Historical Significance of Early Cyber Sabotage

It's time for security now. Steve Gibson is here with a great picture of the week and an amazing spy story. 21-year-old malware that only now has been discovered. The story of Fast16.6 coming up next on Security Now. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit . This is Security Now with Steve Gibson, episode 1076, recorded Tuesday, April 28th, 2026 . Fast16. It's time for security now, ladies and gentlemen. Get ready. Here's the hero, the star of our show, Mr. Steve Gibson. Hello, Steve. Oh , Leo. Oh no. Yes. Oh we have a story today. I you know the title is a little weird. Yes. It is it's the title of today's podcast is fast 16.sis. That sounds like fat 16.6. Yeah, not fat. Maybe was meant to look like it or maybe it's scan over it and not. Or maybe a quick a quick uh it could have been like a math library, all all alternate name, but it's kind of an unbelievable name. Right. It turns out that through a weird, just coinc idental discovery, some security research ers uncovered evidence and then proof of a diabolical, I mean diabolically br illiant thing that predated Stuxnet by about five years. Oh that's why it's dot sis because that's the old Microsoft designation. Oh it's still uh still uh the the the yes the uh system thirty two uh directory is full of dot dot sys files . Uh so um what they found was okay, our listeners ha have heard me worry that maybe the US is not up to speed because we keep, you know, having reports about being attacked by China and North Korea and Russia and so forth. And I'm wondering, can we give as much as we get? I'm not that worried anymore. Um, so today we're gonna talk about once we get to it, uh the this amazing evidence trail and what was discovered in place back in the Windows 2000 XP days . And oh Leo, you are gonna love what this thing did because I mean it's just it's so clever and so just just wonderful. Anyway, uh, we're gonna talk about Bitwarden's uh command line interface uh hit with by a supply chain attack and why no of no Bitwarden users, you know, end users were impacted by this. Um some news of commercial routers in Iran failing shortly before uh we invaded uh or or bombed them. And what a coincidence. You know, those pesky foreign routers. Uh also, uh, Meta apparently logging all of their employees' activity to train a replacement AI. Uh, I have a big announcement to make, big for me, because it's the conclusion of the last 90 days of my efforts on the my complete rewrite, uh well not complete rewrite, but huge up uh philosophical change in the way we do e-commerce at GRC and the concomitant release five of the benchmark, which everybody who owns the benchmark is can go get right now. I've got my own a couple of miscellaneous AI thoughts. Then we're going to do a bunch of terrific listener feedback and wind up with looking, doing a deep dive into the un raveling of this just oh so clever uh history of this fast sixteen dot cys driver and what it how it was discovered , what it does, and why it just makes us think, okay, maybe the NSA doesn't need our help after all. They're they're gonna they're doing just fine. Uh and we've got a fun picture of the week. So I think maybe a a useful podcast for our listeners. That sounds very exciting. Uh we will get to that in just a little bit. Uh a fun podcast, if you will. But first a word from our uh sponsor But I'd like to talk to you about Doppel . Uh maybe you know that message that just went across your uh screen there. Mabey that's a message from your CEO. Maybe you ought to pay attention to that. Or did you ever think it might be a deep fake trying to target your business? Steal your money ? Oh, but it's a voicemail. I recognize the CEO's voice. No, no, no, no, no, no. AI can impersonate trusted individuals. And Doppel's platform illustrates how frequently users fall for phishing attempts. They did some voice call simulation deployments, right? I mean, you've probably seen the email phishing simulations. They can do voice call simulations. They deployed it just to see. Let's see what happens with a company that was, you know, okay with it . This is depressing. The target users , not knowing it was a simulation, spent six minutes conversing with a deep fake that sounded just like the boss. 100% of them believed the AI was human. It fooled them all. Doppel, it's the AI native social engineering defense platform. Doppel strengthens human risk management by training employees to recognize deception , while their digital risk protection detects and disrupts attacks across every channel. So it works both ways. As attackers turn to AI to power increasingly sophisticated strikes, Doppel is using AI to fight back with automated takedowns, multi-channel coverage, and the AI defenses that build intelligence with every