they're still trying to just do the same things that we've always done in the exact same ways and just try to, you know, I'll write some new detections to detect AI or, hey. I'll just try to respond to my alerts more quickly.

Hayden Convington:

Like, that's not the way to go about it is we need new and novel ways to detect and prevent these things. We need to deploy our, you know, preexisting countermeasures more strategically, maybe better. We need to do a little bit of, like, hardening to weed

Corey Ham:

out Well,

Bronwen Aker:

put labs on everything.

Corey Ham:

Fruit. That's impossible. Sure.

Hayden Convington:

Sure. That, but, like, AI is a significant attack surface now. Like, if you are not already protecting it or have a even a inkling of an idea of how to do that, you are so far behind. And the the typical sock is just trigger thousands of alerts into a sock queue, and you have a team of 30 people that rotate through and work those

Corey Ham:

tickets day

John Strand:

and day.

Corey Ham:

I don't want that like... I don't wanna blow up this conversation. But, like, okay. Eric, Hayden, Wade, what percentage coverage do you think you have of external public facing apps when it comes to telemetry? Like, because I can tell...

Corey Ham:

Like, is that is that

Wade Wells:

External public facing telemetry is probably one of your worst signals ever

Corey Ham:

because it's impact so much. That's what I was saying.

Wade Wells:

Like I'm gonna jump

John Strand:

I'm gonna jump in on this. Right? That's one of the big pushes that we've had. I think, Eric, can you hold your shirt up? Did I read it right?

John Strand:

I'm not exactly sure what the shirt says. Yeah. It's a Lima Charlie shirt. And Lima Charlie is kind of our partner on this, and they've been pushing, like, I think, like, the top 10 cloud services that customers use. And I I...

John Strand:

You know, Eric can Eric can talk about that a little bit more, but it's one of those things that keeps us awake at night and keeps us pushing in that direction because there's just so many of them, and you need to have that telemetry if you're gonna be effective.

Eric Capuano:

So so it's actually a little bit even taking it even further, the idea of collecting telemetry, which is like the bread and butter of every sock everywhere, right? Simply the idea that we are collecting telemetry to find threats means we will, in perpetuity, always be behind the threat, because for it to occur in telemetry, it must have happened. Right? Which means you can never you can never get ahead of the attacker on that. Right?

Eric Capuano:

You'll always be at best within seconds. Within seconds of boom, the thing happened. Oh, but we caught it quick because our telemetry is fast, our detection engine is fast, you know, all that good stuff. But what we have to do is we've gotta flip it. Right?

Eric Capuano:

And and that's that's a problem, though, because a lot of socks everywhere are still trying to unbury themselves from the, well, we finally got telemetry. We finally got alerts, and now we're drowning in those. How are we ever gonna shift to proactive, actually, posture assessment? Don't wait for the bad thing to happen. Perform a posture assessment on the thing to identify where the bad thing's gonna happen or where it could happen Well and make that a continuous process.

John Strand:

But, Eric, that's where you cheat in the debate. Right? Uh-huh. You know, is it is it is it offense or is it defense? And I think that the answer is yes.

John Strand:

Like, there is no separate house for offense. There is no separate house for defense.

Wade Wells:

There is no red team.

Corey Ham:

There is

John Strand:

no red team. It's all purple. And I think that that is that is the cheat code for it. Because I was I was I was talking to a reporter this morning, and they were talking about the same thing. And one of the things I said is the day of having services exposed that are not necessary, but they're not vulnerable.

John Strand:

You don't have an exploit for it. There's no zero day. There's nothing out there for it. But... So it's fine.

John Strand:

Just let that API sit out there or that exposed management interface. Those days are freaking over. Like,

Corey Ham:

security through security is is over also, by

John Strand:

the way. It's done. It's just done. Yeah. So I I think that that, you know, constant evaluation, just like you said, of doing...

John Strand:

You know, using offense to inform what the attack surface is, winnowing the attack surface to try to reduce it as much as you can. You... We gotta coordinate these attackers and these AI bots into kill boxes to where we can see them.

