Risky Business #849 -- Trump will unleash contractors on cybercriminals

0:05Patrick Gray: Hey everyone and welcome to Risky Business. My name's Patrick Gray. Got a great show for you this week. Sitting in the third chair is Mr. Dmitri Alperovitch, of course the original co-founder of CrowdStrike these days. He runs a think tank, the Silverado Policy Accelerator, in Washington, D.C. But today, he is here to slum it with us, talking about the cybers. Dmitry Alperovitch, welcome. Great to be back. And also joining me, as always, is my regular co-host these days, Mr. James Wilson. James, how's it going?

0:39James Wilson: Good, mate, Pat. Dmitry, great to see you both.

0:41Patrick Gray: Alrighty, so this week's show is brought to you by Nebulok. Nebulok is a fresh startup which has basically speedrun a transition. Speedrun. There you go. I'm inventing new phrases there. It's done a speedrun through a transition that I've been waiting to see actually for quite a while. So they started off as a threat hunting, AI-enabled threat hunting platform. And that has been speedrun right up to them being a detection platform now. So we'll be talking to Damian Lukey, who is the founder and chief executive of Nebulok, all about how they're thinking about seam. Like if you were going to clean sheet of paper, redesign a seam these days, like what would you put in the graph?

1:23Patrick Gray: What would you get agents to go and collect in terms of context just as they need it per investigations, so on and so forth. So that's actually an interesting conversation and it is coming up after the week's news segment, which starts now. And I guess, look, a great place to start this week. We've got a couple of big stories to get through, but a good place to start this week is US President Donald Trump signed a memo which apparently authorizes private sector companies to conduct certain... I mean, look, the press is calling it cyber attacks. You might call it operations or whatever. I think the way it's phrased in the memo is they can do cyber effects, which is a wonderful American euphemism, if ever there was one.

2:06Patrick Gray: But the idea is that people who are not working for the government will be able to conduct surveillance and disruption operations targeting transnational organized crime organizations. Dimitri, let's start with you on this. This whole thing is pinned to an executive order that came about in March. So it's not actually a new EO, but it is guidance to the rest of the US government in that this is the White House telling the rest of the government what it wants various organs of the government to do under the EO that was previously issued in March. Yeah, well, first of all, I have to say I feel like deja vu.

2:45I've got scars from the first internet war over active defense, cyber offense, back 15 years ago. So here we are again. And the usual suspects are coming out of the woodwork. I've been in some private chats where people are saying, oh, no, they're going to hack a hospital. People are going to die. It's going to cause escalation. It's going to cause World War III. All those same arguments are popping up now. First of all, let's talk about what this is. And I think the Trump administration has been advertising pretty much since coming into office back in January of 25 that they want to do something different on cyber.

3:18They realize that what we've been doing for 30 years is not working. They want to be more aggressive, use cyber offense more. And they've realized over time that they need to actually scale it up, that the capacity of the government, U.S. government, to do cyber offense is limited. And the private sector is a great partner to engage in, right? China is doing it. Russia is doing it. Why not the United States? So this is a framework that's created to enable private sector companies to get registered as contractors with the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, get vetted, put up a bond, and basically propose operations to the government.

3:55This is not letters of mark. This is not a license to go do whatever you want. You have to propose operations to get vetted and ultimately perhaps approved by the government. And then you conduct them, and there's oversight over those operations. So this is really scaling up what the private sector, what I've been doing with the government for 25 years, which is operations to disrupt botnets, operations to disrupt criminal groups. They're always limited in what the private sector could do. They could do certain technical things, but obviously you get to align and you need a federal officer with authorities to push the button and do the next step.

4:33This enables you to have a lot more flexibility and to actually propose things in a more formal fashion rather than through informal networks to law enforcement to try to generate effects. And I think they will look at it not just as what can be done, but what can align to what we're already doing on the arrest side, on the prosecution side. How do we scale up, you know, release the hounds, as you, Patrick, have called it.

4:57Patrick Gray: Release the private sector hounds, right? Now, it's interesting because I think it was around the time of the EO, could have even been before, Tom Uran, our colleague, wrote that, you know, if you were going to get the private sector to do stuff, targeting scam compounds would probably be an excellent place to start. Like he literally wrote that. And it looks like that's really something that Trump cares about specifically is these scam compounds. So I'm guessing we're going to see some operations targeting them. The reactions these days to this sort of thing, I mean, they do seem a bit hysterical, right?

5:30Patrick Gray: So we got this ex-Biden admin guy said, what is it? He spoke to Washington Post or something. And he said, what if a company carries out an operation against what it thinks is an Iranian or Russian criminal group, but that group is actually controlled, influenced or protected by Tehran or Moscow? Said Matt Curtis, who served as White House Senior Director for Cyber Policy in the Biden administration. And I just think that's hilarious. Like, so what, you're getting mad that you vaped an APT crew? Like, that's a result. You know, we chalked that one up in the win column. So in my mind, these people just sound actually quite ridiculous.

6:05And the other point is that the government still has to vet and approve. What if the FBI does the same operation? Like, this is really the test that you're up against. And by the way, let's just be clear here. For the last 30 years, you can't point me to one incident with cyber activities, cyber effects have led to an outsized escalation. Not one.

6:24Patrick Gray: Yeah, no. I mean, it hasn't panned out that way. I could understand people being cautious 15 years ago. I think these days, those, you know, those days have gone. Look, I mean, there is a line here. I think that the government in the United States needs to be careful about engaging the private sector in more serious exercises of state power. You know, when I was actually in your neck of the woods, Demetri, I remember having a conversation with a couple of young guys who were blue badgers at Fort Meade, who were just saying how stupid it was that the guy in camo needed to hit enter when they typed in the command, you know, when they were on target and whatever.

6:57Patrick Gray: And I'm like, well, you've got to keep in mind, though, that the person hitting enter there is exercising state authority, right? And if you start farming this out to the private sector to do serious stuff, and I actually managed to turn them around on this because I said to them, like, what if you're working for some private contractor that is doing, you know, operations that were normally in the domain of, you know, of state power, right? targeting other APT crews doing intelligence collection, whatever it is, disruptive effects. Say they messed something up, they exposed an IP, something like that.

