The Future of Human Coding

It's time for security now! Steve Gibson is here. He's got some more thoughts on Project Mythos, the new super smart AI that can find security flaws. He's he's saying, you know what, this isn't hype , and he's got some real evidence behind it. We'll talk about Microsoft buying its own bugs back and ignoring other ones. And what uh what do Steve think of Project Hail Mary? Yeah, even that coming up next on Security Now . Podcasts You Love. From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Security Now with Steve Gibson. Episode 1075. Recorded Tuesday, April 21st, 2026. Yes, exactly. It's time for security now. Yay! Tuesday has come. You've been waiting all week long to hear from this guy right here, Steve Gibson, the man in charge at SecurityNow. Hey, Steve, good afternoon to you. Leo, great to be with you again as always. Um I got some feedback from the 20,000 plus listeners who joined my email list who to receive the show notes. Yeah. Um as a consequence of my own schedule over the weekend, I needed to start work on this Friday. I finished Saturday afternoon and immediately set out the show notes. And the the feedback was, wait, is it Sunday? No. No. People are paying attention, Steve. You can't pull one over. Unfortunately, they're paying very close attention because I also, because I my my emailing system assumed that I would be doing the email ing in the morning of the podcast. It autof ills the day's date at the top of the email. But since I'm sending the mailing out typically on Sundays and occasionally on a Saturday, I have to go in and man and remove the the placeholder for the autofill and replace it with the actual date. Unfortunately, something is wrong with me because this is not the first time I've put in 2024 as the year. And so is I send it out as 421 2024. And so several of our sharp eyed listeners said I think so. Have we traveled in time? And when now I'm thinking I'm just gonna leave it with autofill and it'll date the email on the send date rather than the podcast date since you know that would work forever. Anyway, um we're gonna have uh some fun. Uh I I hope that today's podcast will put to rest any question about what mythos means. Because two days after last Tuesday's podcast , the entire indust ry of security professionals, Bruce Schneier, who we know well, uh Google CISO, I mean a who's who all co-signed and authored and produced a document that is intended to get the industry's attention because they all agree with me . So I titled today's podcast, Yes, exactly . Which is meant the same. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Yes. It is what I said last week , but we've got I'd wanna I want to share just to really no this is probably at one point remember I said that last week's show notes was ver was revision three. U inh the first revision, I wrote, this could be the most significant podcast in our pot in the in the history of security now. Woohoo. Now I I got a I you know did some deep breathing and I'm in one of the spollow-on revisions I removed that sentence. But it uh you know my point was we're talking about potentially well and of course then my working name was Mythos Marketing or Mayhem because this could be a big deal. So anyway, I just wanna we got a an amazing document that I'm gonna share. And the other thing that is useful is I've heard from some listeners who are having a hard time convincing upper management that they need to respond because of course any response is going to be expensive, right? I mean it,'s going to require expenditures of talent, equipment, like uh you know, upgrade, upheaval, whatever. Well, that's why the flaws are still there in the first place. Exactly, and of course, and then and then there's the issue of the new things that haven't yet been found. So one of the things that this document offers, and in fact this is also the first time I've had two shortcuts in one podcast for the same file because you can get to this two ways grc.sc slash mythos or episode number grc.sc slash 1075 nice because I want there to be no possible reason that our listeners can't get the PDF and send it up to the C-suite, folks, because it is written for them. There are takeaways and bullet points and priority lists and this is what you have to do because a tsunami is very likely coming. And in fact, I draw I I realize there's a I'm I'm already giving this away. I've got this whole thing in my head. Uh it's there is a very much of a Y2K aspect of this, right? Rem think about it, you know, everyone who said after after we went went into the year 2000., oh Oh look, that was nothing. Nothing happened. Well, folks, there was a reason nothing happened. It's because everybody who needed to actually took it seriously and prevented something from happening. So anyway, we're gonna have a I think a great follow-up today to last week's that last week was just my opinion. Today we've got everybody's opinion. Um, but we're gonna talk about a disgruntled developer who has been disclosing multiple Windows zero days because he's upset with Microsoft. Uh Microsoft purchasing its own bugs in a massive campaign. Uh, the story behind something that's a couple of weeks ago, many of our listeners wrote to me. I it I didn't know what to say about it. I could have talked about it last week, but actually I bumped it because last week's podcast was full , uh, about how VeraCrypt and Wireshark and some other projects suddenly lost their dev accounts at Microsoft. They were like, what happened? We were they like were they were unable to to do uh revisions of their software for some reason. We now have the whole story there. Uh which so it's kind of good I waited a week, so I you know, because we were gonna talk about it anyway. Uh uh we got a serious problem of recaptured domain names, which is reminiscent of the bucket reuse that we talked about with AWS a couple weeks back. Um, also a listener feedback inspired exploration of how exactly AI might help to secure, might best help to secure open source repositories. Um Um a listener wrote to say, hey, I never heard heard you and Leo talk about your opinions of Project Hail Mary. Could you say a few words? So we will. And then we're going to end with what cybersecurity professionals across the industry tell us about what mythos means. Oh, that'll be interesting. And of course, again, the title of today's podcast is Yes, exactly. That gives you some idea of what's to come . Awesome. We also have a lovely picture of the week, which I haven't seen, but I know it's lovely because it always is. They're always fun. This one this one is a little a bit of a hoot. So yeah. A bit of a hoot coming up. Mm-hmm. Uh you're watching security now. We're glad you're here, and we are so glad to have our sponsor with us, the wonderful folks at Thinx Canary. Thinks Canaries. We've talked about these so many times. I'll give you a quick recap if you're new here. They're honey pots. Honey pots, notoriously difficult to write, but the idea is you put something on your network that's very attractive to hackers. And you might say, well, why would a hacker be in my network? Well, that's the question, isn't it? You know, I think a lot of times we assume we've got such great perimeter defenses. There's no way a bad guy could get in, except I think anybody paying attention, if you've just listened to the show a little bit, you know that breaches are happening with increased frequency all the time now. That and that means somebody's got into your network. And the real issue, in my opinion, uh, and I don't think I'm alone in this, is how do you know? Because these bad guys are often very good at covering their tracks. That's one of the real skills of being a hacker. Is you, you know, delete logs, you hide any uh, you know, record of their presence. So how would you know if somebody's in your network? As stats say most people don't. Uh on average, a company will not know that they've been breached for 91 days . That's a problem because that means that's three months a bad guy has to go through your stuff. Exfiltrate information they could use to blackmail you or your customers, huge potential reputation damage, plant little time bomb ransomwares that could go off. I mean, they could do all sorts of damage. You need to know the minute somebody's here in your network. That's why you need a thinxed canary. It's a honeypot that is a designed by people who've been doing this for years. They are they are experts in breaching networks. They've been teaching private industry and government how to do it for years . Uh they're they're super smart. They've written something that is highly secure because you don't want to put something in your network that's not. So it is absolutely rock solid. Uh that one of the things they do that I like, and I asked them about this when I saw them at uh RSAC a couple of weeks ago, th they're always pushing out updates. They're always uh adding features but also f fixing bugs, making sure that your ThinksCanary is solid as a rock. So you can put it on your network with confidence. It's a honeypot, very easy to deploy. You plug it in. I've got mine right here. It's just got, it has two connectors on it, a USB connector for power, and it's got a network connection. It actually just looks like a uh uh an external hard drive, right? Just a black box. Nobody will really notice it looks like many devices hooked into your network. But the cool thing about this is it can impersonate almost anything. So you go into the console, your thing is scenario console, and you'll choose the personality you're going to apply to this scenario. Mine is uh has been for a long time a Synology NAS, but it could be a SharePoint server, a Windows server, a Linux ser ver. You can turn on any ports you want. You could light it up like a Christmas tree, give it every possible service, or just have a few select ones, you know, like Windows file sharing. You can uh it could be a SCADA device, it could be an S SH server. It also, this is really neat, can create files that phone home. These files can be really anything, a wire guard configuration. Oh, by the way, hackers love that. Because then that means again, other networks that are theoretically secured, right? It could be a spreadsheet. I have a few spreadsheets. You can put them on your local drive, but even on your cloud drive. So I have a few spreadsheets that say things like payroll information, something a bad guy cannot help but open. The thing is, the minute the the the intruder, whether it's an outside hacker or a malicious insider , op tries to open this uh fake SSH server or tries to access that spreadsheet that says payroll information, your Thinks Can ary will immediately tell you there's somebody in the network. You got a problem. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter, and in any way you want, by the way. Text message, S you know, SMS, but uh webhooks, uh, Slack, syslog, of course, it could be email, any way you want. They they're very flexible. They even have an API, so you could write your own tool if you want. This is so cool. Choose a profile for your Think Scanary device. You register with a hosted console. That's how it gets the monitoring. That's how it generates the notifications. And then you just wait. You just wait. You sit back and relax. An adversary cannot help but make themselves known by accessing your things to can ary. Now, let me tell you, a big bank might have hundreds of these. You certainly should have one for every network segment. I think all the nooks and crannies on your network, right? And let's not forget, you can put it on cloud devices too. Visit canary.tools slash twit. Let's say you want five of them, okay? That's $7,500 a year. You get the five Things Canaries. You get your own hosted console. You get upgrades support. You get maintenance. Oh, and if you use the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us box, you get 10% off the price. And not just for the first year, forever, or as long as you have your Thinks Canaries. You also should be reassured because you can always return your Thinks Canaries. They have a very generous two-month money-back guarantee for a full refund. I should point out though that they've been advertising with us this month. It's their 10th year advertising with us, 10 years. And during all that time, that full refund has never been claimed. Not once. Visit canary.tools slash twit. Enter the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us box? 10% off for life. Canary.tools slash twit. Use the offer code TWIT and we thank him so much for 10 years of support for what's Steve been doing here at uh security now. That is I I think probably our longest standing uh sponsor just to go monitoring your network is I mean one thing to secure it, but you need to also keep an eye on what comes through the door. You need to know. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I am uh prepared to show all the picture of the week. I gave this picture the caption hyphen usage is uncommon, but there are times when there's no substitute. All right. Um I like the uh I like the uh this is going to be another punctuation uh hyphen usage is uncommon, but there are times when there's no substitute Okay . Okay. Somebody took this quite literally. You want to describe it? Yes. Yes. So we have a we have a sign. You can sort of see at a keyboard on a shelf above and maybe a monitor. There's some sort of a and there and there's a power strip in the back. There's some sort of a you know, some sensitive electronics and come you know PC stuff. We had signs like this all over our studio because I always bring my coffee Yes, and the sign says no drinks back here unless they have a screw on top. Now and then it says thank the management. Now, they clearly meant a screw-on top, not a screw on top . So what we have then is a styrofoam cup with uh one of those little plastic styrofoam lids and a long about an inch and a half wood screw sitting on top of the cup. So it has a screw on top. Which all you all you need it satisfies all requirements. Yes. And had it said screw hyphen on, then it would have been clear that you didn't want a screw on the top of the cup. You wanted a screw on top . Again, punc tuation. Container. Yes. Can be very important. Yes. Uh, not many people use hyphens. Uh, but I like to hyphens. I like hyphens. Yeah, I do too. Yeah. Not quite clear when you need 'em, but I I've just say hey, air in the positive uh uh in this direction of it hyphenating because what the hell? So we mentioned last time that the patch Tuesday last week was the second biggest patch Tuesday of all time. I mean, big numbers. Yes. And we don't know yet whether that's mythos related, but we know that Microsoft is one of the companies that was named that Anthropic gave has given access to uh mythos . So and and you have to wonder because you know I've I've heard people talk about oh you know uh like somebody was saying uh on some show oh you know what what do they think?' Thsere no way' thats it not gonna escape. It's not gonna get out. It's like they're not you know they're giving them access to the model online. They're not thinking giving them uh mythos to go. No. Here's your mythos. We'll wrap it up for you. Please make sure it's not like one of those iPhones that gets that that gets left at a bar uh when when when you when you walk, you know, an unreleased iPhone. So anyway, there's no problem. But but but the fact that it's cloud-based means that Microsoft would need to trust their competitor because of course they're all open AI, whereas this is coming from uh Anthropic, they would need to trust Anthropic with their source code uploads into Anthropic's cloud in order to have Mythos rummaging around in Microsoft source. So there's that. But then on the other hand, everybody is going to have to trust anthropic in in that fashion because it's their cloud. There's no local mythos yet, as far as I know. Anyway, uh last Thursday, the 