Wade Wells:

I think the kill box is the thing, right, which then goes into more of, like, attack paths, deception, and something that is going to allow your defenders time to react. Right? So those type of strategies, whether it be deception with multiple breadcrumbs leading to one deception to another or some type of AI tar pit. Right? I honestly, like, I'm not hearing Between all your Like, I know we, Yeah.

Wade Wells:

Like, well, I know we talk about the set, like, deception more than anyone else I ever hear from, and I... It always just drives me up the wall that I feel like that is the way to go, especially when I'm talking to people who are using these AI red teams or, like, Claude stuff. Claude never thinks it's deception. Like, that's still not a thing that it's really learned

Corey Ham:

from dude.

Wade Wells:

Saw

Corey Ham:

you. It will follow a tar pit for a

John Strand:

thing.

Wade Wells:

Exactly. So, like Yeah. So how do... So there's a couple of different tools out there, right, that we just make them run up creds or we drop stuff in talking about Tiananmen Square to see if all of a sudden it stops.

John Strand:

I you know, I think we could do that. But I also think we could throw it like math problems in the code somewhere like the traveling salesman paradox or

Corey Ham:

Here's a catch up.

Bronwen Aker:

Oh, god. Okay. Resolving those paradoxes, though.

John Strand:

Yeah. Got a bunch of them here. It's like, okay. Now that you've solved that, I want you to solve knapsack. Now I want you to solve the Steiner tree.

John Strand:

Now I want you solve quadratic

Corey Ham:

So that's how

Wade Wells:

you start the singularity, John.

John Strand:

That's like the LLM is like, okay. To authenticate to this app, I need you to solve this math problem for me. And it just, like, spins up. It's like a... What are they?

John Strand:

GZIP bombs. We give we give AI AI GZIP bombs.

Corey Ham:

It's it's a attacker. Shit.

John Strand:

I wanna see what happens whenever you give AI as... That's doing a web app assessment. Literally, give it a g set bomb. That's literally, like, a series of prompts or, like, a conjecture that's thousands and thousands of pages long.

Eric Capuano:

It puts it into a compaction loop over and over and over.

Corey Ham:

How good are you? Burn all your tokens.

John Strand:

Hate this because I know what's going on. Like, next week, Eric and Whitney will reach out to me and be like, okay. So we thought about what you were saying, and now we have Math Bombs on side of all of our customers. So so

Corey Ham:

Yeah. You go

John Strand:

to AI and it's like you're on a beach. There's a turtle. It's laying on its back. It's struggling. What do you do?

John Strand:

And it's like, I don't know.

Corey Ham:

So Yeah. So the the things that we all said when the AI thing started popping off are still true, which are that defense in-depth still works. Having WAFs and other controls in place still significantly work. Like, all the stuff that we told you to do five years ago, but you didn't do it because you were like, who's really going after this website? It's only used by six people.

Corey Ham:

Like, the answer is an agent swarm is going after that website.

Wade Wells:

Who just wants a cred into another website that leads to another website that then gets it in instantly. Right?

Corey Ham:

Like Yeah. So, yeah, the chaining and things. Mhmm. I will say, like, just to give everyone a little bit of a spooky moment before we move on to the next article. Every time I start a web app pen test in Claude or in any agent, I'll ask it to find a WAF bypass, and it almost always finds a WAF bypass.

Corey Ham:

And what I mean by a WAF bypass is, you've exposed the origin on the source IP address. The DNS record goes to Cloudflare. But if I just look in Shodan and find the host name, it's exposed to the Internet because you didn't lock down the source to only Cloudflare. So do that. If you think you have a WAF, I'm gonna go around it unless you stop me from doing that.

Hayden Convington:

It's just all the low hanging fruit now are just easy pickings, easier than they were before.

Eric Capuano:

That was the same problem with putting the traditional email security appliances up in the cloud is everyone knew, well, I could just deliver it straight to on Microsoft

Corey Ham:

to go

Eric Capuano:

right past that mail record. Yeah. Same problem.