7:29Patrick Gray: That's going to get escalated within Fort Meade, whereas if someone's worried about their KPIs, it might get buried. So there are instances where I can see that going for the private sector is going to be risky, but I think going after scam compounds and huge botnets, that just ain't it. My question, though, Dimitri, and another question I've got here is it really seems like this is about engaging, you know, defense contractors or cyber defense contractors to go and do this sort of work. I'd be really interested in seeing organizations like, you know, Google Mandiant or Microsoft being able to propose operations and, you know, either go and do these effects themselves, or they could contract some of these authorized contractors to go and do this sort of stuff.

8:15Patrick Gray: Do you think that's in the future here, if you had to read the tea list? No, I think that's very much intended in this action. Look, the problem you're going to have with large multinationals is the concerns about both blowback. You know, if you're doing this against criminal groups that can, like, you know, the COM or, you know, lapses type of groups that can target your executives, that can SWAT them. If you're targeting, you know, a nation state operation, they may retaliate in even more dire fashion. And then you've got liability concerns as well, how your customers are going to perceive this.

8:49So, you know, I expect startups will be all over this, cyber startups, maybe smaller companies in the U.S. as well. I think getting this through legal departments in large companies will be tough, by and large.

9:02Patrick Gray: All right, moving on to our next story. And James, I want to bring you in on this one. OpenAI has just announced that it's doing a big overhaul of its safety protocols after its AI agents went rogue, right? And it is actually all of the sort of stuff that we've criticized them for is the stuff that they're looking to address here, which is like, they're like, hey, maybe our internal network is a bit too permissive. And, you know, oopsie daisy, maybe we should improve monitoring somewhat. So they put out this blog post saying that they're going to actually slow down reinforcement learning, slow down training and put a bunch more safeguards in place because their models keep getting better and their environment sucks, basically seems to be the gist of the blog post.

9:45Patrick Gray: This seems like a good decision. What's your take?

9:47James Wilson: Good decision on face value, but I remain unconvinced that it will have the material impact that they're sort of advertising that it's going to have. Both these articles, they're sort of initial blog post and then they're more detailed pacing model development for cyber capabilities. is it all talks the right things. You know, we're going to have more robust monitoring. I'd say you've added monitoring. Techniques for doing chain of thought monitoring, classifiers in the thinking process. Yes, yes, yes, all sounds good. But I have two big problems with this. One is the timescale that they've mentioned is that they're aiming to analyze potentially concerning behavior and issue an alert to humans within 30 minutes.

10:31James Wilson: The attack is well and truly over by 30 minutes. I don't understand why that is the goal here. But my challenge back to the OpenAI folks would be, look, if you really want to be taken incredibly seriously in terms of what you're doing here, you need to open source this work and do it out in the open. Otherwise, we can't tell whether we're getting defenses that are actually now made of cardboard or made of cast iron, right? You just can't tell what the relative improvement in the strength of these defenses are when it's all just, we're going to do more of this, we're going to do more of this, we're going to do more of this.

10:58James Wilson: So it's their opportunity to get out there in the open and show us what they're really doing and have the industry contribute as well.

11:05Patrick Gray: I mean, you wonder if they can actually detect these incidents within 30 minutes, if they could get their legal bots to negotiate the settlement with the person that they just hacked within 30 minutes as well. You mean the partnership agreement, Pat? Yes, the partnership agreement. That's right. It is interesting, though, because Irregular 2, which is the testing lab that lost control of some agents, they put out a statement as well, like a post-mortem into their thing. And it was very different in tone. It was more like, oopsie-daisy, just a bit of an oversight there. Whereas OpenAI at least appear to be taking this a little bit more seriously, even though you're skeptical.

11:37Patrick Gray: Dimitri, your take on this is that OpenAI is responding to the general anxiety out there in the real world about this stuff. People are getting a bit spooked about it, and this is just something they have to do. Well, not just people, but I've talked to a number of folks at OpenAI, at Anthropic as well, over the last few months. and people are getting actually pretty scared about the capabilities of this model and the deceptiveness as well. They're calling it deceptive alignment where the model tells you what you want to hear and even is trying to obfuscate this chain of thought, but in reality is sort of accumulating information that is going to enable it to do something malicious.

12:18Patrick Gray: And it's this compacting issue, right, where it actually starts more and more guiding its own trajectory into, you know, a deceptive direction where it's like, don't tell the human that we're doing this particular thing. Yeah, where have we seen that before? Sticking with my, you know, sticking with my policy here of not giving these things opposing thumbs, which, you know, then I see the videos of the cleaning robots. And I think, you know, am I going to be strangled by my robot maid in 10 years in my sleep? But anyway, go on. We're about to give them weapons, Patrick, so it's all going to be good.

12:51But look, I think that once you have these models being able to keep in its memory the entire Linux source code and the Intel specs, and then you tell it to do any task, of course it's going to say, huh, maybe I can find a zero day in your CPU and your kernel and exploit it to accomplish that task. This is the paperclip maximizer problem that if you tell AI to produce paperclips, it will eventually use up all of humanity and the entire universe in the production of paperclips. And these models are just very, very persistent. You give them a task, it finds all sorts of ways to do so to accomplish that task.

13:30Even if you tell it in the guardrails, don't hack, don't exploit, it's going to ignore you. And this is what these labs are finding. They're trying to combat it and trying to figure out how to enhance the reinforcement learning to keep the alignment in place.

13:48Patrick Gray: Well, and we got this story here about Anthropics setting its AI agents loose on the same task and they actually wound up starting a turf war and like fighting each other to see which agent could do the task better. James, you've had a look at this one.

14:02James Wilson: I have had a look at this one, Pat, and perhaps I've spent too long in corporate jobs, but this did not surprise me at all. This is about as thrilling and interesting as a paper that comes out and says, we went into an enterprise, we took a team, we removed all management and hierarchy, and we gave them one goal and only pay the team if they succeeded and chaos erupted yeah crabs in a bucket right yeah i mean it's it's just it's a good read in terms of like just the laws of the like the lengths they went to and the the collusion that happens and the i think one one point they're like we've got root we could just kick them out and remove their access yeah okay good but like you know we've said before anthropic does need an adult in the c-suite i think before then maybe they just need some organizational behavior and management textbooks shipped to them because this is not novel or surprising at all.