16th, Bleeping Computer's headline was New Microsoft Defender Red Sun, that's the name of it, or it's been given to it, Zero Day Proof of Concept Grants System Privileges, which, as we know, elevation of privilege is almost important as important as remote code execution. Because oftentimes the remote code that you're executing is in the context of a user uh login where there the whole OS is got security wrapped around the user to keep the user from misbehaving. So you need to first get into the user account, but then you need to get out of the user account into the system account, you know, out, you know, into root. So as again, you know, elevation of privilege is a big deal. Um so So Bleeping Computers piece told the story of the disgruntled developer who had and and I'll share some of what this guy wrote because we'll get us he sounds like he himself is a little more than disgruntled. He's a little sketchy, but uh anyway, this guy uh has been publishing not this is like not even the first fully working proof of concept exploit code uh for his discover ies plural of privilege of elevation vulnerabilities in both workstation and server, like from like 2019 on, it's like like server 2019 on have have been vulnerable to this. Um, so the following day on the 17th, so on the 16th, bleeping computers headline was new Microsoft window defender wet uh you know zero-day proof of concept grants system privileges. The next day , they followed up that reporting with another piece titled Recently Leaked Windows Zero Days Now Exploited in Attacks. In other words, this guy put the proof of con cepts up on GitHub and the next day bad guys had found them and were exploiting them to hurt Windows users. So not good. Bleeping computer said threat actors are exploiting three recently disclosed Windows security vulnerabilities in attacks to gain system or elevated administrat or permissions. Since the start of the month, a security researcher known as chaotic eclipse or nightmare oh there's a hyphen. Nightmare hyphen eclipse. So he's hyphenating, has published proof of concept exploit code for all three security issues in protest to how Microsoft Security Response Center, you know, MSRC, handled the disclosure process . And we're not getting much much uh visibility into what that means exactly. Um bleeping said two of the vulnerabilities dubbed Blue Hammer and Red Sun are Microsoft Defender local privilege escalation flaws, while the third, known as undefend, can be exploited as a standard user to block Microsoft Defender definition updates . At the time of the leak, the security flaws, these exploits targeted, were considered zero days by Microsoft's definition, which remember is a little different than the industry's, since they had no official pat ches or updates to address them. Normally zero day is is about surprise. In this case, it's about response essentially to a to something that hasn't yet been patched or updat They said on Thursday, this is of last week, Huntress Lab's security researchers reported seeing all three zero-day exploits deployed in the wild, meaning in use to hurt people, with the Blue Hammer vulnerability being exploited since April 10th. They also spotted undefend and Red Sun exploits on a Windows device that was breached using a compromised SL SSL VPN user in a tax showing evidence of what they're calling hands-on keyboard threat actor activity, meaning not just automated scan stuff, but you know an attacker logged in through an SSL VPN hitting keystrokes in order to explore and and exploit the vulnerable connection. They said, while Microsoft is tracking the Blue Hammer vulnerability as CVE 2026 338-25 and has patched it in April 2026 security update. So it got fixed last Tuesday, which was patch Tuesday of this month. They said attackers can use the Red Sun exploit to gain system privileges on Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server 2019 and later systems when Windows Defender is enabled. It actually uses Defender in order to leverage its attack. So weirdly, disabling Defender disables the zero day. Um and they said even after applying the April patch Tuesday updates. So this is a this is a vulnerability post patch Tuesday of this month. So we don't know when it's going to get fixed. Maybe an emergency out of cycle update. Who knows? They said the def the disgruntled researcher explained. So this is the researcher saying, quote, when windows Defender realiz es that a malicious file has a cloud tag, meaning, you know, like the remember the uh the the mark of the web which tags you ab'lere to get saying, uh, we're gonna treat this differently because you downloaded this off the internet. Says when a malicious file has a cloud tag for this is the d this is the uh the the the discordal researcher writing, quote, for for whatever stupid and hilarious reason, the antivirus that's supposed to protect dec ides it would be a good idea to just rewrite the file it found to its original location. The proof of concept abuses this behavior to overwrite system files and gain administrative privilege unquote. And we'll get we'll actually get a little more detail about that in a second. So um they wrote when bleeping computer contacted Microsoft earlier this week for more information on the disclosure uh reported by the anonymous researcher, a Microsoft spok esperson, told Bleeping Computer, of course, this is going to be as helpful as they generally are. Quote, Microsoft has a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and update imp acted devices to protect customers as soon as possible. We also support coordinated vulnerability disclosure, a widely adopted industry practice that helps ensure issues are carefully investigated and addressed before public disclosure, supporting both customer protection and the security research community. So thank you for that, Microsoft. So two days before that on Wednesday, this person, this is me talking now, this person going by the moniker chaotic eclipse, posted his own diatribe over on blog spot. And I think it's worth sharing since it gives us some impression of who's doing the disgruntling. Uh dated Wednesday, April fifteenth, the blog spot post was titled Public Dis discclosure A Response for C V E twenty twenty-six three thirty-eight twenty-five patch. So it reads, posted by the guy, here is the code enjoy. And then he's got a GitHub link, uh, github.com/slash nightmare hyphen eclipse forward slash red sun . So he said now to so it looks like nightmare eclipse is the guy's name, right? And red sun is the exploit. Now to address what some media articles wrote, first of all, I want to talk about MSRC official response regarding Blue Hammer. That's his previous release of a zero-day exploit proof of concept code. He said , uh Microsoft has a customer commitment to investigated, reported security issues, and update impacted devices. Oh, so it's he so so this is uh him quoting what what bleeping computer just showed us they had they had said for what it's worth. So he said this is a very generic response , almost as if they don't care, and they don't. Why? Because MSRC was fully aware of this public disclosure. A case was filed but was dismissed by them , and they are also aware that this one will be disclosed, but again, they are ignorant. Period. This is again Mr. Disgruntled. Normally, he writes, I would go through the process of begging them to fix a bug, but to summarize, I was told personally by them that they will ruin my life, and they did. And I'm not sure if I was the only person who had this horrible experience, or a few people did, but I think most would just eat it and cut their losses. But for me, they took away everything. They mopped the floor with me and pulled every childish game they could. It was so bad, duos on so bad, at some point I was wondering if I was dealing with a massive corporation or someone who was just having fun seeing me suffer, but it seems to be a collective decision. Wow. And one I know. And one other thing, they do everything but support the research community. I won't disclose details, but they sabotage people a lot. I mean, just look at the past. Microsoft is the only major company who had a track of multiple vulnerabilities being publicly disclosed just because the researchers were so upset by how MSRC treated them. Unfortunately, the folks who have the capacity to stop those disclosures not only don't care, but also seem to push harder for even worse exploits to be released. I didn't want to be evil, but they are actively poking me to start releasing RCEs, which I will be doing at some point. Dot dot dot . He said and he finishes. I will personally make sure that it goes gets funnier every single time Microsoft releases a patch. Okay, so we talked about vulnerability discoverers feeling that their brilliance is not being sufficiently recognized or rewarded. Uh in an earlier posting on March 26th last month this person wrote quote i never wanted to reopen a blog and a new github account to drop code but someone violated our agreement and left me homeless with nothing. They knew this will happen and they still stabbed me in the back anyways. This is their decision, not mine. Okay, so my presumption , without knowing anything specific, is that Microsoft almost certainly treated this researcher the same way they treat everyone else. But he believed, or he or she believed, that they deserved special treatment. You know, we've certainly shared horror stories in the past about the way some researchers have been treated. But Microsoft is not evil. It's full of good people, but you know, a great many good people. So the result is that it's a big lumbering machine that doesn't care about anything, but you know, only because caring is not what big lumbering mach ines are optimized to do. This researcher appears to have adopted, you know, an I didn't want to, but you made me do it rationale for his actions. Reading between the lines, my guess is maybe he was counting on receiving a big bug bounty payout that he desperately needed, which never came. Sort of sounds like he may have released the proof of of of concept before Microsoft you know went through the the formal disclosure process and so blew his opportunity because he pre-released and so now he's complaining about that. So now, of course, he's blaming Microsoft for this. Um, it's unfortunate that this person is having trouble with life. Uh, I looked at the details of the proof of concept that he designed, and it's a slick bit of work. You know, that the well-known security researcher Will Dorman, from whom Bleeping Computer often seeks confirmation of complex issues, posted about this new Red Sun exploit over on Mastodon. Will wrote from the same author as Blue Hammer, we now have Red Sun. This works around 100% reliably to go from unprivileged user to system against Windows 11 and Windows Server 2019 and beyond with April 2026 updates as well as Windows 10, as long as you have Windows Defender enabled. Any system that has CLD API.dl should be affected. Okay, so CLD API sounds like the cloud when the Windows Cloud API and is. In the next quote from Will, he refers to ICAR, EI-C--A-R. That's the abbreviation for the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research. The file they produced, which itself is known as ICAR , is a popular pseudo malware test file that can be used to deliberately freak out any good AV to ol without actually itself containing or doing anything malicious. It's just used as a as a test uh file to see if A V detects it. So he said in in a follow-on Mastodon posting, Will writes this to explain what this thing does. He says this exploit uses the Cloud Fil es API, writes ICAR to a file using it, meaning using the Cloud Files AP I, uses an opt lock to win a vol ume shadow copy race, and uses a directory junction reparse point to redirect the file rewrite with new contents into C colon backslash Windows backslash system 32 backslash tearing engine service dot xe. At this point, the cloud files infrastructure runs the attacker planted tiering engine service.exe, which is the red sun exploit itself, as system , and he writes game over in other words this is what this is the proof of concept that the disgruntled attacker well developer engineered which as I said is some slick work. I mean that,'s kind of tricky to figure that out. Anyway, our primary takeaway here is that all fully patched as of last week's mega patch Tuesday, uh, as you said, Leo, second biggest ever, but apparently not quite big enough. Uh Windows Desktop and server are currently vulnerable to this exploit, which is now being actively used in the w ild. It's not the end of the world since something bad must first get into a machine so that it's able to trick Windows Defender into performing that odd file rewrite dance . And that allows attacker provided code to be run with full system privilege . But it's you know the attacker has to first get in there and provide the code. So I as said, while it's not the end of the world, Huntress Labs is observing it under active use. So it would be nice, yeah, if Microsoft were to fix the issue for this before uh you know May's patch Tuesday, which is still a full three and a half weeks away. I mean, this is a this is a bad problem. And um you know Microsoft didn't get there in time and they probably should get this updated. In the meantime, I think it's hilarious. Turn off Windows Defender. Yes. Actually, that is the only that's the mitigation is turn off Defender because Defender's being used , this weird behavior that Defender has. And I'm sure Microsoft knows why they're doing this, but you know, it ends up you can leverage that in order to get yourself attacked. Yeah . I wouldn't off Windows Defender. I don't know what I would do. Um maybe the Zero Patch guys. I'd haven't I didn't think to look over at Zeropatch.com. Maybe they have a quickie patch. No, they offer for free patches which Microsoft patches for vulnerabilities that are known, but which Microsoft has not yet provided fixes. And they might do that. So uh that that might be an opportunity. If if they 're checking right now just to see. Cool . Meanwhile, Microsoft has been buying up their own bugs. While we're on the topic of Microsoft and bugs. Uh bleepinguter Comp also reported that Microsoft has been breaking records for bug bounty payouts. Um and b before I take note of the irony inherent in this i'll share what bleeping computer wrote they said microsoft has awarded two point three get this two point three million dollars to security researchers after receiving nearly 700 submissions during this year's Zero Day Quest, which is the name of it, Zero Day Quest, you know, Z ZDQ hacking contest. Tom Gallagher, Vice President of Engineering and Microsoft Security Research Center, that MSRC we were just talking about, said that over 8 80 of the flaws found during the live event at Microsoft's Redmond campus were high impact cloud and AI security vulnerabilities. So that's just great. We've all been using that software , which has 80 high impact cloud and security vulnerabilities. And actually, Leo, that may more account for patch for the April patch Tuesday than Mythos stuff. So you don't really need mythos. There's plenty to go around. Well, just pay because 2.3 million dollars. I mean, what we've seen is this bug bounty concept paying, you need to motivate research ers who have, you know, uh only so many hours in the day to go r running around chasing after Microsoft vulnerabilities, although it doesn't seem there's any that there's any scarcity of those. So bleeping computer continues. Gallagher said, quote, during the 2026 hacking, the live hacking event, Microsoft partnered with the global security research community, representing more than 20 countries and a wide range of professional backgrounds, from high school students to college professors. Researchers conducted all testing within authorized environments in accordance with Microsoft's rules of engagement, demonstrating