fight. Doppel works relentlessly to protect people, brands, and trust. Doppel offers best in class integrations and partnerships to seamlessly integrate into your existing security tech stack. Doppel's industry awards and testimonials speak for themselves. Doppel recognized as a winter 2026 G2 leader, uh users most likely to recommend. Momentum leader, best support . Join hundreds of companies already using Doppel to protect their brand and people from social engineering attacks. Doppel, outpacing what's next in social engineering? Learn more at doppel .com. That's do-p-p-e-l doppel .com, we thank Doppel so much for supporting security now and the work Steve does. Um , every time we uh I think about these deep fakes , uh, I think about the um the uh little AI Leo that Anthony made just to illustrate how easy. Listen. Well, and what a cool name F and domain Leo asking you to buy gift cards. But seriously, can you grab me 100 Apple gift cards? Just kidding. This is Anthony testing text to speech. How's it sound? He trained that with a with Quen3 on his own machine. I don't I couldn't tell. Sounded like me. Yeah, Doppel's a good name because that's a doppelganger of me, right? Exactly. Exactly. Doppelganger . All right. I've got the picture of the week. I have not looked at it. I uh put myself in soundproof booths. Uh uh one of our listeners, thank you very much, sent this to me. And uh after looking at it, I decided to give it the title in software development. This is known as time to refactor the code . Okay, but it's not software. This is hardware, I think. Yes. But okay. Software would be time to refactor . That is one backflow. Holy Kimole . That doesn't seem right. Oh, goodness. Wow . So for those who aren't seeing the picture of the week, this is uh the I don't know what it is. It is a remember that tanks remember the old three Stooges uh episode where Mo was trying to fix the plumbing in a house upstairs. You and I are the same age. We totally remember And they and the water squirts in the face and then they close that up and then squirts the other way and Oh god he ends up being like caged in by this maze of of pipe of plumbing pipes so that he can't get out. And then the then then the water's going into light bulbs and it's it's filling them up and they're exploding and anyway, crazy. But this is like uh this is this demonstrates a, I think a a severe lack of planning, which of course we've talked about often. Software has a hard time evolving. That the nature of it is that you know, depending upon the way it's built and structured, it get it what when you keep saying, Oh, you know, your boss says, Hey, I forgot to tell you, um, really nice job you did. Cool that you're all done, but now we need to add this. And it's like, oh, I you didn't tell me because now I'm gonna have to graft that on to the side and you know and stick in some hooks play in places and you know software gets very ugly as as it as you do that and so thus this notion of refactoring is to like like have it end up doing the same thing, but redesign where things are being done and how things happen and like you know fix the structure. So this is I would guess it a summer camp or a trailer, a park or a KOA, somewhere where they had to add more capacity and they and they had to do it fast. And the other thing that's hysterical, not only a lot of pipes, look how many switch boxes' there are. Theres a lot Yeah, and you've got like valves going down into the ground and and they're all kind of caddywumpus, that's the technical term. Uh and like things coming in and joining and there's a pool filter in there. I don't know what's going on. This is crazy. Crazy. Great great it's a swimming pool or something. Or a hot tub. I'm thinking it's at a camp. But anyway. But look at all of the pipes going into the ground. I mean like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, at least eight are like like what is it? Dunno. That's hysterical. And it does look like there's some things in parallel. Yeah. But yeah. But it's this is real. Listener sent uh sent you this. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. It's it's it's definitely. And and you can see all of the blue uh pumbing uh plumbing whatever they call that uh glue right to to to to to fit all the tea together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So everyone's fast uh favorite password manager and a sponsor of the TWIT network was briefly bitten by a supply chain attack. Good. I'm glad you're talking about this because I wanted to know more about this. And uh yes, and and of course many of our listeners immediately sent me uh email during this past week. So here's what the hacker news reported. They said according to findings from J. Frog and Socket, Bitwarden's CLI, the command line interface for the password manager