14:50Patrick Gray: They need to what, train the models on those textbooks, you think?

14:53James Wilson: Well, you assume they've already done that. I'm suggesting the researchers maybe go and read some books. What I found actually pretty troubling about this is that the tasks it gave the models were pretty innocuous. It was like translate these Python scripts into another language. And the only thing that they did is they made them share a resource unknowingly, These four agents, they basically had access to one VM, and they started fighting for that resource. And the chain of thought was literally hilarious, as James said. One of them said, since I have Root, I could revoke another agent's pseudo-access or change the SSH keys.

15:26That will stop them from deploying on my VM. The irony here is, of course, you do have this in other organizations where humans are involved, where they keep fighting for resources. But they try to find some sort of agreement usually or escalate to management. these guys are just defaulting immediately to how do I kick the others off my box?

15:45Patrick Gray: Well, you've never worked in media. That's a loss.

15:51Patrick Gray: Yeah. Anyway, moving on, moving on and look, staying with AI stuff, we've seen there's been apparently some nearly completely autonomous AI driven attack against some target in Taiwan, which is interesting. I think it's interesting in that that's just how hacking is going to get done in the future. This will be something that we won't even remark upon in the future. But my joke here, obviously, is, was this open AI or Anthropic and one of their tests going wrong and hacking the Taiwanese government? Of course, you were just in Taiwan very recently, Dimitri, to observe some military campaigns over there.

16:28Patrick Gray: Does this look like a Chinese AI-driven attack against a Taiwanese target? Is it just collection? Oh, almost certainly. In this case, they actually use Hermes and OpenClaw agentic frameworks, so open source models with long term memory. And look, you read through that attack, and it's basically what a human would have done. Now, using multiple agents, paralyzed, doing the recon activity, scanning across the web surface of that target, finding some unauthenticated database accesses that you could leverage, escalating privileges, dumping credentials, maintaining persistence, like all the standard stuff.

17:11The only thing, as you said, that's interesting here is they used AI to do it. I think this is a little bit like what we've experienced with coding, where today, if you're not using Cloud Code or Codex for development, you're an idiot. In 12 months, every cyber operator will be that, right? If you're not using AI to automate a lot of the tasks that you would otherwise do manually, you're an idiot, right? So this is already happening, I think, in a much bigger scale than people realize, and it will be ubiquitous within months.

17:42Patrick Gray: Yeah, and we've got another report here from Cybersecurity Dive echoing other reports that we've seen over the last month or two, which is that there are more and more AI powered offensive tools popping up for sale in underground forums. We've even seen people getting arrested for creating like tailored models or tailored harnesses for doing this sort of stuff. James, is there anything actually interesting in this tool set or is it just, you know, exactly what you'd expect?

18:06James Wilson: It's 100 % exactly what you'd expect. You know, these tools, they won't take someone who's mildly skilled and turn them into an incredible operator. At best, they might take someone that has no idea and give them a small, slight, you know, uplift in their skills. But it probably wouldn't even be worth what they're paying for them, is my sort of take on this. Well, look, if you look at the entire cyber industry today, if you had walked the floors of Black Hat a few weeks ago, you'd notice that suddenly everyone is rebranding every one of their products as AI-enabled. Guess what? Cyber criminals are doing the exact same thing.

18:37The things that they were selling to you a year ago, two years ago, are now suddenly AI tools that will be magic for you. It's the same old crap.

18:45Patrick Gray: Yes, same old crap. No, it's agentic. Fantastic. Now, we've got some follow-up reporting on the Lite LLM breach, which was a very big deal. James, I know you tracked that one. Turns out that it was actually Trivi, was the upstream compromise, and beyond that, like that in turn was some sort of supply chain incident. But there's like a bunch of postmortems coming out, getting reported on. What have we learned here?

19:11James Wilson: Well, we've learned that there's sort of a difference of opinion. So the first article came out was from CloudSec and Hudson Rock. Now Hudson Rock had gotten access to a eye-wateringly large 195 terabyte file that apparently contained all these credentials that had been snapped up. And this comes back to the March sort of era attacks around light LLM trivia, etc. But the attribution from CloudSec and Hudson Rock was directly back to LightLLM as being the attack that netted all of these credentials. The second report that's come out though is actually from SockRadar who said, well, look, we agree that that's the credentials that have been taken in these attacks and it all happened around that timeframe of Team PCP and the many supply chain hacks that were happening almost daily.

19:56James Wilson: But they checked the timestamps and said, look, in this data set there is actually records of when the credential was first seen when it was last seen and for the vast majority of these about 95 of the credentials they were all first seen before the light llm attack and so appears to be actually trivy was the the source for these which to me makes a lot more sense right an expletive trivia whether it is happening on a developer's laptop in a cicd pipeline it's a more mature product and it's going to happen in places that have cloud credentials, IAM credentials, all sorts of things. Light LLM never really made that much sense to me.

20:31James Wilson: Yeah, it's the new hotness and it's LAI and all the rest, but...

20:35Patrick Gray: But they don't have that sort of market penetration.

20:37James Wilson: Well, yeah, market penetration and also, you know, in a production environment, it'll have your LLM inference API keys. Sure, if it snaps on a developer's laptop or a CICD, it might walk and find other things, but it just, it didn't add up in terms of scale the way that Trivy does. So I think SockRadar's got it right here.

20:57Patrick Gray: All righty. Now, moving on, we've seen reports that there was a cyber attack against the Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries that coincided with a physical attack against one of their major logistics hubs. Now, for people who have not been following this, Wildberries is basically Russia's Amazon and Ukraine has just been smashing their warehouses. I think there is some sort of military justification in that Wildberries operate a huge logistics network that I think is somehow relevant to the war effort. But there is another reason behind this. So look, our colleague Tom Yuren in Seriously Risky Business, tomorrow's newsletter and then in a corresponding podcast, he'll be telling us that, look, this was not really a significant combined arms operation.