potential impact without accessing customer data or other tenant systems. Within these constraints, researchers identified critical paths involving credenti al exposure, SSRF, you know, server-side request forgery chains, and cross-tenant access. So lots of cloud, lots of AI. He wrote, or or bleeping computers said last August, Microsoft announced that it would increase the prize pool at this year's zero day quest hacking contest to five million in bounties , which the company described as the largest hacking event in history. In 2025, Zero Day Quest also generated significant participation from the security community following Microsoft's offer of 4 million in rewards for vulnerabilities in cloud and AI products and platforms. So they they bumped it from last year's 4 million to this year's 5 million. After the hacking competition concluded, Microsoft announced it had paid $1.6 million in rewards after receiving more than 600 vulnerability submissions. So last year they offered 4 million, they paid out 1.6 after 600 vulnerability. This year they offered 5 million and paid out 2.3 million. So lots more actual problems found . The Zero Day Quest event contest is part of Microsoft Security Future Initiative, a cybersecurity engineering effort launched in November 2023, following a scathing report from the Cyber Safety Review Board of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that found the company's security culture inadequate and required an overhaul. And of course we talked about this at the time. I mean they they they're the the it was just really raked him over the clock, you know, charging ex excess money for logging as an uh as like logging security events. So they could just turn it on, but let's like, oh no, let's make some more money from having so many bugs that people have to log in order to track them. Right. Anyway, bleep being said, last August, Gallagher said,, quote as part of our secure future initiative, we will transparently share critical vulnerabilities through the CVE program, even if no customer action is required. And here I hate this word, learnings from the zero day quest will be shared across Microsoft. They're sharing their learnings. They love that word. I don't know why, but you know they I mean, yeah. The things we learn talk, I think. The things we learned is the with the way I learned my learnings to help improve cloud and AI security in alignment with SFI's core principles, securing by default, by design, and in operations. Apparently, however, not in code. Uh finally, earlier last August, Microsoft announced it had paid a record $17 million to $3 4 4 security researchers across 59 countries through its bug bounty program between July 2024 and June 2025. You know, there's a mixed blessing, right, of bragging about how many millions of dollars you have paid to 344 security researchers who have found really bad problems with your software. On the one hand, okay , I think it's great that Microsoft software will now or will soon be, you know, that many bugs fewer in cloud and AI security vulnerabilities. Now that's of course good for everyone. But as I said, it seems a little ironic to have Microsoft gleefully bragging about how many hundreds of bugs researchers were just able to find throughout their products when they were sufficiently motivated to do so. So anyway, um as we know, none of those bugs should have been there in the first place to be found, but hey, Microsoft has way more cash on hand than it knows what to do with. So dangling increasing quantities of cold hard cash in front of security researchers who will then be motivated to go bug hunting? That's definitely money well spent. Let's have more of it because Microsoft can certainly afford to pay. Um, we're going to talk about the mysterious disappearing developer accounts, Leo . No, unlike those developer accounts. I just I I like the uh what was it, hands-on ke yboard? That's another good one. I never hands-on keyboard attacker. Yeah. You can see, like, oh, Boris is hunting, Boris is hunting and pecking. Wow. Yes. Wow. Uh Redcon 5 in our Discord says the term learnings was not in common use in nineteenth and twentieth century, although the countable noun sense learning, as in things learned, dates to Middle English and the plural learnings to early modern English. Note that early use of learnings often have the sense or connotation teachings. Yeah, I've heard teachings before. Yeah. As was the case of the of learn generally. It is found occasional use for centuries, including by Shakespeare. So I guess if you're subject to teachings, what you come away with is learnings. Learnings. I don't like it either. I agree with you a hundred percent. It feels like corporate speak. It feels like you've what are you smoking on the peninsula up there? Yes. All right. Let's take a little time out. Steve will caffeinate. I will educate this episode of Security Now and advertate advertate. And I hope you learn it, learning eight. This episode of Security Now brought to you by Delete Me. Actually, this is something you might want to learn about. Ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the internet for anyone to see? We were talking on Sunday on the on Twit before the show about this whole data broker issue. And like, where do they get the information from? And who are they selling it to? I think what we do know is there are more than 500 data brokers out there collecting every little bit of information they can, your name, your contact info, your social security number, your home address, even information about your family members. They connect it, collect it in a variety of ways. I mean, that's why we're always talking about browser fingerprinting and things like that. Uh frankly, companies sell it to them, and it's not at all unusual for them to offer libraries for companies to incorporate into their mobile apps because mobile is great for this, because you put everything in your phone, right? So there's a a lot of ways they get this information. They the the fact is they know it. And worse, they will sell it to anyone. They don't care. To uh to marketers, of course, but also to hackers, to harassers, to law enforcement, to f other countries, nation states , anyone on the web can buy your private data, including your social security number, and it's completely legal in this country. It shouldn't be. I know it shouldn't be, but it is. And what does that lead to? Well, I mean, your imagination's the limit. Identity theft, phishing attempts, doxing, harassment, hacking . But I think it's very important to know that there is something you can do about it. You can protect your privacy with DeleteMe . We learned about DeleteMe when we started getting phished a lot. And what was weird is the phishing texts knew way too much about our company organization, about our management, about their employees, their direct reports, phone numbers. And of course the more personal information a phishing attempt has, the more effective it is, because it's believable. Right? We knew immediately there was a problem. Fortunately, our team is pretty savvy. They didn't fall for it, but we wanted to immediately go out and and get this personal information off the internet. So we subscribe to DeleteMe. Yes, it's a subscription service. It removes that personal info from hundreds of data brokers. It's very simple. You sign up, you give it exactly the information you want deleted, and then the delete me experts take it from there. And they, this is good because they know exactly who the data brokers are. Every one of the data brokers is required by law to have a removal page, but they're sneaky. They hide it. It's in a different spot for everybody. It's not immediately obvious, but that's why you need these DeleteMe experts, because they know they have exactly where to go. So Delete Me will send you regular personalized privacy reports showing what info they found, where they found it , what they removed. And this is why it's a subscription. It's not a one-time service because even if they remove it, it comes back. It's like cockroaches. These data brokers, the w some of them, you know, quote, go out of business, change their name, and then just continue on. Some of them, even after you delete the information, will start repopulating it. So delete me is always working for you, constantly monitoring and removing that personal information you don't want on the internet . You could, I guess, do it yourself, but it's really hard. To put it simply, delete me does the hard work for you of wiping your family, your personal information , your company's personal information from data broker websites. Take control of your data, keep your private life private. Sign up for delete me. We've got a special discount today only for our listeners. 20% off your individual delete me plan when you go to joindeleteme.com slash twit and use the promo code TWIT at checkout. Now that's the only way to get 20% off. JoindeleteMe.com slash twit. Enter the code TWIT at checkout. Go directly to joind eleteme.com. That's one word, joindeleteme dot com slash twit . And please do us a favor. Use the offer code TWIT. You do yourself a favor. You get twenty percent off join the late me.com slash twit and the offer code is twit and we thank him so much for supporting uh security now and for and for getting our private information off the internet. We appreciate that too . Steve . I think those little um remember when they were there were all those fake sweepstakes? That's another way. Yeah. We know that that happened on Facebook. That was the Cambridge Analytica scandal. They were making quizzes, like which Star Wars figure am I? And just by simply virtue of taking those quizzes, not only did they get all your Facebook information, they got all your friends ' Facebook information. So even if you said, Oh, I'm not going to do that, if your friends do it, they're revealing it. Yeah. Now that hole's been plugged, but there's always more because they're like a cacaraches . You can't get rid of them . All right. Anyway, on we go. Let's talk about the missing Microsofties. One of the recent bits of news that that was uh that was, as I said, bumped so that we'd have time to thoroughly examine Anthropic's mythos , was that Microsoft last week was that Microsoft had, without apparent cause or reason, suddenly dropped a number of dri ver developer accounts, products such as Veracrypt and WireGuard. I mean like the well the well-known WireGuard like next generation VPN uh they both incor they inherently incorporate kernel driver components in order to obtain the deep os level access they need in order to operate. Um so this was a huge concern for many users of these products and I heard from many of our listeners who picked up on this news. Okay, as it turns out, it was as I said before, it was just as well that I waited since last week , the news um the the news the only news that we had was that the the accounts had been dropped. We didn't know why. Today we know uh the reason for Microsoft 's suspension of these accounts turned out not to be a mistake, but was entirely deliberate, uh, which is also a process or a reason for some concern. Um, and I know it's probably gets gonna hit home for many of our listeners since it's an issue that I've been talking about recently during that whole process of updating my code signing certificate and what I had to go through, which we you know, like getting my CPA to sign an attestation letter that yes, he'd just laid eyes on me and I was real and he was putting his license on the line in order to vouch for me. It's like yesik. None of that had ever been needed before. So once again, Bleeping Computer was on top of this under their heading. fast track to reinstate Windows hardware dev accounts. Kind of an oops. Anyway, bleeping computer explained, writing, Microsoft has rolled out a fast track response to help developers re gain access to accounts recently suspended from its Windows hardware program following widespread complaints that they were locked out without warning. Last week the company suspended Windows hardware developer accounts used to publish Windows drivers and updates for widely used tools like WireGuard, Ver acrypt, Mem Test eighty six, super popular, and Windscribe . The suspensions prevented developers from releasing new Windows builds and security patches, raising concerns about potential delays in responding to vulnerabilities. Veracrypt developer uh Mon uri Adrassi stated that his account, so this is Veracrypt, the successor to TrueCrypt, as we know, uh that was taken over by someone in France, this Adrassi guy. He said his account had been terminated without warning, and that he was unable to reach a human support representative, leaving him unable to publish Windows updates. Similar experiences were reported by WireGuard maintainer Jason Donfeld and others, who described being locked out without fac ing uh uh any or or uh without access or facing lengthy or unclear appeals processes. You know, there was the machine, the Microsoft machine was just sort of ignoring them. After many developers took to X to report the suspensions, Microsoft vice president Scott Hanselman said the accounts were suspended for failing to complete identity verification in the Windows hardware program, and that the company had been emailing these people, which they call partners, about the requirement since October of 2025. Right? So six months of we're trying to reach you and you're not replying. Microsoft requires identity verification for the Windows Hardware program, because it allows developers to sign and distribute. Actually, it doesn't anymore, but okay. Remember, Microsoft is doing the signing now, and distribute kernel level level drivers. It does allow developers to develop kernel level drivers under the program, which run rights bleeping computer with high privileges and have been, well, yeah, in the kernel and have been like you could do anything, have been abused by threat actors in past attacks . However, they write, many developers claimed, and there's so many, it's probably true, claimed they had not received any prior notification, including emails, before they were suspended. While Hanselman and others at Microsoft have been working to reinstate accounts, Microsoft yesterday introduced a temporary process to fast track reinstatement for suspended accounts. An update to Microsoft's advisory adds, quote, We've heard your feedback, uh huh . We know that some partners whose accounts were suspended following account verification are experiencing challenges . Regaining access to the hardware dev center, the HDC, protecting the security of Windows ecosystem remains our highest priority. And we are adding a temporary process to accelerate the reinstatement experience for partners who are able to resolve outstanding compliance requirements . Wow. Under the new process, developers are told to, they wrote, to open a support case through the hardware program as the fastest way to reinstate accounts. Requests must include a clear business justification explaining how access to the hardware dev center will be used. Microsoft says that once reinstated, all outstanding compliance requirements must still be resolved before full access is restored. So this is sort of an interim, you know , we're we're pr on a on a provisional uh trial basis, we're gonna give you your account back that you have had you know previously had access to for years until we decided nope, no more. Suddenly we don't know who you are. Uh, but now you're gonna have to tell us who you are. Um, and prove it, of course. Uh so Microsoft said it advised partners to ensure they're signed in with the correct account when submitting tickets and to continue prompting co-pil ot to create a ticket if automated assistance fails, whatever that means. For those unable to submit requests through standard channels, Microsoft provided an alternative support contact to help initiate the process. Microsoft