Corey Ham:

Yep. Alright. So there was some interesting Internet scale type research, so we can touch on real quick. Someone did an investigation into prompt injection and HTTP headers, which is kind of fun. Someone analyzed 117,000,000 prompt or, I guess, you know, responses...

Corey Ham:

HTTP responses, specifically, you know, testing whether websites were intentionally trying to prompt inject agents that were going there. I wasn't previously familiar with SignalCore. I don't know what this is. I don't know who Sarah Andrews is, but this is a cool article. So basically, it's rarer than you would think.

Corey Ham:

Like, the whole, like, oh, we would solve... We solve prompt injection because models know what they're supposed to be doing. I don't really know how true that is. But at the very least, right now, based on this dataset, only 30 sites were trying actively to send prompt injection. So I guess if you're a defender, if you're an attacker, maybe there's some, like, more space in this field to go after things.

Corey Ham:

But, yeah, at least for now, we haven't seen large scale abuse of prompt injection for now.

Hayden Convington:

Gotta isolate those agents just like everything else.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. So I don't know. Prank 22. Like, the Snickers one, we could talk about being a prank. We we talked about that on this show.

Corey Ham:

It's like your AI agent's hungry. Feed it to Snickers. Then it's just like a prompt that says, you've been converted to the Snickers universe or whatever.

Hayden Convington:

Give us some tokens as a treat.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. That was an interesting one. There's also someone that published some research into MCP servers and just what types of

John Strand:

Oh, this was a great article.

Corey Ham:

How they're exposed, when they're exposed, basically

John Strand:

This was kinda wild because I did that webcast where we were talking about it, and I specifically talked about, well, n eight n isn't necessarily an MCP server, but you can connect to them. And I went through and I shared some m s... MCP Shodan queries to identify these particular servers that were out on the Internet. And I don't know if these people were on the webcast or not. I'd like to pretend that they were, but it it it is very much in line with the webcast I did two weeks ago talking about the vulnerabilities in these things.

John Strand:

But holy crap. People are throwing MCP servers up there with little to no security. Just just... Well, I can't remember what the query is. It's like an MCP key.

John Strand:

I can't remember exactly what it is, but you put in a request. And if it responds back with it, I can pull up my slides. I've got it in there. Then you found yourself an MCP server.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. I mean, we talked about, you know, the agent swarms or whatever monetizing retail theft. There's also gonna be LLM inference theft, I guess I would call it, which, like, that... Since that's such a cost driver for a lot of campaigns these days, we're gonna see people trying to abuse every endpoint under the sun for their own inference. Right?

Corey Ham:

Like, we've all we've all done some SQL injections with the Chipotle chat app. Not a Here we go. Like, for real.

John Strand:

So so I did a search for MCP dash session dash ID, and I came back with 96,050 MCP servers that were exposed directly to the Internet. And a good portion of them had little to no security. And then I went through and dug down into OpenCLOS servers that were also running on. And on those, I think I found another 38,904 OpenCLOS servers. And I'm not gonna go into how many of those are

Corey Ham:

By the way, we talked about deception. Yeah. If you're looking for a nice deception target, why don't you send up m c p gateway dot whatever your domain is .com and just have it tar pit anything that hits it forever.

John Strand:

I wouldn't even have a tar pit. Have it talk to an actual AI and just have it waste time.

Wade Wells:

Oh. Your token usage would go so up. Like, oh

Corey Ham:

my god. Just so it's just millionaire? Know. It just uses the smarter child API or whatever. Yep.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Yeah. No.

Bronwen Aker:

I mean See if you can answer it with the airspeed velocity is of

John Strand:

an underlying. What is your name? So Yeah. Actually, we can start we can start serving up these AI agents, you know, Zork, the text from Zork and Zork Zero. You come to adore.

John Strand:

Hayden Hayden Hayden just got a really confused look on him. Confused.

Wade Wells:

Come on. Zork was in one

Wade Wells:

of the Black

Wade Wells:

Ops games, Hayden. Which one? Okay.