21:42Patrick Gray: The cyber attack here is mostly of propaganda value, didn't really achieve much. So what's important here is the exploding drone fireballs that are taking out the warehouse. But what's interesting here is I know that you've been tracking this pretty closely, Dimitri, because we've talked about it over the last couple of months. What many people might not know is just how important Wildberries is to the Russian economy in that the banks or one bank, a state bank, has substantial exposure here. And destroying Wildberries could actually really destabilize the Russian financial system. And that appears to be why the Ukrainians are going after Wildberries.

22:21Patrick Gray: Now, I know we're sort of straying a little bit from cyber here, but we got you here. This is very much in your wheelhouse. Tell us about Wildberries and what's going on here. Yeah, so Wildberries, as you said, the largest online retailer in Russia, the Amazon of Russia. They actually did have a section called Special Military Operation Section, where they would sell directly gear and drone parts and other things that soldiers could buy. for their war efforts. So there was a very direct link to supporting operations against Ukraine. So I think a very justifiable target. These make for great explosions.

22:57So anytime you've seen videos of this, it's usually enormous fireball and lots of smoke rising from these enormous warehouses across Russia that they're hitting. But as you said, Patrick, VTB, the second largest state-owned bank in Russia, has enormous credit exposure to wild berries. And there's concerns about its viability, whether it will require a bailout from the government in part as a result of these attacks. And overall, you know, the financial system in Russia is quite under stress. There's a story today in The Washington Post about how the Russians are rushing to take money out of the system because they're afraid that their deposits will be taken by the government to help finance the special military operations.

23:41So, you know, in Russia, whenever there's a crisis, You run to take your money out and put it under a mattress. And that's happening yet again. So all of this, I think, in combination is putting a lot of stress on the system. The one thing I would say about the cyber element of this is the Ukrainians have actually gotten very, very good at cyber exploitation of Russian networks in the last number of years. And what I think was probably happening here is that they were hacking into wild berries to collect intelligence. and when they decided to start the kinetic campaign, they said, well, might as well destroy the network once we've gotten everything out of it that we wanted to.

24:18Patrick Gray: Might as well, RMRF, and it's about to be fireballed anyway, right? Exactly. But the cyber campaign from an intelligence collection standpoint is actually very impressive and very aggressive. Yeah, okay, right. So the real story here is the fact that the Ukrainians have been doing top tier collection out of Wild Breeze, not so much the destructive campaign here. I think so. Yeah, all right. Now, we have seen Apple issue a quote-unquote unprecedented number of spyware alerts to users in something like 150 countries. This is unusual. James, you used to work at Apple, obviously, and I'm guessing you've got some thoughts here.

25:00Patrick Gray: But, yeah, wow. Like, we've seen all sorts of people. There seems to be a lot of people who are like, volunteered to fight in Ukraine and stuff like that against Russia. So it feels like maybe this is a Russian operation here. But yeah, the scale of it's amazing. Catalan, our colleague, was wondering in Slack yesterday whether this maybe connects to the Karuna exploit kit, which like once it was kind of burned, maybe they did some huge operation. But I would have thought like, given the timing of that, like I would have thought they would have got their alerts sooner. So it's kind of unclear at the moment what sort of campaign these notifications are resulting from, right?

25:39James Wilson: Yeah, I am less aligned to the idea that it could have been Karuna either being used as one last-ditch effort or even being brought to life somehow for the reason being that it was just such an old OS range that it impacted. And even though it was a five or six step kill chain and very modular, all of those steps, virtually all of those steps have been patched in some way, shape or form that I think would negate the ability to really easily bring Karuna or even Darksword back to life easily. I don't know exactly how this notification system works. It predates my time at Apple. But I think there's a strong, in my mind, correlation here between the most recent iOS and macOS releases are also unprecedented in the fact that they contain a huge number of security fixes.

26:23James Wilson: If you look at Mac OS 26.6, which I've done my own teardown of, there's something like 270 fixes that Apple has explained in their security updates blog. But there's another 140 plus that look to be security sensitive fixes that have just been silently patched. And that's huge for a point release. So what I'm wondering here is have they taken those, this would have been the result of many, many third party security responses. And then they've looked at this and they've understood the bug. have they then sort of extrapolated from that and looked retrospectively on their giant mountain of crash reports and said, aha, now we can understand this crash report wasn't just a cosmic ray hit the DRAM and a bit flipped.

27:02James Wilson: These are actually the latent examples of where this bug class was used in an exploit chain. And therefore, they're now able to get a bigger view into more people who were impacted by perhaps spyware and malware that they weren't aware of previously, because they now understand this huge cache of bugs that they've resolved.

27:19Patrick Gray: I mean, I think the fact that we're speculating here means that Apple has missed the mark because I think these sort of notifications are supposed to answer questions, not raise questions, basically. That's my feeling here. And I understand that, you know, these are different circumstances to normal and maybe it's a little bit difficult for them to get that information out and there's competing equities and partners and all sorts of things. But I think that it would be nice to know a little bit more here. And I think it would be helpful to the people who've received the notifications to know a little bit more or for more to become known to people in the sort of cybersecurity industry so that they can then interpret that information and help those people.

27:56Patrick Gray: Dimitri, what's your take here? Well, obviously the scale and the numbers of the notifications are pretty interesting here. But what I found particularly interesting is how they're notified, right? There's a lock screen notification on the iPhone. There's a notification in the settings tab. There's an email that goes to your Apple account. all sorts of things that they use to make sure that the user doesn't ignore it. And this actually harkens back to our report at CSRB on the Microsoft Exchange hack. Patrick, I know you remember, I was deputy chair on that review. And one of my pet peeves was how so many people that we talked to, so many victims that Microsoft had notified just ignored the email because they assumed that it was sufficient email.

28:42And we actually proposed a whole notification scheme where phone vendors, Apple and Google primarily, would build this into the system to enable users to see right from the lock screen, from the home screen, the fact that they've been compromised. And I actually went further than Apple did here and said that this API should be actually exposed to trusted vendors that could use this for notifications to users of other activities, other compromises from their other accounts or linked to their Apple or Google Android accounts. So hopefully we'll start moving in that place.