has not said how long this accelerator process will remain in effect , that is what this grace period is going to be. So affected developers are advised to act quick quickly. Okay, so I would tend to believe the developers over Microsoft regarding this complete lack of attempts to inform them. As I noted earlier, Microsoft is no longer an entity that is actually able to care. Caring is not something that it does. It's just too big. And car ing is a distraction. So someone somewhere doubtless decided that the best way to get developer attention or just to remove dead accounts would be to simply suspend all currently non-compliant accounts for non-compliance. This has the advantage, as I said, of weeding out any older accounts that no one really cares about that much since they won't be immediately inconvenienced by their inability to access Microsoft's developer portal. And conversely, those who are inconvenienced will be highly motivated to get their identity proving act together. As we know, this may involving that this may involve getting an affiliated attorney or CPA to sign some attestation papers. It's what I went through. Basically, this is the same process in order. You need to have, you know, identity verification that is bulletproof. And of course, that's you know, that's true because running code in the Windows kernel is a privilege that no but none of us want bad guys to have. So we do want Microsoft to make that as bulletproof as possible. You know, while Microsoft could have been way more gentle about this, this did get the job done. So, you know, that's what that was all about. The reason Microsoft suddenly suspended a bunch of devel oper accounts, many that who were immediately inconvenienced because they were using them activ ely. Now, you know, basically it's like, okay, we're gonna give them back to you for a while, but you need to get your identity uh made compliant. So that will happen. Um, okay, now this next piece of news beautifully exem plifies a problem we've we've seen before that's I think largely a consequence of the aging internet and aspects c,ritical aspects of its design that were never very well thought thought through since and in defense of its designers, they could have never and never did foresee what their creation , which we call the internet, would become. Uh they I mean I I'm in awe of the uh the original design of these protocols that have stood the test of time, there are some aspects that haven't. Software abused to deploy antivirus killing scripts. Not a great headline. Well, that's factually true. It's more of the consequence of the problem than the problem itself. Okay, so look but let's start with what Bleepy Computer reported. They said a digitally signed meaning, you know, there's a real company behind it, so it's digitally signed and pretty much these days anything has to be a digitally signed adware tool. So not so not malware, not you know, not evil, but just unwanted, and a digitally signed adware tool has deployed payloads running with system privileges that disabled antivirus protections on tens of thousands of endpoints, meaning plate, you know, hosts, host computers at where it was installed. Some in the educational, utilities, government, and healthcare sectors. In a single day, researchers observed more than 23, 500 infected hosts in across 124 countries trying to connect to the oper ator's infrastructure with hundreds of infected endpoints being present in high value networks. Okay, so they're saying 23, 5 five hundred PCs have this adware tool. Hundreds of them are in like really important networks and they're all reaching out trying to phone home to this operator's infrastructure. Bleeping wrote: Security researchers at managed security company Huntress discovered the campaign on March 22nd when signed execu tables viewed as potentially unwanted programs, love that, pups, P U Ps, potentially unwanted programs. Do you really want this? Which is what that that that original opt-out tool that I wrote and for that old radi ate or Oreate mouth, you know, adware was. Anyway, they said potentially unwanted programs triggered alerts in multiple manag ed environments. So Huntress is in the environment management business and they saw these things doing this . They wrote pups or adware are regarded more as a nuisance than malicious, as their role is typically to generate revenue for the developer by showing advertisement pop-ups, banners, or through browser redirects. You know, they'll they'll they'll infect browser URLs to bounce through some other redirect before they go to the site that you actually intend. Huntress researchers say that the software was signed by a company called Dragon Boss Solutions LLC , sounds kind of Chinese, involved in quote, search monetization research, whatever that is, activity, and promoting various tools, for example, the Chrome Stera browser. Oh, Leo, don't leave home without the ChromeStera browser . Uh Chrome us, whatever that is, the world wide web. Oh, that's catchy. Uh, web genius and the artificious browser. I don't know if I want the artificious browser. Anyway, all labeled as browsers, but detected as pups by multiple security solutions. So they're recognized as are you sure you want this? Beyond annoying users with ads and redirects, Huntress researchers say the browsers from dragon Boss Solutions also feature an advanced update mechanism that deploys and get this an antivirus killer. In other words, they found out that there's things that don't like them, so let's kill that because we don't want to be unliked. Huntress researchers discovered that the operation relied on the update mechanism from the commercial advanced install er authoring tool to deploy MSI and PowerShell payloads. Analyzing the configuration file for the update process revealed several flags that made the operation completely silent. You know, no user interaction required. You don't want to bother users with per those pesky permission dialogues. It also installed the payloads with elevated system privileges prevented users from disabling automatic updates, and checked frequently for new updates. So basically badly behaving malware, I would agree , potentially unwanted, probably definitely unwanted . That would be dupe. Definitely unwanted programs. Not a pup, it's a dupe. Yeah, that's right. Okay. So none of those things seem deliberately malicious, right? Uh having been harassed by false positive A V detections, uh you know, I can at least understand their motivation behind creating exceptions for one's code. You know, as we know, uh that's not the approach I take, you know, like killing off a V that bothers you. Mostly this seems like software written entirely with the convenience of its publisher rather than its user in mind. That's bad software, no doubt about it. But that's also life. So the report ing continues saying, according to the researchers, the update process retrieves an MSI payload, you know, setup.msi , disguised, this is weird, disguised as a GIF image , which is currently flagged as malicious on virus total, but only five by only by five out of 69 or 70 security vendors. So not many false positives or positive positives. Anyway, it does seem a little sketchy. Why would any software publisher who thinks of themselves as legitimate retrieve a Windows setup.ms MSI file disguised as a GIF image. What? Okay. Anyway, they continue writing, the MSI payload includes several legitimate DLLs that advanced installer uses for specific tasks, such as executing PowerShell scripts, looking for specific software on the system or other custom ac tions defined in a separate file named uh exclamation point underscore string data that includes instructions for the installer. Huntress says that before deploying the main payload, the MSI installer conducts reconnaissance by checking the admin status, detecting virtual machines, verifying internet connectivity and querying the registry for installed antivirus products from malware bites Kaspersky McAfee and ESET. The security products are disabled using a PowerShell script named clock removal dot ps one, you know, PowerShell, which is placed in two locations. The researchers say that installers for the Opera, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browsers are also targeted, likely to avoid potential interference with the AdWare's browser hijacking. Yeah, you want to turn off, you know anything that might get in the way. The clock removal dot ps1 script also executes a routine when the system boots and at logon and every 30 minutes to make sure that antivirus products are no longer present on the system by stopping services, killing processes, deleting installation directories, wow, you know, really wiping them and registry entries, silently running vendors uninstallers, love that, and forcefully deleting files when uninstallers fail to successfully uninstall. It also ensures that the security products cannot be reinstalled or updated by blocking the vendor's domains through modifying the hosts file and null routing them, redirecting them to zero zero zero zero . Wow. So again not technically malicious, but you just don't want that. So what's clearly going on here is that the publ ishers of this definitely malbehaving crapware have previously experienced well-deserved run-ins with a handful of alert anti-crapware utilities that want to warn their users that this is a potentially unwanted program in spades . So these Cretans have upped the ante by making their adware offerings even more obnoxious in the things they do to get anything that doesn't like them off the system and keep them off. Like you can't even contact those A V uh companies any longer because you you the your browser will not resolve the domain because the hosts file has been edited in order to null route them. Wow. Okay, so here's something curious and interesting . During the analysis, Huntress found that the operator did not register the main update domain Chrome Stera browser, ChromeSterabrowser.com, or the fallback domain World Wide Web Framework3 .com used in the campaign, presenting them with the opportunity, presenting them Huntress, Huntress with the opportunity to sinkhole the connection from all affected infected hosts. In other words, domain got abandoned. Huntress saw nobody had re-registered it, so they did . As such, writes Bleeping Computer, they registered the main update domain and watched tens of thousands of compromised PCs re ach out looking for instructions that in the wrong hands could have been anything based on the source IP addresses of the endpoints, these PCs that are that are that have this crap on them, the researchers identified 3 2 4 infected hosts residing in a high value networks. Remember, that's 324 out of twenty-three thousand five hundred. So there's twenty-three thousand five hundred PCs overall, three hundred and twenty-four in high value networks, specifically two hundred 21 in academic institutions in North America, Europe, and Asia, 41 OT, as we're calling them now, operational technology networks in the energy and transport sector Educational institutions, three health care organizations, hospital systems and public health care providers, and the networks of multiple Fortune 500 companies. So if a bad guy had registered that domain before Huntress did, they'd have access into all of those networks . Bleeping Computer wrote that they tried to reach out to Dragon Ball Solutions, but could not find contact information as their site is no longer operational. Huntress warns that while the malicious tool currently uses an A V killer , the mechanism to introduce far more dangerous payloads into infected systems is in place and could be leveraged at any time to escalate the attacks. Additionally, since the main update domain was not registered, anyone could claim it and push arbitrary payloads to thousands of already infected machines with no security solutions protecting them by design and through an already established infrastructure. Huntress recommends that system admins look for WMI event subscriptions containing the string M B Removal or M B setup schedule tasks referencing WMI load or clock removal and processes signed by Dragon Boss Solutions LLC . Additionally, review the hosts file for entries blocking AV vendor domains and check Microsoft De fender exclusions for suspicious paths such as D Google, e Microsoft, or DD Apps . Okay, so this is this particular incident is not the end of the world. But as I noted at the start, it's another perfect example of something the internet was never designed to handle. Some random company may its elf not be explicitly evil, but might have sloppy, uncaring, and abusive coders who install software that does things to its hosting PCs that would raise serious concerns from anyone who understood what was going on. But as we know, the phrase from anyone who understood what was going on is almost never going to include the end user who decided, hey, you know, I'll bet that Chrome Stera browser would be a lot better than Chrome. So I'm using Chrome Sterra instead of Chrome. It's like, okay. So here's the problem . Yeah. So here's the problem that the internet's designers never considered. What happens when the progenitors of ill begotten and very badly designed software and not necessarily even that like any software , which is now using an infrastructure to phone home to check for updates, and then has the power to automatically download them and put them in place . What happens when that software, which continually reaches out to the internet for updates, eventually, and if it's a you know a fly by night company, probably inevitably goes out of business. Their horrible software remains installed and alive and querying for updates. I know that all of us have stuff on our PCs that we installed some time ago and then stopped using, but probably haven't taken the time to remove because it's not bothering us . But then their various domains also expire. Oops . Now anybody could re register them. Fortunately in this instance, Huntress are the good guys who re registered those expired domains for the sake of their resear ch. But if bad guys were to do this, they would have stumbled upon the motherlode. 