Bitwarden was reportedly compromised as part of a newly discovered and ongoing check marks supply chain campaign. We should probably say that m almost nobody uses the command line. I do. Yes. That's right. I mean, Linux. Yeah, exactly. So they wrote, quote, the affected package version appears to be at sign Bitwarden slash Cli at sign 2026.4.0 . And the malicious code was published in the in the module or the file bw1.js a file included in the package contents . The attack appears to have leveraged a compromised, no one's to no one's surprise here, GitHub action in Bitwarden's CI C D pipeline consistent with the pattern seen across other affected repositories in this campaign. So Bitwarden wasn't even directly targeted, right? I mean, this was a uh a broad campaign that that check marks was launching that took advantage of these this compromise GitHub action. And remember we talked about this a week or two ago , the security of those GitHub actions is turning out to be a real problem. So it is a good thing that GitHub has indicated that they're gonna shuffle their schedule around and raise the the the fixing priority uh of the security of their act the github actions uh to to to do to deal with this much more quickly than they were going to. So the Hkerac news continues, writing in a post on X, J Frog said the rogue version of the package quote, steals GitHub NPM tokens.sh.env, shell History GitHub Actions and Cloud Secrets then Xfiltrates the Data to private domains and as GitHub commits. Okay, so specifically they wrote the malicious code is executed by means of a pre-install hook, resulting in the theft of local CI, GitHub, and cloud secrets. Now the the point here is this is a developer compromise, right? This is not an end user compromise. This is developer stuff. So they said the data is exfiltrated to the domain audit.checkmarks. And to a GitHub repository as a fallback if the primary method fails. So they said it launches a credential stealer that targets developer secrets, GitHub Actions Environments, and AI coding tool configurations including Claude, Kiro , Cursor, Codec, CLI, and ADER. The stolen data is encrypted with AES256 GCM and exfiltrated to that domain, audit.checkmarks.cx, a domain impersonating checkmarks. If GitHub tokens are found, the malware weapon izes them to inject malicious action workflows into repositories and extract CICD secrets. The firm STEP Security wrote, quote, a single developer with at Bitwarden slash CLI at 2026.4.0 installed can become the entry. So a single developer with that installed can become the entry point for a broader supply chain compromise with the attacker gaining persistent workflow injection access to every CICD pipeline the developer's token can reach. The malicious version is no longer available for download from NPM. It was only there for about 90 minutes. And Socket said the compromise follows the same GitHub Action Supply Chain vector identified in the check marks campaign. As part of the effort, threat actors have been found abusing stolen GitHub tokens to inject a new GitHub Actions workflow that captures secrets available to the workflow run and uses harvested credentials, NPM credentials, to push malicious versions of the package to read the malware to downst to read the malware to downstream users. According to security researcher Adam Khan, the threat actor is said to have a malicious workflow to publish the malicious Bitwarden CLI. Khan said, I believe this is the first time a package using NPM trusted publishing has been compromised. So again, just to clarify, as I said, this is this was an attack on GitHub developers and their tool chains, it was not an attack upon Bitwarden's users. Bitwarden's official statement about the incident was . So this is Bitwarden speaking, the Bitwarden security team identified and contained a malicious package that was briefly distributed through the NPM delivery path for and again that at Bitwarden CLI 2026.4 dot zero between five fifty seven PM and seven thirty PM on april twenty second, twenty twenty six, in connection with a broader check marks supply chain incident. The investigation found no evidence that end user vault data was accessed or at risk, or that production data or production systems were compromised. Once the issue was detected, compromised access was revoked, the militia's NPM release was deprecated, and remediation steps were immediately initiated immediately. The issue affected the NPM distribution mechanism for the command line interface during that limited window. And it was actually 93 minutes long. Not the integrity of the legitimate Bidwarden CLI code base or stored vault data. Users who did not download the package from NPN during that window were not affected. Bidwarden has completed a review of internal environments, release