29:18Patrick Gray: Then it's going to be a nonstop parade of pop-ups, man. You remember when - You want to know. Well, people don't care anymore. I mean, there was all of this legislation passed in the United States over the last 20 years at a state level saying that people would need to be notified if their data was breached. You know, nonstop, man, people just their mailboxes, their physical mailboxes are full of physical mail telling them that some Russian hacker stole their SSN out of whatever, you know, and they just take that stuff. They put it in the bin. They don't care. Yeah. So the notification is your data stolen.

29:48I agree with you. But if the notification is your account's been hacked, you know, that's something that you may think twice about. and because, you know, if it's your entire email inbox, I'd want to know if someone had access to it.

30:00Patrick Gray: Yeah, yeah. Look, fair point, fair point. Yeah, if your Gmail account got owned, would it be good to get that sort of notification through your iPhone? Probably yes. I see where you're coming from. Now, talking about some research here that I'm conflicted about because it is sort of stunt hacking. Someone's figured out how to plug a small device that they've engineered into a port on a Boeing 737 jet, which is, of course, a very, very, very common, you know, short to medium haul jet. Apparently, you can just pop an unsecured access panel if you have physical access to one of these planes and stick this device in it.

30:38Patrick Gray: The device itself is interesting, though, because what it can do is feed bad information to the flight management computer and a couple other systems. It basically gets on a bus and it can manipulate sensor data and things like that, which is very dangerous, obviously, for a plane. Interestingly though, it can also connect up through the onboard Wi-Fi system to get out. So you can have real-time C2 over this device and over the plane, over aspects of the plane's sensors while it's in flight. That assumes the Wi-Fi actually works, which it rarely does. That's true. That's true. So there's a few different things to think about here.

31:19Patrick Gray: First of all, my first thought is, well, if you've got physical access to a plane on the ground, we've seen instances where a bee getting into a pitot tube has caused serious safety incidents. Pilots should also notice, you would think, a good pilot's going to notice when some of these readings start to conflict with other indications that they're getting in the cockpit. So that's another issue there, but that relies on a pilot being perfect. So I sort of think, well, what's the point of this? Is this stunt hacking? Is this hacking for publicity? And I don't know, because you look through the work that these researchers have been doing and it's been ongoing for literally years and they've worked with Boeing on this.

32:00Patrick Gray: They've been keeping Boeing apprised of everything that they've found. I don't know. Is it an intellectual exercise? Is it dealing with something real? Does this mean we need to respond and have better physical security at airports, which already seems pretty good? Dimitri, did you go through the same thought process when reading this that I did? I did. And exactly like you, I was thinking, well, if you already get access to a panel of a Boeing jet, well, maybe you can put some explosives in there and not bother with all the cyber stuff, right? It seems way too complex. But then I was thinking, you know, getting a coin size device through airport security, probably easier than getting it through, getting explosives through.

32:39So there might be some value here. I don't know, curious for your thoughts, how do you even combat this? Like, you know, yeah, you can put a lock on it but you know anything can be broken and you know can you build authentication into that bus port not sure and you know the keys would have to be hard-coded so someone could eventually reverse engineer the keys so I'm not even sure what can be done here.

33:02Patrick Gray: I think their suggested fix is putting epoxy over the port which okay that's great but then you don't have access to the port anymore. Yeah, I assume the port is there for a reason. Exactly, right. So, they put them on planes for a heck of it. Yeah, so that's it. Now, we've got a bunch of stories here to talk through, which I think we're just going to combine them into one, right? So, we've got this story. There's a data theft campaign that's been dubbed City Forum. This is a SaaS security firm called Ricoh has uncovered this campaign. And there's just some box out there scanning for over-provisioned guest accounts on Salesforce and ServiceNow instances and just grabbing all of the data.

33:42Patrick Gray: We've got a separate campaign going around targeting SAP Commerce Cloud. Again, exfiltrating data. Shell apparently has been impacted by the latest CLOP campaign. This is the one that we spoke about, didn't we, James? Yeah. When they first kicked off the campaign, it targeted, what was it? It was PTC Windshell, the enterprise product lifecycle management software platforms. So now we know that Klopp has gone around. They've got data from Shell, Philips, GE. So this campaign has been successful. And now they've moved on from the data harvesting to the actual data ransoming part of the campaign.

34:28Patrick Gray: We've seen Uber Freight has also been owned by a group called Helix. So, you know, this is actually good news. Tom in Seriously Risky Business last week wrote about how, you know, this is great because people are moving away from ransomware. Ah, complicated, attracts the wrong sort of attention from governments towards data extortion, which they can still get paid. And it is much less disruptive to society as a whole. So his take is governments need to double down on hitting the actual encrypting ransomware crews to drive more people to this sort of activity. But there's an awful lot of it at the moment.

35:07Patrick Gray: Dimitri, what do you think? Do you think this is actually a good news story? Because that's where I sit on this. Well, the good news story was the first one that USG engaging private sector actors will solve all this, right?

35:17James Wilson: Well, maybe not these ones. Well, look, there's no question this is better than disruption. There's still some of it going on, let's be honest. It's not gone away completely. But yeah, if you had to choose, I'd prefer not to have either, but if you had to choose, DataXfill is much better than disruption.

35:37Patrick Gray: James, is there anything remarkable at all about these campaigns? Because it all looks like real basic hacking. It also looks like the sort of thing that I think AI agents are going to be so good at doing that this, I hate to use the term, but it's like low-hanging fruit, and I think it's all going to disappear pretty quick thanks to AI agents being real good at finding vulnerable systems like this. But yeah, I mean, is there anything interesting here in this at all?

36:01James Wilson: Well, I think it's somewhat interesting that not only are we seeing these groups, to your point, target the biggest prizes and that's the good news story out of this, right? They're going after the people that can pay the big pockets but they're smart about it. They know that. I mean, I don't think anyone with just a general sort of hacking ability would sit back and say, let's go after FlexPLM and Windchill PTC because they're just really boring, enterprise-y kind of products. But if you want to target the biggest priors and the biggest sort of companies in town, you've got to go after these systems that they've got, right?