221 academic institutions, 41 operational technology networks and infrastructure providers, 35 municipal governments, state agencies, and public utilities, 24 school systems, three healthcare organizations, and the networks of multiple Fortune 5 00 companies, they could get into all of them. Ransomware, anyone ? This abandoned software would literally have a ready-to-go backdoor into the networks of all of those 3 24 high value targets . And here's the concern to think about. This cannot be an isolated event. This particular discovery was Huntress showing that they're awake and alert and doing their managed security thing. That's great. But similar events are doubtless happening across the internet . Companies are abandoning their previous failed software offerings, which included technology to phone home. Then home is abandoned too. Note that it's one thing when some random website's domain is abandoned, but it's an entirely different matter when autom ation that's been silently installed into user machines is making those queries. This creates a ready-made backdoor into every one of the networks that's reaching out to abandoned doma ins . Um, you know, we're in a world where there is no accountability for the actions of the software while it's in use, right? I mean, people can down load this crapware and it does that to their machines. Horrible things. Installing scheduled tasks, stripping AV out, running the AV uninstallers and if that doesn't work, removing their registry entries and manually deleting the software for their machines, black holing their domains by putting 0.0.0.0 in the hosts file and the user doesn't know they they said yeah I really want the Chrome ster a browser sounds great and this happens there's no accountability in our current environment companies can do whatever they want, including this kind of crap. You know, you know, the this basically, we're in a world where we have a rent a domain name system, right? We rent a domain name and as long as we're willing to pay for it, we get to keep it. But when we decide we don't want to rent that domain name any longer after it expires, it's up for grabs. Just like the AWS abandoned bucket problem was, where bad guys could grab abandoned buckets that were you know still had activity on them. So unfortunately, this re-registering a domain is assumed and encouraged, but it leaves us with some serious potential for security problems. It's not something our forefathers on the internet uh thought about because they could have never imagined that the net would become what it has. But this this problem of recycling domains uh it creates a whole new world of security problems What an interesting story. Yeah . From Ster a. I can't wait to get it. By the way, I just uh saw this news cross the wire. Yeah. Mozilla is saying now that it used Mythos on Firefox and that it found 27 1 bugs which they patched in their current version 150. So this is the first that we've seen of an actual admission that Mythos was used and by an independent third party. Yep. Two hundred seventy-one bugs in in shipping software. That's been tested and tested and tested. Oh my god, pounded on, and we know it is it is the largest attack surface on an on anyone's computer is the web brow Yeah. Um one of the things Mozilla uh said is this is our belief is that that the tools have changed dramatically and there were categories of bugs you couldn't find with that you could find with human analysis, you couldn't find with automated analysis, which means that threat actors had an advantage if they were willing to spend the time and energy we couldn't keep up. And now it is finding them with automated analysis. Every piece of software uh this is uh by the way, this is Holly, Bobby Holly, Firefox's CTO . Every piece of software is gonna have to make this transition because every piece of software has a lot of bugs buried underneath the surface that are now discoverable. This is a transitory moment that is difficult and requires coordinated focus and a lot of grit to get through, but I think that this is a finite moment, even as the models become more advanced. He said, yes, we are flooded now with with things we have to fix, but at least we know about them. Yeah. And when AI is in the pre-delivery pipeline , we're not going to be there again. So as I said, we are going to have it's transient mayhem potentially. It's Y2K. This the Y2K is a perfect model. I think this confirms what you just said. Exactly. Yep. It is Y2K. It's it's hair on fire . But for a limited time only. Yes. And now and and you know that going forward have with fire with the Mozilla team having seen this, they will vet anything they do now through AI to cat to uh as a like hyperlint in order to catch any any of the problems before they ship. That's what Holly is saying, basically, is this is now incumbent on everybody. The new model. It's the new model. It's a future. But this is a real confirmation that Mythos it wasn't merely marketing hype, that there is something going on. If you can find two hundred seventy-one bugs in a highly tested version, current version of please tell Jeff in Paris. I'm so annoyed with that like, is it really? Yes. Read something. It is now. Well, we didn't I mean, uh to be fair, we did we weren't sure. You know, because yeah, you were said that last week. Yeah. Yeah. Uh and I mentioned that to them. Uh, but now we now we have absolute confirmation this is this is the real deal. Uh because they've been using automated tools before. This is not it's this is a special category. And I will, when we get to our main topic, I will the the uh the the guys at IELT Remember AI S L E the they're the guys that found all the problems in OpenSSL. And so they have a little bit of pushback against anthropic, which I'll share to round this out. Um but anyway, uh as I said, the podcast is titled Yes, Exactly. Exactly. And you were you called it. You were absolutely right. I take it you would like to pause to celebrate . And it is time for a pause. It is to refresh. To refresh as I talk about our sponsor for this segment of security now. We're glad you're here. Thank you for watching. And I think you're glad you're watching too. Uh a show today brought to you by Hoxhunt. It's like Fox Hunt with an H H O X H U N T. As a security leader, uh you've been there, right? The eye rolls during training, the one size fits all fishing simulations, I'll put that in quotes, that your employees spot from a mile away. And the report button that gets ignored more often than not, your programs are running, but it's not changing employee behavior. Meanwhile, we're seeing that AI is making real attacks more convincing by the day and leadership is starting to ask the question, you don't have a clear answer to. Is this actually working? Well, Hoxhunt is built to answer that. Hoxhunt empowers your employees to spot and stop advanced fishing attacks, drive measurable behavior change, so personalized g,amified micro training. It's powered by AI and behavioral science and it really works. And you'll love it because as an admin, Hawkshunt's doing all the heavy lifting. The simulations run automatically, and not just email, but email of course, but Slack and Teams too. And just like the real attacks, they're personalized to each employee based on role, location, and behavior. Every simulation uses AI to mirror those real world attacks. So your employees are actually being tested on stuff that that's real, that's actually getting through, not some outdated template that they say, oh yeah, we've seen this before. Gamified training keeps the engagement high. They love it. They get gold stars, they get stickers, they get, I mean, they love it. But it and so it doesn't feel punitive, because I'll tell you something, nobody ever learned something by being punished . Right? Because every inter action generates a coaching moment. You're not just tracking completion. Yes, they press the button. Yes, they finish the test. You're building behavioral indicators that tell a real story. Reporting rates, repeat clicker reduction, and time to report, the kind of metrics that hold up when leadership asks the hard questions. But you don't have to take my word for it, with over thirty, five hundred verified reviews on G2. Hawk Sun is the top rated security training platform. Recognized both for best results and easiest to use, it's also recognized as customer's choice by Gartner. Thousands of companies use it, Qualcomm, DocuSign, and Nokia . They trust Hoaxhunt to train millions of employees worldwide. Visit Hoaxhunt.com/slash security now today to learn why modern secure companies are making the switch to Hoxhunt. That's Hoxhunt. slash security now. We thank them so much for their support of Security Now and Steve Gibson. We've got some feedback . What? Oh, you're muted . Hello? Oh , thank you. Okay . So feedback. Um, a listener shared some mus ings over strateg ies for securing open source repositories. And it provided a perfect setup for an ask for looking at this aspect of the future. So his name's Gene Hastings, and uh who listens to us, I'm familiar with the name. He sent email in the past. He wrote, A colleague and I often meet to talk about DevOps and related issues. You know, system and personal health. He's more dev, I'm more ops. Both often cranky. One of our listeners. In any event, we were talking about the nightmare that's having a project's dependence on libraries all over the net. And what steps might be taken to provide some degree of defense. He said, I was already aware of version pinning, and there was the recent news about a compromised package where the infection modified it without changing the version. I recalled long after our conversation that one would need to store a hash of the package and compare it on retrieval, right? Because if then a modification would get detected that would the hashes would He's had little protection against a compromised new version or a first-time use, but some nonetheless. There's also the concern as to the trustworthiness of the package's own dependencies. All this led me to reflect that what may need to happen next is having uh is to have each package and its components not only signed by the author, but also by an independent auditor. Obviously, this does not scale physically or financially. So the next step is to have a trusted agenic auditor that does not charge a fortune for each signing. Such automation will be necessary soon. This led me to a further thought. Imagine a new project philosophically akin to Let's Encrypt , a service for smaller developers who can do an automatic audit at a tolerable expense. He says, if all of the following are true, the agents, like Mythos and Descendants are competent. The agents are efficient. The agents are trustworthy. The agents are not priced out of reach with some flavor for everyone. And the owners of the agents are trustworthy. He has an exclamation point on that one. He said, then there could be a future for us and the internet. Apparently, otherwise, forget about it. That's all over. He said, as an aside, I am an AI skeptic. I do not trust that which cannot be explained. Getting back to operations, if I don't have a half decent idea what a system and its configuration is doing, I am very reluctant to put my name on it. I am willing to trust people who are able to understand the systems to assure me that I can be fairly reassured. At the moment, such people are hard to find amid the I'm also I'm I'm not as concerned about the quality of the technologies as I am about the people pushing them. I wouldn't trust simple driving directions from the likes of Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, or Jeff Bezos. I do not trust their motives, plans, or motives, or plans, signed Gene Hastings. Okay. So thank you. As he said, often cranky. Cranky Gene. U h he's suggesting a future , uh a future solution, uh, which might be a system in the form of let's encrypt where individual developers would need to have an AI-based agent audit their code for problems and you know unsuspected or unwanted behaviors and would then sign the library all for a low cost. The trouble with this is that then we need some authority to manage the trust in these AI agent signatures and on the trusting end some sort of new root store that users of these signed libraries could use to look up and verify the trust. In other words, a whole bunch of new stuff. I think there's a more direct, cleaner, and straightforward means of accomplishing the same thing. We simply move to a world very much like what we were just talking about, Leo, with Mozilla. We move to a world where anything that a public code repository offers for broad public consumption first passes the scrutiny of an AI agent. An AI will be guarding the exits, essentially. Code cannot leave the repository without first being checked by the AI ag ent . And the process might not be autonomous. You know, the the repositories AI might have some questions for a package's authors that would need to be answered and negotiated before a new or updated package could be made widely available. And since the use of an AI will certainly come at a non-zero cost for the foreseeable future at least. I'd mean there'll probably always be some cost because this is always going to be some compute. I'd imagine that there would be some form of rate limiting on submission so new sub missions being made available publicly for review and publishing. You know, non professional authors who are in the habit of constantly revising their code to know to make an endless series of incremental improvements might have a release delay or some sort of submission limit imposed. But but the idea being, in the same way that Mozilla will be running their Firefox code from hand from now on through AI. The solution is for repositories to do the same thing, to clean anything that is being released to the public before it gets out there. And I suspect that solves this problem. You know, the vast majority of a repository's code is mostly static, right? So an AI would only need to give it the once-over one time. And from then on, uh, those who pull it could rely upon its security more than they ever have been able to before. And most code only changes incrementally so an an AI could could retain the context that it developed when during that original once over and then bring itself back up to speed and only looking look at the changes, all the deltas to the code, in order to minimize the recurring cost of continu ing to review uh code which incrementally changes over time. So I think the whole system can be made practical. So what I know is this. You know, the year is currently 2026. See, I got it right this time. It's not 2024. 2026 . When AI costs today far more to run than it's able to generate in revenue. I am sure that the economics of AI will be radically different in the future. Just as the economics, for example, of mass storage and computation have been utterly There's a rich history of this. This has always happened. Today we're all walking around with globally connected pocket computers that would have boggled the minds of our grandparents. Yeah. So your parents, forget the grandparents. Yes. It should be clear to everyone that AI, which continues to boggle our minds today will be just as accepted and taken for granted by our grandkids as the internet is by today's kids. So, you know, I mean that you know kids growing up today, they've always had the internet. That's just like, yeah, they don't know life without it. We're still sort of like, wow, remember those days? Rem remember books? Remember C Ds, DVDs, right? Records. And finally, GP, our listener, says, Dear Stephen Leo, given April's security related news, I can see how thoughts on the Project Hail Mary movie might have been pushed to the wayside. I'm wondering what you gentlemen thought of the film and its treatment of the source material. I felt the movie struck a nice balance. It did justice to the book while allowing those who have not read it to enjoy the story without being overwhelmed by a flood of science, which could have easily turned it into a five part mini-series. Oh, yeah. He said a lot of science in the book. Yeah. There is. Well, and that's why we love Andy Weir's writing. Right. So he said, My young one enjoyed the movie so much that they uh young ones, oh young one, that they they that they wanted to read the book. So good. So we yeah. That's good. Yes. So we signed up to borrow it from the library. However, we were number one hundred and ten in the queue of the public library to borrow the book. Yeah. So we 're on the bestseller list again, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So we opted for my old copy on Audible instead. List although I salute him for reading because I'm still a you know, I think reading is is primal. But anyway, he said, listening to the story again did not diminish the movie, it only enhanced the experience for both me and my little one. It's like getting the inside story, if you get my drift. This is one of the few times in recent history where a movie did not ruin the book, but actually improved upon it. Good job to the production team on this one, all the best GP. So, Leo? Yeah, I'd agree a hundred percent. In fact, I'm re-listening to the book, which I started right after the movie. The other thing we did do though is we also re-watched The Martian, because Lisa and I had a little uh inside uh bet. Uh 'Cause after the Project Hell Mary, I said, Oh, that was as good as the Martian. She said, No, it wasn't. And she said it was really good, but it's not as good as the Martian. And I said, Oh. And then we watched the Martian and I have to agree with her. The Martian was remarkably uh good. Yeah. I think