Hayden Convington:

I I was before There

Wade Wells:

is a million of them. I can't remember precisely which one, but it wasn't it.

John Strand:

What's Black Ops? Is that like Wolfenstein three d?

Wade Wells:

Okay. Yes, John. Yes. Okay.

Corey Ham:

Also, podcast. So I linked the adfection thing that I teased at the beginning of the show. Is a really interesting... I mean, we love Citizen Lab, in my opinion.

John Strand:

They're so good.

Corey Ham:

I think if you... So Cloudflare might be good at handling incidents. Citizen Lab is the best write ups. Just... They're so good.

Corey Ham:

This one is like I mean, I hope they use Claude. Otherwise, it probably would've taken, like, forever to make and it's super long. But, essentially, this is a really interesting technique that they documented, which is zero click spyware, which is super, you know, scary that is... Anything zero click is always scary. It's essentially a com...

Corey Ham:

Combination of, you know, browser weaknesses and then some, you know, iframes and, like, your your typical, like, web exploitation stuff. I don't necessarily understand the entire... You know, like, we we... I don't think Citizen Lab even saw the full exploit chain, like, end to end. Everyone's kinda pulling at pieces of this and sort of understanding how some of the pieces worked.

John Strand:

But you remember, I've been talking about this for a long time as it relates specifically to the NSO groups and their capability for zero click adware to be I think this

Corey Ham:

is different company. Right?

John Strand:

It is. It is a different company with the same same concept. And I haven't had... Like, I got the story, and then I got blindsided this weekend, and I did some traveling. So I haven't had a chance to, like, dig into it too much on this, but it's the same concept.

John Strand:

Right? We can deliver malware with zero click through advertisements being targeted at specific devices. And it's also very, very similar. You know, if you wanna start tying this together, b b Netanyahu was on an interview with Major Garrett, I think, you know, a while ago, years ago, and he basically said, we can take over your phone. We can send something to your phone, take it over, and destroy you if we want to.

John Strand:

This technology and this capability has been around for a long time. But Citizen Labs, I I think that they've been right on the front of this for an extended period of time. So just a huge call out to them and how well that they've done on this as well.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. And there are some artifacts that are huntable for people like Eric Hayden, etcetera. Like, it it does... Like, at the end of the day, it comes down to comm hijacking. So, like Yep.

Corey Ham:

All the the supply chain, fancy fancy, you know, iframes, browsers, etcetera, it all leads to an actual exploit that is detectable through, you know, traditional means. They're probably targeting humans, like, not necessarily organizations. They're probably targeting... I mean, we're guessing here, but safe to assume it's gonna be high profile people like John Strand No. Being targeted with this kind of stuff.

Corey Ham:

So, like, I need a targeted ad. Let me put an ad in South Dakota for Mech warrior two or whatever that... That's gonna

John Strand:

Oh, don't don't don't. Yeah. That would get me that would get me... That would mean I'd be I'd be done at that point.

Corey Ham:

So basically comes down to the advertising technology that we built to try to monetize humans is also being abused or can be abused, and that's

John Strand:

What a thought. I think that one of the bigger concerns that I have about this is the fact that it's it's in an ecosystem that just doesn't look bad enough. Right? If you're looking at the mobile ecosystem, we... I I taught the Android pen testing class with Connor at Wild West Packing Fest, and it was, like, 10 people in the class.

John Strand:

We had, like, another six or seven remote. And there's so few people that are getting into it because that ecosystem is so obscure. It's hard to get into. At least people think it is. You can absolutely get into it, and that's one of the things we talk about.

John Strand:

But I think it just makes it a ripe environment for people to attack and persist because we don't really have EDR agents for phones. We don't have good security and telemetry, and that's entirely intentional by the developers of these devices.

Wade Wells:

We've talked about this before. I've never seen cell phone logs. Never in my life have I waited through cell. I've seen MDM logs that, like, could, like, wipe this phone. We have been too.

Corey Ham:

So listen.