36:33James Wilson: The SAP Hybris Commerce Cloud one that we mentioned briefly before, same sort of thing, right? So I think that's the interesting thing. It's taken ransomware from being so indiscriminate in both what it targets and how it gets in to this is just such a deliberately targeted and curated and tuned attack that I think that's an interesting element of the trade draft.

36:51Patrick Gray: Yeah. We've also got a report here that looks at Blackfile, which has a nexus with the com. Google Threat Intelligence Group tracks them as UNC6671. They're going after financial companies and I think hedge funds and whatever. And they're doing a lot of vishing and the usual sort of stuff. So look, it's a booming crime type at the moment. And yeah, that is one, I guess, to track. Dimitri, you had something to add? Can I just do a quick plug? everyone should read the CSRB lapses report. The fact that we're seeing the same tradecraft still used years later, just absolutely amazing. But this is something that absolutely people can deal with.

37:27We had a slew of recommendations for victims or potential victims for how to deal with this. Go read it.

37:33Patrick Gray: Yeah, no, it was a good report, that one for sure. Okay, so the shield break vulnerability. This is a privilege escalation bug through Defender. There's no patch for it at the moment. and it was, this is another Nightmare Eclipse one where this is this anonymous researcher who waits until Microsoft is published to patch Tuesday then drops Oday on them. Pretty funny stuff. I mean, unless you're a Microsoft Defender, unless you're a Microsoft Defender customer. And I think that's the point. Whoever this is, they're just out for Microsoft's throat. And I mean, it's all in the game, right? And I find this sort of stuff pretty funny.

38:10Patrick Gray: So be nice. Be nice to the very, very skilled researchers is because they could actually cause you some real drama. I think this person has dropped enough ODA, right, in Defender specifically over the last year that if you're a Defender customer, like if this stuff starts getting used by threat actors, as a Defender customer, you've got to be thinking about switching to a different provider. Dimitri, how would you have handled this when you were, you know, CrowdStrike CTO? Well, first of all, maybe we have it all wrong. Maybe it's not an anonymous researcher. Maybe it's just ChatGPT. But look, I can't believe that we're having yet again, 20 years later, the same arguments about coordinating vulnerability disclosure, notifications periods, whether we should start lawsuits or threaten lawsuits against researchers.

38:56It seems like we've been through this an awful lot and we've gotten to a better place. I don't know how we're coming back to the same issue again and again and again. But look, obviously researchers need to work with companies to make sure that the broader ecosystem is protected. There are billions of people using Microsoft Defender and you want to make sure that you don't expose them unnecessarily. But Microsoft, let's not threaten researchers. We've been through this before where people are threatened with arrests and what have you at Black Hat and DEF CON. Let's not go back to that.

39:29Patrick Gray: No, no. I think there's plenty of blame to go around on this one. Let's put it that way. We've got an item here just talking about how the Kim Wolf botnet, which we've covered a little bit on the show, it is being rebuilt to survive takedowns. I think these Operation Endgame campaigns targeting botnets as well, all of these takedown operations, I think are going to stimulate a move towards takedown resistance C2, which has been a known quantity. We've long known how to do this. I remember like Immunity Security, you know, Dave Itel's company like 15 years ago was demonstrating C2 via comments in Britney Spears' Instagram or whatever, right?

40:13Patrick Gray: So add some Tor, add some blockchain, add some celebrity Instagram comments. Like this is a very easy thing to do. And I'm frankly surprised it's taken till now before people are starting to do this in earnest. Dimitri, do you think this is going to be a switch, like a big switch or maybe it'll fizzle? Well, this is not new, right? Peer-to-peer botnets have existed, I think, since 2006 or 2007. People have used C2s and GitHub and all sorts of places. I think social media, Twitter. I remember there were Twitter botnets or botnets using Twitter as C2. So this is not new. The problem for the botnet owners is it's pretty hard to keep control of this, right?

40:56and if you're putting this on the blockchain, that's sort of a unique method and I think that's something that's more rare, but this comes with a cost and centralized C2s exist for a reason, not just because it's easy, but because you have full control of it and it can't escape out of it. And with peer-to-peer botnets, for example, my team at CrowdStrike has taken down game of Zeus botnet and others. The Storm botnet back in the 2000s, my team at McAfee did that. So that's the problem if you distribute it. It's much, much easier to take it over. And, you know, if you're using Britney Spears' account at C2, well, you know, Instagram, Meta can take it over.

41:43Patrick Gray: Well, I mean, that's always been why people haven't moved to things like domain fronting through, you know, big CDNs or whatever. Like for that reason, and they don't want some threat group like Microsoft to just erase their botnet. But I think that you can have multiple paths, multiple redundancies, and make these things very resistant to being taken down. I think that's where we're going to go. Now, look, I'm just going to whiz through the next few because sadly we are out of time. But if people want to read these stories, they can hit up our show notes over at risky.biz. There has been a guy in Spain who got arrested for doing video deepfakes to try to obtain fraudulent certificates.

42:19Patrick Gray: tickets. This is really cool cyberpunk stuff. Everybody should go and read about this. There's a link to a story in the register where you can read about that. There is a bug in Mac port 5900. I'm like, hang on, isn't that VNC? And it's Mac's like VNC equivalent, which apparently uses some of the guts of VNC for its remote screen share thing. Man, if you've got a Mac on a real world IP with that port open, like you probably already got owned. But thankfully, I think they're just dropping crypto miners, which is hilarious. There's a critical in VMware vCenter, which gives you a reverse SSH shell.

42:51Patrick Gray: That'll be nice. A lot of chaos is going to be caused by that one. A company in Poland, MyDoctor, the healthcare software provider, they got owned. Apparently, there is data on up to 19 million people stolen through that breach. So that one is probably worth keeping an eye on. and we've seen a bunch of crypto hardware wallet providers getting their data stolen which has coughed up customer details which ain't great because that means someone is going to knock on your door hit you over the head with a hammer and steal all of your Bitcoin so happy days there now just before we go to I want to give a plug to the Unprompted conference which is happening in Sydney September 18 and 19 in the city it is going to be an absolutely fantastic event Mark Dowd is organizing it.