that's partly because Ridley Scott directed it. Um, I think the directors of Project Hail Mary, who chiefly are famous for the Lego movie, um maybe have a little bit more of a kiddie sensibility. I could see I would app eal to his uh little ones. Because, you know, uh Grayson uh is uh Grace Ryland, Grace is like there's a lot of times where he goes, Oh , you know, things the kids would like.. Yeah But it's a little over the top. That bugged me a little. I do feel it was very true to the book. The book has infinitely more detail. Yeah. Because you had to cut all that stuff out. I'd forgotten how much science there is in the book . Um and so there's stuff that I thought, oh boy, I they didn't they left that part out of the movie. But well, and for example, I love the details of breeding astrophage from the book, it was so good. Right. And we just got a little a little suggestion of it in in in the movie. Almost all the science is suggested, you know, in the movie. Yeah. Yeah. They focus on the drama, the interpersonal relationshi ps, and the science gets a second. So my theory, because I've, you know, I've reread the book when we knew there was going to be a movie, because I read it originally when Andy wrote it. And I've thought about this question of movie versus book a lot. Of course, famously I've complained here that that that um uh uh uh Jurassic Park, the uh when I was watching the movie , I was incensed because so much was left out. Right. I mean, some imp arguably really important stuff. On the other hand, look, Jurassic Park was a phenomenon as a movie. So who can say that like there's what I've decided is it's really not fair to compare. Yes. They are two it it the what they have in common is a similar plot. So they have the concept and the plot, but you really are addressing two different audiences. A book reader or audible listener is a different audience than somebody who wants to go to a movie for in two hours and be entertained. They're different media. Yes. Absolutely. And you have to be native to the medium, otherwise, it just isn't going to work. And I understand that. But I do agree with you that this, which is unusual, and our correspondent, this movie makes you want to read the book, which is really great. And you don't feel disappointed in either direction, which is very unusual. I almost always fear disappointed by science fiction books not living up to the movie. Uh in this case, no, I I think in both for both the Martian and Project Hail Mary, the movies are great. They really do a good job. Yeah. Uh so we'rere in agement. Yeah . Okay, let's take a break and then we're gonna plow into what the experts say and what the and what you you just shared a perfect example from Mozilla, what they found when they ran Mythos against their Firefox code base. Yeah, yeah, very interesting. Uh I I do have to point out, uh uh Redcon 5 asked in the uh Discord chat, our club twitch chat, how many of the two hundred seventy one bugs were severe or were you know and I they actually didn't talk about severity. So I don't know. They might have been smaller bugs. I we don't know. Um so that's the next question. But I guess a bug is a bug is a bug. I mean and we know how often bugs can be elevated elevated into something more severe. Right, right. Uh uh this episode of uh Security Now brought to you by Meter , the company Building Better Networks. Talk about severe . If you're a network engineer, you know you are facing severe constraints. Leg acy providers, inflexible pricing, IT resource constraints stretching you thin, complex deployments across fragmented tools. It's a wonder anything works. You're mission critical to the business, but you're working with infrastructure that just wasn't built for today's demands. And to be fair, I mean no one anticipated how much bandwidth we'd need, how much bandwidth we'd be using. I mean, it's it's been an explosion it's been great but you need your hardware to your network stack to keep up and that's why businesses are switching to meter this is brand new, cre ated by two network engineers who feel your pain, who said there's got to be a better way. Meter delivers full stack networking infrastructure for wired and wireless and cellular that,'s built, specifically built for performance and scalability. And I would add a third term to that, reliability, right ? And they know that the way to get there is to do the whole stack. So Meter designs the hardware, they write the firmware, they build the software, they manage deployments, they even provide support after the deployment . Meter offers everything. I mean, even down to ISP procurement. They cover security and routing and switching, all the things you need, wireless, firewall, cellular, power. You know, a lot of times we forget how important power is to the reliability of this whole thing. Not meter, because they've been there. They know it. They feel your pain. They cover DNS security, VPNs, SD-WAN, multi-site workflows, all in a single solution. I had a great conversation with the meter engineers, and they were talking about, well, you know, one of the real pain points they see a lot is a company acquires another company. Now you've got two heterogeneous systems that may not interoperate well , and then throw in a hundred thousand square foot warehouse with wireless that works in one corner but not the other, and never can get back to the home office. And you can see why you need meter. Meter's single integrated networking stack just works in all of those hostile environments from major hospitals, branch offices, those huge warehouses, even large campuses, even data centers. You know who uses meter? Reddit . That's pretty good. I mean, that's a challenging environment. Here's another one: the assistant director of uh technology for Webb School of Knoxville said we had more than twenty games on our campus between our two facilities. Each of the twenty games was streamed via wired and wireless connections. The event went off without a hitch. He says we could never have done this before. Meter redesign our network. With meter, you get a single partner for all your connectivity needs. That's nice. One phone number to call from first sight survey to ongoing support without the complexity of managing multiple providers or multiple tools, Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your IT team and give you deep control and visibility. Reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online. Meter is built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow. I know tomorrow you're going to say, what was the name of that? We need that. What was the name of that that Leo was talking about? Remember it. Meter . Thanks to Meter so much for supporting SecurityNow. And go right now to meter.com slash security now and book a demo. That's M-E-T-E-R .com slash security now. Book a demo. This is networking done right. This is what you need. Meter.com slash security now . Uh 15 of the Firefox CVEs were low. 18 were mod erate, 13 were high, at least of those. At least that's according to Jokin Boken. So on the YouTube. So and I realized that the proper response uh to the guy in the club is listen to what the Mozilla guy is saying. Yeah. He is saying this is significant. Yeah. You know, this wasn't this wasn't dust that was found. Yeah. You know, they were like, whoa. So and and that number is huge. Two hundred and seventy-one is mind boggling. But it but if thirteen were high, this is from version one forty nine to one fifty. This is this is huge . Yeah. Anyway, let's talk about it. And just one package. We're talking about the I mean all think of all the software in the industry. Think of think of um how how minut ely Firefox has been curated and developed over time, how much scrutiny it's received, and even so AI found what people could not. Now imagine the typical software that's just thrown together and out the door. Think about Windows, how many hundreds of millions of lines of code. Well, and how many bugs they know about and don't and like, yeah, remember, didn't they ship famously seven with like 10,000 or 20,000 like known bugs? Like, what? How does it even get off the ground ? Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's it's it's a revolution. Okay, so exactly, Steve. Yeah. As I noted several times last week, my original working title uh for last week's podcast was Mythos, Marketing, or Mayhem . But once I'd assembled and examined all the data, I realized that leaving the question to the, you know, leaving the question or the answer to the question that that title implied up in the air would be wrong because there's no way really after looking at the facts and just with no bias there's no way that mythos was only marketing we. We had evidence of it. So uh, you know, I acknowledged also that it it was certainly also marketing, but it was also far more, far more than only that. And I think that 's where people get confused, is they just mistrust people's motives to such a degree these days that it's like, oh, but but again, it could be both. And it was, it happens that anthropic use this for marketing, but I'm gonna make the point at the end of the podcast, thank God, because it broke out. That's the difference, and that this breakout is what we're talking about today. I titled today's podcast, yes, exactly, because last Thursday, two days after, as I said at the top of the show, two days after our what mythos means podcast was delivered, an incredibly signific ant group of industry veterans who pretty much comprise a who's who of the cybersecurity industry all weighed in with a formal emergency wake-up call for the entire cybersecurity world. The organizer and publisher was a group calling themselves the Cloud Security Alliance. And I have a link to the most recent version of their 23-page paper in the show notes. Uh, they titled it the AI Vulnerability Storm building a mythos ready security program . So the paper enumerates its sixteen primary contributing authors because this is important for appreciating the weight of the paper's stated concerns, I'm going to share them briefly. They are Jen Easterly, CEO of the RSA Conference and former director of C ISA , Bruce Schneier, who we all know, renowned cryptographer, current head uh or chief of security architecture at Inrupt, and fellow and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. Chris Inglis, the White House's former national cyber director. Phil Venables, ballistic ventures, formal he is formerly the CISO of Google Cloud, Heather Adkins, current CISO of Google, Rob Joyce, the NSA's former cybersecurity director, Sonel Yu, the CTO of Gnostic and former Chief Security Scientist for Bank of America, Katie Masuris, the founder and CEO of Luta Security, John N. Stewart, Talons Venture, and former CSTO for Cisco, J ames Line, CEO of the SANS Security Institute, Dave Lewis, Global Advisory CISO for OnePassword, Maxim Kowalski, Managing Director of A I Security COE for Consortium Networks, Jim Revis and John Yo, who are the CEO and CSO respectively of that cloud security alliance, Joshua Sachs, CTO and co-founder at Security Superintelligence Labs, former AI and Lama Security Head at Meta, and finally Rami Husani, CCSO for none other than Cloudflare . So in it okay, so as I said, the the the the who's who in addition to those primary contributing authors, the paper's content was also reviewed by a list of CISOs that pretty much includes everyone else. I'm not gonna read them since there are too many of them, but I reproduced that page from the report in the show notes so you can just see it. I mean, it is like there's anybody who I didn't just read, uh former head of security for Netflix, uh uh CISO for Brave Technology . Uh you know, I mean uh uh global field CISO for fast ly . Um you know your eye just drops on any of them. I mean so you know everybody basically under stood what mythos meant. Okay, so we've clearly established the provenance of this document. So I want to first share the executive summary overview, then the key takeaways for CISOs, followed by their brief summary of why mythos is so important. Much of this will sound exactly like I did last week, two days before this was published, which is of course why I immodestly titled today's podcast, Yes, Exactly. This amazing group of experts even use some of the same phrases that I used, given the impossible to exaggerate significance of mythos and the successor systems that are sure to follow, and not only philanthropic, but I get it. As I said last week, they're just first . But they were the one that broke through. And breaking through is what we really needed for our industry to get the wake-up call it needs. So I think it's crucial for the listeners of this podcast to appreciate that it's not just me with a lone opinion here . Um, okay, so the authors of the executive summary set it up as a sort of topical QA. They wrote, What happened? Answered AI as demonstrated by anthropics mythos. So again, noted that even they didn't didn't re you know fall you know to their knees in front of mythos. They're saying AI as demonstrated by anthropics mythos has significantly increased the likelihood of attackers discovering new vulnerabilities, creating new exploits, and using them in complex automated attacks at scale, while AI also increases the speed of patch development and reduces defects in new software, defenders still face a heavier relative burden due to the inherent limitations of patching. Attackers gain asymmetric benefits. And I that's what I referred to last week when I was talking about the existing installed base of software that has n't had the the opportunity to be screened through AI. It's already deployed, it's in devices and appliances, and many of it has been forgotten , but not by the attackers who want to use it to get in. So they asked the question, how is this different from the status quo? And answered, in the near term, security organizations will likely be overwhelmed by the need to apply patches and respond to AI discovered vulnerabilities, exploits, and autonomous attacks . What to do now to deal with the current risk spike ? Adjust risk calculations and reorient security program resources for increasing volume of patches , decreasing time to patch, and more persistent and complex attacks. Focus on the basics and harden your environment further. Segmentation, egress filtering, multifactor authentication, and defense in depth breadth all increase the difficulty for attackers . What do we believe will happen next? The storm of vulnerability disclosures from Project Glasswing is the first of many large waves of AI discovered vulnerabilities that may occur in rapid sequence. The capabilities seen in mythos will quickly become more widely available, dramatically increasing the number and frequency of complex novel attacks organizations will face. And finally, what else should start now to be re should should start now to be ready for the next waves? Prioritize robust dependency management to reduce vulnerabilities in third-party and open source components. Enforce automated security assessments consistently in your development process, including using LLM powered agents to find vulnerabilities before attackers do. Introduce AI agents to the cyber workforce across the board, enabling defenders to match attackers speed and begin closing the gap. Reevaluate your risk tolerance for operational downtime caused by vulnerability remediation to account for shorter adversary timelines, update governance for more efficient vendor onboarding and increase headcount to facilitate a faster cycle deployment of new AI based defens es. As an industry, we need to strengthen our coalition's cooperation and coordination . Okay, so I think it should be clear from these executive summary bullet points that the cybersecurity industry's posture on mythos is that there is less than no time to waste. This is not the time to adopt a wait and see posture and to be reactive to events. By the time a