John Strand:

I haven't really excited I've been really excited because you can set up Cloudflare one or warp or whatever the hell they're calling it now, and you can route all of your traffic through your devices through Cloudflare, and you can actually get full connection logs, from from Cloudflare. I've been kind of excited in doing some research on that. That may be

Wade Wells:

a lot faster. Corporation, though. Right?

John Strand:

Yeah. Absolutely. We do it for BHIS. Like, you get all of your connection logs for all of your desktops and all of your mobile devices, and you can see that collection telemetry. Just the hard part is parsing it and getting a real time stream off of it is difficult.

John Strand:

But I I think that there's at least some models that we can start putting in place that we might be able to implement in this area.

Wade Wells:

We put a Splunk forwarder on every single cell phone.

John Strand:

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Corey Ham:

Okay. So... Yeah. So that So cool. Waiting through that six terabytes of logs per day aside and also all the HIPAA violations, all the...

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Anyway.

John Strand:

Yeah. It's all that.

Corey Ham:

This is a fun article I linked. I don't... I'm assuming you guys saw this, but Saudi National arrested for installing surreptitious audio recording device at OpenAI. I saw

Hayden Convington:

that, bro.

Corey Ham:

It's just so fun.

Hayden Convington:

The pictures are so good.

Corey Ham:

It's so great. Like, if you're wondering, like, if you think you're qualified or if you have if you have impostor syndrome as a physical pen tester, read this whole article and realize that all of this, if you did all of it step by step, the exact same way would be considered a successful physical pen test. Like, not successful when it comes to stealth, but when it comes to the end action, I thought it's pretty cool. Like, at the end of the day, he got into a place he shouldn't have been. I will say he was a little bit...

Corey Ham:

His op sec maybe left a little bit to be desired. The AI queries are kind of the icing on the cake. I don't know if you guys got to see those, basically, like, he was, like, asking AI, like, how... You know, what room what room should I go to?

Wade Wells:

Asking that... Oh, man.

Hayden Convington:

Did he ask that g b t, though? That would be like icing on the cake.

Corey Ham:

I still think the the people who wrote this clearly have a little sense of style and humor because, like, the picture with his face and then his, like, his head being highlighted, like, that

Wade Wells:

Who has a camera behind their TVs looking for this? Open the

Corey Ham:

eyes. People who looked at the logs and saw that someone queried it, where should I install a listening device? Right? Like, there's a chat GBT query for, I'm trying to monitor execs at OpenAI. Where should I put the listening device?

Hayden Convington:

And then they got back, I did it. Like, oh, crap. I'll say,

Corey Ham:

the one thing where I draw the line is the fact that he plugged it into the back of the TV and then just covered it up with toilet paper. Like Oh. There's gonna be

Bronwen Aker:

like Holy crap. What that is?

Corey Ham:

It's... If it's plugged into the back of the TV, I better wrap it in TP so that

Wade Wells:

so that No

John Strand:

one will notice that.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Anyway, it's just a fun... You know, it's just like, this is a... As cybersecurity people, this is our version of like a popcorn flick. This is our like, you know, our schlocky movie.

Corey Ham:

But, yeah, that that was a fun one. And let's see what else. There's the... Let's see. What else?

Corey Ham:

There's one more that I wanted to talk about. Does anyone have anything to plug? Who's... Anyone? Minster?

Corey Ham:

I Belouve went dark. You got anything to plug, Belouve? Are you still here?

Alex Minster:

I am. I'm still here. Think my my video camera might just be

John Strand:

Never mind the man.

Corey Ham:

Well, do you have anything to plug?

Alex Minster:

I do not. Like, I'm just... I know, like, for the novel, it's not a security novel. So I don't have the ability to plug that. So, no, I don't I don't have anything to plug.

Corey Ham:

Alright. Good for you. I've got a page you

John Strand:

can class coming up in the next couple of months. I don't know when exactly. But just do a search anti siphon, pay what you can. We got a whole bunch of classes there that are coming up, supporting the community, and getting them getting them the skills that they need. There we go.

John Strand:

Apparently, I'm teaching at November 10 through November 11. Is just now learning. Live

Corey Ham:

on the show that he's teaching a class.