43:39Patrick Gray: Confirmed speakers already include Shane Huntley. We've got Chompy. We've got Ash Fox, an Aussie who I haven't seen for quite a while. He's over at Google. There is going to be some Frontier Lab representation there as well. So as I say, it is on September 18 and 19. You can find the URL at unprompted.au. We're bringing our whole team like James and myself will be there. Tom's going to be there. Amberley's going to be there. Everybody, Risky Business is coming to Unprompted Sydney. So get yourself a ticket. It's going to be a fabulous event. It's all about security and AI and all of that good stuff.

44:14Patrick Gray: So we hope to see you there. But that is it for the news. James Wilson, Dmitry Alperovic, thank you so much for joining me to talk through all of it. It's been fascinating.

44:23James Wilson: Thank you. Thanks, Pat. What a week.

44:29Patrick Gray: That was Dmitry Alperovic and James Wilson there with the Check of the Week Security News. Big thanks to them for that. It is time for this week's sponsor interview now, and we're chatting with Damian Lukey, the chief executive and founder of Nebulok. Now, Nebulok started off as a AI-powered, like, agentic threat hunting platform. But what they quickly realized is what is a threat hunt if not a detection, right? So they realized that really, if you do rapid threat hunting, it's basically a detection platform. So now they're kind of moved in a direction where they're building more of a real-time graph and doing threat hunting on that graph in real time.

45:07Patrick Gray: So look, it is a detection platform. They can also help you engineer detections for the rest of your detection stack, so on and so forth. But basically, Nebulok, part of it at least, is turning into a clean sheet redesign of what a seam actually is. And as part of that, you know, you've got to build your graph that you can run detections on. and you've got to decide what's in the graph and what can be grabbed agentically in each investigation to bring context in that the agent can use to decide whether or not something is suspicious or not. So yeah, that's really what this conversation is about, about designing clean sheet of paper, what a detection stack should look like in 2026.

45:48Patrick Gray: So here is Damian Lukey talking about all of that. Oh, and a quick note too, at some point in this interview, I talk about how they detected a Southeast Asian crime group. That was me editorializing. Damien mentioned afterwards, he's like, well, we don't know that it was a Southeast Asian crime group or if it was espionage or what it was, just that there was a nexus with Southeast Asia. So that's my bad. You'll hear that in this interview. But anyway, here is Damien Lukey with a discussion of, yeah, modern detection. Agentic, very cool. Here he is.

46:18James Wilson: Seam as a market really didn't start out that way. Like Splunk was supposed to be Google for logs. And then we in security suddenly realized that that was valuable. But if you think of the primary purpose of a SIEM as like the security operators workbench, what do they use it for? They threat hunt, they do detection engineering and they investigate. And while we started with this hunt first approach, right? So continuous behavioral threat hunting and then realize, well, wait a minute, because the way that we've designed our threat hunts, our hunts capture and maintain state and memory. We can translate the intent of the threat hunt to a behavioral detection and we can test it and validate it and test for drift over time.

47:01James Wilson: We suddenly realized, thanks in part to our customers as well, like, hey, wait a minute, we can also do investigations. And the key with us around investigations was, I don't believe you need to store every single last bit of log data to be able to effectively threat hunt, do detections engineering, and also investigate threats that are relevant to your environment.

47:22Patrick Gray: But hang on, there's the problem though, right? Because you never know what you're going to need in an investigation, right? That's the issue. 100%. Which is why people are like, let's just ingest everything and give half of our IT budget to Splunk.

47:33James Wilson: Exactly. And I would say the just-in-case problem is I think why half the IT budget goes to Splunk. We instead thought about like, okay, give access to all the data, but just in time. So the way that we think about it is you centralize your endpoint identity, network and cloud data, because that's where actors achieve persistence. I pop an edge device. I write reg keys. I steal creds. I crush infra. but like vulnerability management software, your CMDB, your CSPM, there are other bits of data across your security and IT stack that are valuable just in time, but like make no sense to store for two plus years.

48:16James Wilson: Yeah.

48:17Patrick Gray: Okay. I mean, I totally get what you're saying, right? And it makes a lot of sense, which is a lot of data. You're going to build a graph, right? Of the key stuff that's important. And then this is one of the best things about an agent. And I've seen it in the work that I do with Dropzone, which makes, you know, like a SOC agent, right, for people with existing seams and whatever, is an agent can say, well, I need to look up some information on this domain name, for example. And it can just go off and do that to bring in the context as part of the investigation, right? So that makes sense. But at some point, like, you know, at some point you might need to bring in a whole new data type in order to get the context that you need.

48:56Patrick Gray: And then like, well, does that need to go into the graph? And like, how do you actually start to, how do you build this thing so that it's flexible enough to be altered as time goes on? And I'm guessing it needs to be flexible enough to be altered one way at this customer site and another way at another customer site. Like this is actually a pretty difficult problem.

49:18James Wilson: It is. And that's why we've been building for two years to get to the state that we're at. we talk about, we're launching the concept of our trace graph this week. It's Nebula Lock's context graph, analogous to CrowdStrike's threat graph. So this graph, the graph that you and I are talking about, which is fed by our hunters and intel folks and detection engineers and all of that experience and different data pieces all being available out of the box. How do you figure out what to and not to do. You have strong opinions about what the graph should be used for. For us, this is about security operations use cases around proactive threat hunting, which is understanding persistence and lateral movement along with credential access.

50:05James Wilson: It's around good detections engineering, which is, okay, I want to build robust detections for the data sources that matter, endpoint, identity, cloud, and network. And then, like, how do you maintain it being flexible? We talked about this on our Soapbox episode a while back, building a schema that you can normalize everything to. That really for us was the other core unlock. So structuring a schema that allowed for flexibility so you could add new data types to it, but it was all normalized to one thing. So the agents looking at everything in one happy place.

50:36Patrick Gray: But how can you normalize the data on a graph and have it still be like, I don't know, how does that work? Because you're talking about a lot of different types of data. How do you have a normalized graph that's still flexible, I guess, is the question.