reaction is indicated, it will be too late. Despite these clear alarms being run by many security being rung, the alarms being rung by many security professionals who have no profit stake in any of this being true, inertia being what it is, many organizations will nevertheless wait to see if anything really happens. For what it's worth, I did not wait. Although GRC's border security has always been as strong as I've been able to make it. As I've mentioned before, I did have two deliberately exposed SSH servers listening for connections from any U.S. domestic IP. Foreign IPs have always been hard blocked. I'm referring to them now in the past tense because after Mythos , they're already shut down. I've used those SSH links to allow me to deal with the rare IP changes in my two Cox cable connections. An SSH session allows me to update the firewall filters that block all other connections from anywhere other than my two remote work locations. Even though those SSH servers are both using the strong est multi-factor identity identity authentication available. That might not matter if some bypass vulnerability is found. I don't need those SSH servers as much as I need security. So I'm gonna take a wait and see approach in the opposite direction, rather than waiting to see whether a problem is found and then hoping I get the ne ws quickly enough, I'm gonna assume that someone using Mythos might discover something unforeseen in the SSH server software I'm using. So I'm gonna wait and see about that before I feel safe to poke my head out again. And in fact, I may drop SSH complet ely with its inherently open ports altogether and come up with an affirmatively more secure solution. Leo, like you were talking about using tail scale in order to get into your to your uh inside, because tail scale is able to do NAT penetration, in which case you don't have to have any open ports. Yeah. So that's what I use, and it's great. I love it. Yep. So this wonderful call to action paper next offers some key takeaways for CISOs. Here's what the paper's authors recommend CISOs to consider . Use LLM based vulnerability discovery and remediation capabil ities. They said, unlike defensive AI technologies, LLM-based vulnerability discovery capabilities are already mature and could be used to your advantage. Start immediately by asking an agent for a security review of any code and build towards a vulnerops capability. Update your risk metrics. With the shifting landscape, many of your metrics and risk assessments may be outdated and could affect business reporting. Consider how to update these and communicate the challenge with stakeholders . Accelerate your team by the use of coding agents. And you got you were just talking about this on MacBook on Mac Mac Break Weekly, how some group at Apple the Siri group is being sent to learn how to vibe code to almost almost two hundred of them. Because I guess they weren't they didn't do they didn't take it seriously. Take it seriously. They didn't realize what the benefits were. So these these guys are saying of to CISOs, accelerate your team by the use of coding agents, while defensive AI technologies are lagging behind offensive ones, agents can already accelerate human action across the board from incident response to GRC . Encourage and require your team to use these agents to accelerate their capabilities. Triage and test patches, red team your environment, automate audit data collection, and accelerate security operations over In the same week and have playbooks in place for high level critical incidents. I mean, these guys are literally predicting a storm is coming. Examine how to automate remediation capabilities to the degree possible . Verify and enable mitigating controls such as segmentation, egress filtering, zero trust architectures, fishing resistant multifactor authentication, and secrets rotation to limit impact when exploit exploitation occurs. The supply chain will be affected. Increase focus on the basics. The basics remain valid and can be prioritized for risks that cannot otherwise be mitigated. Segmentation, patching known vulnerabilities, identify and act identity and access management and defense in depth and breadth all increase the difficulty for attackers. To lower latent risk, expanding these efforts while there is time is prudent. In other words, do it now before it's too l ate. They said we cannot outwork we cannot outwork machine speed threats, reprioritize, automate, and prepare for burnout. The cadence and volume of vulnerability disclosures will exceed anything we have experienced before. I mean, they're they're literally saying, understand ever ybody, bad guys, China and Russia and North Korea, they're gonna get this capability and they are gonna come at us hard. They wrote the cadence and volume of vulnerability disclosures will exceed anything we have experienced before. Consider how you manage current priorities and request additional headcount and budget for reserve capacity to ex avoidhausting available resources or potentially burning out existing staff . This in parallel with adoption of coding agents, reprioritization, putting more automation in place and helping your team through career uncertainties and upskilling challenges. Yikes . Evolve to a mythos ready security program . Mythos, they wrote, is likely one of many changes coming to cybersecurity risk. If not already underway, seriously consider incorporating Mythos Build collective defense now. Attackers are already operate already operate as syndicates , crowdsourcing, sharing tools, and moving as a collective. Engage now with sector coordinating groups, ISACs, CERTs, and standards bodies to share threat intelligence, coordinate response, and produce sec tor specific guidance for this moment. Defenders must do the same and leverage our coordinating groups, especially when considering organiz ations that fall below the cyber poverty line, as introduced by Wendy Nad her. So just a pause, a little over three years ago, back in 2023, Cisco's uh CISO, Wendy Nad her, articulated a concept she termed the cyber poverty line. It was the point below which an organization cannot afford to invest in the minimum required security to remain safe on the internet . So like you you do need to invest in security. Um the bottom of page 17 of the show notes uh duplicates a breathtaking chart from the very cool and someone unnerving website zero day clock .com, you know, Z-E-R-O-D-A-Y-C-L-O-C-K dot com. The chart shows how the vulnerability versus exploit race has radically changed over just the past eight years. Eight years at the bottom of page 17, a beautiful chart. Eight years ago in 201 8 , the average TTE time to exploit was 2.3 years. In other words, just eight years ago, on average, there was a 2.3 year gap between the public disclosure of a security vulnerability in a CVE and its confirmed use in an attack exploit. Two point three years. Wow, we had a lot of time back in the day. We did. Nothing more. Look at this chart, Leo, at the bottom of page 17. How many days now do we have in a zero day? Well, watch how how this happens. The next year in 2019, that exploitation gap had dropped from 2.3 to 1.9 years. In 2020, a year later, it was down to 1.3 years to exploit. Twenty twenty-one averaged ten point eight months from CVE publication to exploitation. A year later, 2022 dropped that 10.8 months down to 9.7 . The next month, 4.9 . I mean sorry, the next year, 2023, was down to 4.9 months. 2024, just two years ago , we were down to 56 days. Last year, 23.2 days. And shockingly, so far this year, we are seeing exploits appear an average of 10 hours after their CVE vulnerabilities have been published. That's AI, right? I mean, that's got to be AI. That is that is and we've been talking about this on the podcast mostly theoretically because it was obvious it was gonna happen. Bad guys are sitting waiting for new vulnerabilities to be published and they instantly jump on them. Ten hours. And so so I mean, there is just no time. As the as the writers of this paper said , humans cannot outperform machine driven attacks. It can't, it won't, it doesn't happen. So from think about that, eight years, Leo, gone from 2.3 years to 10 hours. So everybody should check out the zero dayclock.com. It's got this chart and a bunch of others where these sorts of stats are are being maintained and it is breathtaking. Okay, so next I'm gonna share just the brief introduction that these cybersecurity industry expert authors wrote for the paper, but Leo, let's first take our final break. Good think ing . Thank you for remembering, Steve. Uh final break and then the final results to yes , exactly . That graph , wow, that says it all, I think. I mean, unbelievable . Um, our show today brought to you, we'll get back to it in just a moment. I know you the thrilling and gripping conclusion. But first, a word from our sponsor, Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. The potential rewards of AI, as you can see, uh every day, too great to ignore. So are the risks. And now I'm not just talking about this, you know, instant vulnerability uh invention, but the risks of the loss of sensitive data through accidental exfiltration by your own staff, by your own team using the AI. And then there are, of course, attacks against enterprise-managed AI. And then there is the obvious risk of generative AI being used by threat actors, helping them to rapidly create phishing lures, write malicious code. Look at this 10 hours. Uh automate data extraction, all kinds of tools, and they do it fast and they do it at scale . So let's talk about that first issue of accidentally uh exfiltrating information. There are 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked to AI applications last year. I bet that number doubled this year around April 15th when we were all finishing our taxes and I bet your employees thought, you know, may I just run this by uh uh chat GPT just to see what it thinks. And of course, what's in your social, your uh your uh tax return? Everything a bad guy needs. Name, address, birth date, social, everything. ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations last year . And that's the inadvertent stuff. That's not even malactors. That's that's just people doing their thing. It really is time to rethink your organization's use of public and private AI. Check out what Civa, the Director of Security and Infrastructure at Zwara, says about using Zscaler to prevent AI attacks. With Zscaler being in line in a security protection strategy, it helps us monitor all the traffic. So even if a bad actor were to use AI, because we have a tight security framework around our endpoint helps us proactively prevent that activity from happening. AI is tremendous in terms of its opportunities, but it also brings in challenges. We're confident that Zscale is gonna help us ensure that we're not slowed down by security challenges, but continue to take advantage of all the advancements. Thanks, Siva. With Zscaler Zero Trust Plus AI . You can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across the business. Their zero trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI-rel ated data loss, protects against these AI attacks we've been talking about, and guarantees greater productivity and compliance. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. O to yourself. That's zscaler.com slash security. We thank him so much for the support. And security now . And uh Steve Gibson . All right. On we go . Oh Steve, I think you're muted again. Did it again. I what didn't want you to hear me typing. So no problem. Okay, thank you. Okay, so uh the brief introduction that these cybersecurity industry expert authors wrote for the paper. They explain and and I'll well I'm gonna point our listeners and our list are to recommend that they point their bosses. Anybody who doesn't understand this the the paper was written for the C suite guys to to understand and that's why it's got the who's who uh behind it. So they wrote many of our assumptions about the capabilities of AI in vulnerability research, exploitation, and autonomous attacks may be outdated. Throughout 2025 and into 2026, we've seen continuous examples of increasing capabilities, both in research and in actual in the wild attacks. AI-driven vulnerability discovery and exploitation has been accelerating for over a year . Anthropics Claude Mythos preview represents a step change in that trajectory. Autonomously finding thousands of critical vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser, generating working exploits without human guidance, and empowering autonomous attack orchestration all at a speed and scale that outpaces any prior capability. The asymmetry this creates is structural. Where's the cost and skill floor for discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities faster than organizations can patch them? This is what I was talking about last week when I said, you know, now script kiddies can be expert attackers and exploiters because you just ask AI for some attacks. The window between discovery and weaponization has collapsed to ours. Attackers gained dis proportionate benefit and current patch cycles, response processes, and risk metrics were not built for this environment. While many of these capabilities predate this model, mythos class capabilities do represent a step change and will proliferate, meaning anthropic is only first, they're not the last. The organiz ations that respond well will be those that build the muscle now, the processes, the tooling, and a culture willing to adopt AI as a core part of how security gets done. The adaptability will help determine who meets the next wave on their own terms. This moment requires reprioritiz ing resources, reviewing risk levels and controls, and leveraging AI where feasible. At the time of this writing, most AI defensive controls and approaches are not yet mature. That said, AI attacker technology may be used for defense purposes, and coding agents will help. Okay, and to finally place all this into context, I want to share appendix A of their paper, which they titled Historical Precedent, uh Precedent, meaning where we came from. Because this will sort of help everybody to put this in context. They said this all began with the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge, a landmark competition organized by DARPA in 2016, so a decade ago, that demonstrated the potential of fully automated cybersecurity systems. Teams developed autonomous platforms capable of identifying, exploiting, and patching software vulnerabilities in real time without human intervention. The challenge highlighted a shift toward machine speed cyber defense, showing how automation and artificial intelligence could significantly enhance vulnerabil ity management and incident response while also raising important questions about trust control and the future role of human operators in cybersecurity, meaning humans are going to be obsolete. By mid-2025 , Expo, an autonomous offensive uh offensive uh security company, topped the Hacker One leaderboard . The DARPA AI Cyber Challenge found fifty-four vulnerabilities in four hours of compute. Google's big sleep discovered real zero days in open source . Anthrop ic was used to automate full attack chains from reconnaissance through exfiltration, and open source tools such as Raptor proved autonomous vulnerability research is available to anyone able to use an agent. In September 25, Heather Adkins, the CISO for Google, and Gaddy Evron, the CEO of Gnostic, published a warning, okay, September 2025. They published a warning that attackers were racing toward a singularity moment with autonomous vulnerability discovery and exploitation roughly six months away. Wow. Well, that's impressive. Their timing was exactly correct. That was six months ago. In February 20 26, Anthropic used Claude Opus 4.6 . Using Claude Opus 4.6 reported more than 500 high severity vulnerabilities in open source