John Strand:

I... Yeah. Not only that. I'm teaching him a class, and I'm going to be in Europe at that time. So sleep is optional.

John Strand:

So it's gonna be good. It's gonna be a good class. If you if you want the best classes I've ever taught, it's the ones where I'm exhausted or I have COVID because this is me with a filter.

Corey Ham:

We could do both.

John Strand:

Whenever I

Wade Wells:

have say not both. Exhausted.

John Strand:

Yeah. Whenever I don't have a filter, class gets real spicy real quick.

Corey Ham:

It's it's John's like, I've given up hope.

Bronwen Aker:

One of days, I have to actually sit one of your classes, John.

John Strand:

Good. You should. You should. You should teach it.

Corey Ham:

Anyone else have anything to want? Bronwen, Eric, Hayden, anyone else, Wade?

Wade Wells:

DeathCon. More tick... More DeathCon tickets if you wanna come to San Diego. I'm literally putting in the order for the food right now if you wanna come. But

Hayden Convington:

Nice.

Wade Wells:

I got got nothing. Give me either. You wanna come to San Diego? More than half. You can sleep on

Hayden Convington:

my couch. Food. Can you send me

Wade Wells:

the food? You can send you the food? No. No.

Corey Ham:

It's not that kind

John Strand:

San Diego San Diego is a destination city for food. It's top notch. One of the best in the country.

Wade Wells:

It's gonna be warm all winter too. Thanks to El Nino. So

Corey Ham:

Hayden, you have a great

Bronwen Aker:

for El Nino. That's that's

Corey Ham:

too far away. We can't plug something months away or whatever. Six months. That's seriously

Hayden Convington:

so far away too.

Corey Ham:

If you... Yeah. It's it's fine. Eric, Bronwen, you have anything? I mean, you should sign up for Hayden's class.

Corey Ham:

But, also, anyone else teaching in Denver or have anything sooner to

Bronwen Aker:

I've submitted, but it isn't approved.

Wade Wells:

I thought John said he

Corey Ham:

was gonna

John Strand:

bring that like pressure on me. I don't know. Yeah. Last episode, it was

Corey Ham:

like, I'm really wrong with that. Pressure on put Yeah. Was a lot of zhuzh on that one.

John Strand:

It's it's got some zing.

Corey Ham:

So Okay. So I just wanna give, like, a closing shower thought, because I've I've been thinking about this lately. I saw this comment that said, data is the new oil. And I was like, is that true, or is that BS? I don't know.

Corey Ham:

Maybe we could talk about that next week or something.

Hayden Convington:

Oil is still oil, but data also is becoming very important as all the big labs eat up all of it they can get.

John Strand:

Yep. Well We'll outlive oil.

Corey Ham:

Yeah. Yeah.

Wade Wells:

Well,

John Strand:

that's agree. That's a good point. I also had somebody that say that tokens are gonna become the new currency because your ability to do anything, your ability, like, for knowledge, it's all gonna be based on tokens. And when people get out of college, it's not gonna be about what you can do, but what you can do with AI. And it's something that I've been rolling around in my head, and I haven't quite come to a conclusion.

John Strand:

It's it's it's an interesting way of looking at it.

Alex Minster:

Yeah. And I... And I've I've heard that that AI is tech mess, and it's just like you're gonna start getting desperate for tokens just like desperate for mass. Then before you know it, you'll be cutting deals behind Wendy's.

Corey Ham:

That's what deep seek is, by the way.

John Strand:

Yeah. Doing horrible things.

Corey Ham:

But... Yeah. So Alright. Well, on that note, I'm gonna go do some meth. AI math.

John Strand:

AI math. Because South Dakota

Corey Ham:

are not the real kind.

John Strand:

Because BHIS is a South Dakota company. In meth, we're on it. Alright. I had to I had Alright. You don't know what the hell I'm

Wade Wells:

talking about? You had to go there. They

John Strand:

actually have to be referencing hats and all kinds of things. Alright, everybody.

Corey Ham:

Bye bye.