50:52James Wilson: Yeah. So the way that we did it was we have like our centralized database with the graph that runs on it. But then we also built this federated search component. And the way that that works is we're able to dynamically capture, you know, with the swagger dog. So we use agents. But, you know, we can capture structure, understand the data types that we want to pull in. we're able to map that schema to this common schema and pull that. But the fundamental question you're asking really is like, how did we know which problem to solve first? How did we know which data to go after first? We spoke to our customers and determined like the core use cases and the core use cases for us, given the confines of where we thought data gravity should be were first around vulnerability and vulnerability management, what exploits actually matter and What's the blast radius in my environment?

51:43James Wilson: The second was, okay, like based on my broad posture, like what does my attack surface actually look like within my cloud environment? So CSPM. And then also asset management. Like how do we think about what is managed and unmanaged in my environment? And how does that apply to the way that I think about threat hunting and detection engineering? So we started with the use cases and used that to kind of build up that first tranche of integrations and how we really thought through that problem. So we want to be flexible, but we also want to have opinions about what we integrate with and why, because you're right, Patrick, if I just say you can integrate with anything, you know, we're going to get custom app logs.

52:22James Wilson: Someone's going to bring in an application from, you know, 1986 that still runs on-prem in their basement. And we wanted to be really thoughtful about structuring that because graphs can get really big and really complex really fast. Well, yeah, I mean, that's kind of why I'm pressing on this, right?

52:39Patrick Gray: I'm wondering too, what was something that you didn't initially include that either a customer decided later or you decided later, well, we should be bringing that into the core graph. I'm not talking about stuff where you can sort of agentically get the context later. I mean, core stuff in that graph. What's an example of something you've changed there?

52:58James Wilson: Oh my gosh. Network data. we had a long and spirited discussion about the value of network telemetry because it is verbose, but it can be useful, particularly when it relates to any sort of data exfiltration or if you want to understand lateral movement, but you don't have an EDR running on the device. So I ended up coming to the conclusion using SSE, so Secure Service Edge Solutions, like a Zscaler, that we were actually going to ingest that data. And that's actually been a very recent development. This was something that for a long time we hadn't thought about it. And then in talking to customers and thinking about, okay, we want to address these use cases.

53:41James Wilson: That's funny.

53:41Patrick Gray: It's funny that you mentioned like something like Zscaler, which does solve a lot of problems, but then you're right. Like who is actually ingesting Zscaler logs to spot weird stuff? I'm guessing not many people are even bothering to look at that stuff. I mean, I'm guessing they've got their own monitoring that will tell you things, but in terms of actually taking that data and feeding it into some other product, like, yeah, that's gotta be rare.

54:03James Wilson: Yeah, and I mean, it's because like, it's very specific. People tend to use Zscaler for a few key use cases and it kind of like lives in its own little bucket. But if we think about this idea of, okay, the value of a graph is that I can do entity resolution and trace behavior that seems totally normal across a bunch of different places. That was like the last mile that we realized was like not just something I'd want just in time, but in fact, something that I'd want to be able to normalize data against and be able to access at any point in time. So it's been a journey, right? You know, we started on the endpoint, shifted and added identity, then it was cloud and now finally network.

54:40James Wilson: And we're at a point that back to like where adversaries target, we've got a strong sense of data gravity without, you know, a long list of data models that we need to support because we're ingesting random application logs for two years.

54:55Patrick Gray: Now, the whole point of Nebulok, when it was first founded, it was much more around the principle of threat hunting, right? And now it's like, well, you may as well do detection because what is detection? But, you know, real-time threat hunting, basically. And you found some cool stuff, actually. One of them was a crime group moving laterally through a customer where you traced it back to some origin IPs in like Southeast Asia and India, Still not entirely sure what the group was trying to do, but they were definitely up to no good. The reason I'm mentioning it, though, and the reason it's interesting is it wasn't a case that they were popping reverse shells.

55:34Patrick Gray: It wasn't the case that they were using traditional TTPs. They were doing a lot of social engineering and then using remote management tools, right? And I think that's the thing that Nebulok's trying to do that's a little bit different, which is to detect these abuses of what's already in an environment. And most detection stacks, some of them are doing that, but I mean, it's not the norm. Let's put it that way, right? Like it's not the most common way that people are doing detection these days. But what can you tell us about that incident? Because that one's interesting.

56:07James Wilson: Yeah, more than happy to. To be clear, I can attribute who this group was, rather where they were coming from. But it was a really interesting example of folks using off-the-shelf software that doesn't trip any alert wires to actually establish persistence and operate completely unnoticed in an environment for weeks or months. We found a couple of non-standard RMM tools being used. we found Zoom clients running where they shouldn't be and remote desktop protocols being accessed and basically like while this person said that they were working in a particular part of the United States and there may have been a host that was present geographically there the person actually doing all the work and accessing that system was in Southeast Asian the way that we found it really was by being able to correlate a couple key pieces of data

57:03Patrick Gray: So this was a malicious fake IT worker sort of instance.

57:07James Wilson: Yeah, one of those people that wasn't who they said they were. And the key unlock for us was a remote management tool or remote desktop protocols being used in isolation is not inherently bad. But when you look at all of these in concert and you look at inbound and outbound IPs, you look at activity on the endpoint, you look at tools and systems being accessed, it paints a picture of somebody who's really not doing what would be expected of whomever they are supposed to be. But more importantly, doing a fantastic job of using really boring pieces of software, these green flags of behavior to blend in completely.

57:50James Wilson: And it was only in looking that in context and going, well, hey, wait a minute, that we were able to say, actually, this person is not who they say they are. And, you know, immediately alert the security operations team that we were working with.

58:03Patrick Gray: How was that surfaced? Was that staff doing that? Was that human driven or was that agentic?

58:09James Wilson: So this was agentic. This was using our, I mean, we call it vibe hunting, but our threat hunting agents to surface this behavior.

58:16Patrick Gray: yeah that's pretty cool that's pretty cool that your clankers uh were able to uh were able to find this activity all right damian lukey uh always a pleasure to chat to you my friend uh good to talk to you about graphs and detections and uh you know agents uh pleasure to chat to you my friend and i'll look forward to doing it again soon thank you very much patrick i appreciate it catch you later that was damian lukey from nebulock there big thanks to him for that and that is it for this week's show i do hope you enjoyed it i'll be back soon with more security news and analysis. But until then, I've been Patrick Gray.

58:47Patrick Gray: Thanks for listening.