software. IELT, remember AI SLE, IEL found 12 open SSL zero days, including a CVSS 9.8 vulnerability dating back to nineteen ninety-eight. Linux kernel maintainers saw vulnerability reports climb from two to ten per week, largely hallucinated at first , but that changed rapidly. The volume has held steady, but the reports are now all verified as real bugs. The curl project, which originally discontinued its bug bounty program because it was drowning in hallucinated vulnerability reports AI slop last week echoed the observation from the Linux team reporting an increasing number of AI supported high quality security incidents. Sysdig documented an AI based attack that reached admin level access in eight minutes. This week, Gambit released a report on the AI led compromise of Mexican government infrastructure originally reported in February. And actually, I I saw that and skipped over reporting that due to show length. But briefly, an attacker used a combination of both chat GPT and Claude to attack, rapidly penetrate, inventory, and exfiltrate a much larger amount of data from the Mexican government than would have ever been possible without the aid of AI automation. He used an AI automated based attack. So they end their historical timeline by telling us about the zero day clock writing in March, uh Sergev Epp and others introduced the zero day clock, visually demonstrating the disappearing time to exploit development, demonstrating the drastic fall in time to exploitation de It's worth noting that the historical collapse in time to exploit has not yet produced a proportional increase in the impact of exploitation. Many of the most consequential incidents of recent years involved credential abuse, social engineering, or supply chain compromise rather than zero days. The zero day clock trend is a leading indicator of where attacker capability is heading, not a direct measure of current damage. So it's predicting what's going to happen shortly . The AI driven. Okay, so then the AI-driven security research company, IL, AI S L E. Um, remember that we talked about them at the time. They found the problems in OpenSSL. They responded a little disgruntled themselves, understandably, to all of the mythos buzz. And so it was in February uh that we reported on them finding those 15 vulnerabilities in OpenSSL, 12 of which entirely composed a major update to OpenSS L . And as we know, this paper briefly mentioned them in passing. They're grumbling somewhat, saying that they were able to reproduce anthropic results themselves without the mythical mythos . They wrote, and I have a link to them uh to their report in the show notes , they said, we took, this is aisle, we took the specific vulnerabilities anthropic showcases in their announcement, isolated the relevant code, and ran them through Mythos's flagship free BSD exploit, including one with only 3.6 billion active parameters costing um . 11 dollars per million tokens. A 5.1 billion active token open model recovered the core chain of the 27-year-old open BSD bug. And on a basic security reason ing task, small open models outperformed most frontier models from every major lab. The capability rankings reshuffled completely across tasks. There is no stable best model across cybersecurity tasks. The capability frontier is jagged. In other words, they're just saying: hold on here, you know, we've got our own small cheap mod els that we are able to deploy that do the same thing as Mythos . Um and I don't doubt what IEL that IL did what they claimed . Um, although it admittedly, there's much they didn't say. For example, even with isolated code, confirming an already known problem feels different from making brand new discoveries , although I know in theory it should, there should be no different. We also don't know how autonomous their system was. That was one of the main points that Anthropic has been making about myt hos is that you just ask it pretty please to attack somebody, and it's able to. Um, and it's only natural for IELT, a commercial enterprise whose specific and narrow focus is to offer commercial vulnerability discovering services to enterprise, to be somewhat miffed over all the breathless industry and media coverage mythos is generated . They should be celebrating their own systems if they're able to meaningfully compete with Mythos ' outcome for far less money. As I said, once the desk the the dust has settled, it's gonna all come down to who can do the most with the fewest resources. So if if IL's got some bunch of tricks up their sleeve that allows them to offer these services much less expensively, far more economically, then I say that's great. Bravo. However, everyone who's been paying attention knows that what the cybersecurity industry most needs right now , this instant, without delay, is a swift kick in the pants. This Security Now podcast informed its listeners of IELTS AI-driven vulnerability discovery news back in February. It's one of the reasons that anthropics claims for myt hos made so much sense to us, right? Because like we saw this coming, you know, this made sense. But IEL did not break through in February. Mythos Even looking at IELTS results with OpenSSL from February, that the next stage of AI-driven rapid vulnerability discovery and exploitation is here now. And that as all of these expert also agreed, we're not ready for it. So I'm all for the hype this industry is able to muster if it will help to instill, some much needed fear and action from an industry which appears to have become far too comfortable with the status quo. You know, as I said at the top and a couple times, let's turn this. L'ets have another Y2K event that never happens. Not because it isn't real, but because it is. And everyone who needed to who needed to unwho needed to under stand and then took action to prevent the apocalypse from ever happening when everything rolled over to the year 2000. Um, anyway, as I said, I've created two GRC shortcut links to this very significant paper to make it even easier for our listeners to get to it. You can either go to grc.sc slash mythos , m- t-h-H-O-S, which everyone should be able to remember, and that'll just bounce you over to the PDF or this this week's episode number, GRC dot S C slash one zero seven five. Uh that'll do the same thing. Nice. And I think it is very clear that the I mean I I I get it that when we're talking about increasing headcount and reshuffling priorities and and all this, I mean, these are expensive things to ask for a problem that hasn't yet manifested. The problem is by the time it does, it could be too late. It's like waiting to be expensive. Yes, it's like waiting to see what you know, like if the elevators stop running on January 1st of the year 2000. Like I'd rather not get stuck in an elevator. Thank you very much. Okay. Now here's the question. Models are going to continue to get better. I think there's no doubt about that. There was some question a a year ago, maybe that maybe we'd hit a plateau and models weren't getting better fast. Uh, I think we all see that that's and we're we're learning how to use this new thing. Yeah. Like the notion of parallel agents and a collection a collection of of uh of different capabilities that are brought in. Right. So yeah, so we're learning basically how to ask. So presumably the 271 bugs we found in Firefox this time , uh, next time we might find more. We might find more again as models get better. We might find more again. Is there a point where software just becomes perfect and there are no more bugs? Or I think we're getting yeah. I think there is. It software is math. Math is 100% predictable. Right. You know, there's there's there's no random number generator that like like there is in AI . There's no there's no random number generator in our software. You know, it is deterministic. And I hold that if that something that doesn't get lost in the details, basically humans have created software that is too complex for them to hold in their head. Right. That that's what's happened is we don't understand our own creation, but AI can be scaled to be able to understand, you know, and I use understand in air quotes. I know it's not conscious, it's not actually understanding, but but but to weave through all the combinatorial ins and outs. And and um God, who was it? Um there was another person who I just saw. I think it might have been in an email feedback. Somebody else. Oh, it was one of our listeners. I I I'll share it next week. It was one of our listeners who has been maintaining a package that is exposed to the internet and it involves sequel, and he was curious, so he aimed claude code at the software that he wrote and it found a vulnerability that astonished him. And he said it wasn't super critical because it only blah blah blah blah blah. You know, there were lots of ways that you had to have it, but he was amazed by what it found in his own code. And so he stood there thinking, My God, did it is this true? And then he actually, oh, he didn't want to upset it it by asking for an exploit. So he he wrote the exploit himself . Actually Glenn Fleischmann on Sunday was reporting something very similar. He's had uh web facing or internet facing a, tool running for I think he said like 20 years, a long time. It's just a little thing that he runs. It's some sort of a book search or something. And uh he said he, you know, fired uh Claude Code at it. It found uh bugs that had been running for twenty years no one's seen, he hadn't seen, uh that he was able to fix. I mean, I think that w I think you nailed it, which is that it's gotten impossible for us as human beings to make perfect software. But this is a machine. It is it is tireless. It is it doesn't make the same kinds of mistakes. And use chess, fall back to chess again. You know, uh super chess grandmasters are able to look at a board and see things in it I can't even begin to describe. Right. They they were able to hold their own for a long time no more. No. That's gone. It's no longer even close. And that that suggests that now we have we have computers that are able to look at the same thing. Again, there's no no one's rolling dice in chess. It is deter a term a deterministic board game and they can take us down now. Meanwhile, I've been uh working on my firmware. Let me just help me, Obi-Wan. Help me, Obi-Wan. Just gonna see if it's listening. Help me, Obi-Wan. Still working on it. It's a very it's a thorny problem we're we're working on here. But uh we are you know we're okay. Uh you're a little younger than I am. You're in your late 60s. I'm now 7 1. No, I'm almost 70. I'll be 70 in November. I'm not so far behind. Oh, okay. Steve. So we're still gonna be here in another 10 years. I hope so. God will. The world is gonna be different. I know, and I love that. I thought I was gonna miss the apocalypse. It's gonna happen so fast. That the what's so cool is there's so much money behind software development that there will be a huge push to make this happen. Oh yeah. And the other thing that's encouraging is this uh these tools are getting more efficient, uh, which means uh they're taking less hardware to do more, which means not only will they improve , but we they will be more accessible. Yeah they will be less expensive. I'm I'm convinced cloud crap is gonna go away. We're gonna have local running models because we'll have little software you know AI boxes in our homes that are the that we talk to and they're able to do what we want. Yep. Yep. That's what I'm working on right now. That's exactly it. I'm trying to make uh because I'm so dissatisfied with Alexa and Siri and all these other uh assistants, I'm trying to make an assistant that works the same way but is local and knows me and has memory and all of that stuff. And we're getting I'm getting closer than I ever thought I would. And I think, you know, by the time uh and here's the key, Leo. You are having fun. Oh, and it's so it's the best game ever. You are coding. It's similar. I mean, I still love coding, but coding is more like hand hand building furniture. Leo, it it is modern coding. This is what coding is gonna become. People are gonna be removed from the code generating loop. And we and we will be directing AI to write our code. Yes. And this is me who's still coding in in assembly language. I'm saying it's over, folks. People are going to be taken out. Wow. And you know what? Maybe that's the right thing because we had our time. Yeah, computers are gonna do a better job of this. This is their native tongue. You know? Uh Steve Gibson does such a good job. I'm so glad we have you to rely on. And uh let's let's hope we get to keep doing this for many, many more years to come. You'll find him at grc.com, the Gibson Research Corporation. That's where you'll find SpinWrite, the world's best mass storage maintenance, performance enhancing and recovery tool. If you've got mass storage, you gotta have spin right. Get cur get the current version. 6.1 is there. Free upgrades for anybody who's ever bought it in the past. If you haven't bought it, buy it now, get on get on the train. Uh he also has something brand new that he wrote that's fantastic, the DNS Benchmark Pro that lets you figure out what the best DNS provider would be for your particular situation. That's where you live. It's less than ten bucks. It matters where you live. Uh, all of that at GRC.com. While you're there, sign up for his newsletters. He has two of them. One is a product announcement newsletter that you'll never get anything from. And because he works very uh carefully. Methodically. Methodically. Uh the other though, you will get a weekly uh email, the show notes, uh sometimes from the wrong year, most of the time from the right ear. No, it's always the correct show notes. It's just the year that it says it's from is is different. Uh and those come out, you know, usually on a Sunday before uh the show on Tuesday or thereabouts. So uh sign up there at grc.com slash email. You're actually what you're really doing, that form there is just to whitelist your email so you can send him pictures of the week and comments and suggestions and stuff. You do have to do that because his he doesn't want any spam. It's a very effective system. He's come up with. Let's see, what else? Oh, we have copies of the show at our website, twit.tv slash sn . Uh there's also a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client. However, you do it, I don't think you want to miss a single episode of this show. And if you're one of those folks who wants the most recent version of this show, you can actually watch us do it live Tuesdays, right after Mac Break Weekly. That's 1:30 Pacific, 4:30 E astern, 2030 UTC. Club members get to watch in the club twit Discord. How nice. Um the rest of you can watch on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Kick. You take your pick. Um, so you can watch live if you want. If you're not a club member, do join the club. Very important to us to keep doing what we're doing. Advertising does not cover all of our expenses , barely covers 70% . Uh, the club makes up the difference. And without you, we really wouldn't be able to do what we're doing. So please think about it. If you can afford it, 10 bucks a month, you get ad-free versions of all the shows, you get access to the Discord, which is a great place. Smart people, really fun to hang out. You get special programming just for club members. We really need you now more than ever. Twit.tv slash club Twit. Steve, have a wonderful week. And we'll do. See you next time. I'll be here next Tuesday. Bye. Hello, everybody. Leo Laporte here. You know what a great gift would be, whether for the holidays or at just any time, a birthday, a membership in club TWIT. If you have a TWIT listener in your family, somebody who enjoys our programming, and you want to give them a nice gift and support what we do, visit twit.tv slash clubtwit. Dell really appreciate it and so will we. Thank you. Twit.tv slash clubtwit. Security now