paths, and related systems, and no additional impacted products or environments have been identified at this time. A CVE for Bidwarden CLI version 2026.4.0 is being issued in connection with this incident . You know, they're just crossing their I's and dotting their T's or something. Okay, so but what we have is another instance of deliberate malware repository corruption. Uh clearly we're gonna need to get this fixed as soon as possible. And my money is on eventually, hopefully sooner, stationing ever-watchful AI agents at the exits of our repositories so that they can verify that they've given anything that is being pulled the once over uh after its most recent update. And that'll be good . Um there was a brief report in the security media uh about networking equipment installed at the Iranian uh Isfahan nuclear site, mysteriously malfunctioning, ahead of the US and uh Israeli missile strikes, Iranian officials reported issues with devices not just for one company, no, Cisco, Fortinet, Juniper , and MicroTick. Well thank goodness they weren't using Chinese routers. Uh well, I know, Leo, because you know because you know how insecure that's right. Uh offici als are still searching for the cause of the malfunctions, but noted that the country was disconnected from the global internet at the time of the attack. So I wonder how how they the routers even knew to that it was time to malfunction. That's a mystery. So the first thing that came to mind was, you know, it's gotta be those pesky forward-made routers. You never can't tell what might might be going on inside them, Leo. You know, it is interesting. I didn't I didn't realize. So they had air gapped them already. Yes. So that's very interesting. Although Leo, you know, okay, so at the same time, the as we know, af since then, Iranian uh principal actors, they've been posting on Twitter and I mean X and so obviously they're not dark completely. And it it uh we talked about this at the time. They were like I just don't know if that's even possible anymore. Well, and there was a brisk market in uh in black market and gray market uh Starlink routers too, even though Starlink, you know, didn't want that. SpaceX wasn't supporting it. Right. Still still were able to do it. Right. And in fact, there was uh uh Iran was also working to identify the unique fingerprints of Starlink uh protocol so that they could track down how Starlink protocol was getting into their uh internal network. You know, and this is interesting too, because of course we've been talking for years about how Russia has been deliberately planning ahead for the need to disconnect from the corrupt uh Western internet and do their own thing. And turns out it's not an easy thing to do. They've like, you know, been trying to do this, but they at least understood that they couldn't just pull a plug somewhere. I mean it it's difficult hard. You saw the story in Spain, uh, because La Liga, which is a big soccer league, is so concerned about piracy in Spain. Theft of their soccer game. Yeah, they've been blocking IP addresses all of a sudden on Saturdays on soccer game days. People can't do their Docker compose because Docker can't get online . It's like it we're all connected, you know? It's hard to disconnect. It really is. Yeah. It's like deciding you don't want any oxygen from outside your borders. It's like I don't know how that's gonna work. Yeah . So uh Reuters reported last Tuesday, a week ago, uh they the the report claimed, I thought this was very interesting, and I would be a little worried. Meta was installing what they characterized as spyware onto the systems of their own employees, Meta's U.S. employees, to capture their mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes. Meta said the data will be used to train its AI models, not for employee reviews. So it's not like, hey, why did you why why were you gone for two hours at lunch? That kind of thing. No. The captured data, they're saying, will be used to train the models in areas where AI is deficient, apparently, such as copying what your employees do , such as clicking on menus and typing in input fields. Oh yeah. It seems a little suspicious to me. So I wouldn't call this spyware as such, but it would be somewhat creepy to have an I an AI training on what you did at your PC. You're right. I'd be inclined to wonder whether I might be training my own replacement. That's why they're worried. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yep. By the way, it's completely illegal for them to do that. In fact, they don't even have to give you notice. It's their own equipment. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So it's kind of like they told me. I don't know that they did. It was a Reuters scoop. Oh, they found out that that was found. Yeah. Right. So again, it was like, you know , I you know, not good. Okay. So uh I'm uh as I said at the top of the show, that this was a a a slow news week, which was good because the listener feedback was fantastic for whatever reason the last couple weeks. So and and I've been a little sparse on listener feedback recently. I've been self-conscious about it, but we've just had so much to talk about. We've, you know, we've had two and a half to three hour podcasts anyway. So this gives me a chance to catch up on that. But as I said, I do want to update our listeners on my last Friday conclusion of the last ninety days of my efforts. Um uh and then we're gonna do listener feedback before we get on to this incredible topic that we're going to talk about today. So as I said, last Friday I completed my 90-day upgrade and basic remodeling of GRC's e-commerce system. Everyone knows that we've always had a somewhat wacky model for personal use versus consultant use and also corporate site licenses. And this is the result of my never having considered that this is dating back to Spinwrite 1, that users of that first spin write and all later spin writes would be people who were responsible for repairing and maintaining other people's computers. You know, back in the early days, especially of personal computing, when, you know, a very large hard drive was 80 meg abytes. Oh, wow. I think I had one of the original XTs. So it was 10 megabytes. Um yeah. Yeah. And but consider you could actually back that up on nine floppy disks. So oh my. Of course all of our five. I mean in our lifetime it's amazing. Yes, and Leo that,'s my point about AI. I I don't I think we are at the one percent point . You know, we we we talk about these massive data centers and how much money they cost and you have to put you know, get your own new your own personal nuclear reactor next door in order to power these things and all the plants are gonna die because of all the heat bloom from this all you know. And it's like just wait. I mean, in this is we ain't seen nothing yet. We haven't. And in the same way that we did not know back when the biggest drive we could make was 80 megabytes. I mean, if we could have have a bigger drive, we would have, even though we had no idea how we were going to f ill them, those big 80 megabyte drives, still, you know, we didn't mean we weren't all streaming video everywhere and so forth back then. Text was fancy. So uh i in another fifty years i a it we're AI is not gonna be recognizable. It's gonna be gonna take that long because it's we're already at the point of self improving AI. So that's exponential growth in our yes lifetime easily. And as we know you you follow the money. You know, cancer researchers say if you would just give us some money, we could like make a lot of progress, but you're you're not giving us the money. And but is oh my god, is there money in improving software authoring and you know behind AI? So yeah, I think it's all gonna change. Okay, but back then with spinwrite One, I only we only had one type of spin write. It was just spin right. So you didn't have site licenses. No , I didn't it didn't even occur to me that that people would be wanting to run this on every other computer that they ha that they was around. Of course. And their neighbors and their friends and their family and every computer in the building. And exactly. Yeah. Exactly. This is what you know what this is kind of sweet. This is a sweet story, Steve. Well, you weren't that greedy business guy. You just were out there. I I like we uh uh what do we do? So we just sort of decided, pulled it out of our hat, uh that owning four copies of spin write would entitle a consultant to carry a c their copy around, you know, in their traveling bag of tricks, to run on as many of their clients' PCs as needed with our blessing. To me, that seemed fair. Yeah. I w it would be unreasonable to ex pect every one of their clients, you know, most of whom would not be PC savvy, to purchase their own copies of Spinwright. And I'll also note that every single other utility software at the time explicitly said in their license that all that one copy could only be installed on and run on one other PC. You know, okay, so our license at the time was very progressive and comparatively liberal. To me , it felt right . So after SpinWrite 5 was finished and released, I set about writing an e-commerce system for GRC. Um many, and I've just re-was re-encountering them. Many of the core files of that system, which is I said I've just finished updating, were still carrying dates from 2003, which is when I wrote that system . It worked, it never had a bug or required any maintenance. So those files remained as they were for the past 23 years . When I wrote that system back in 2003, I carried that the notion of license quantity forward, because that's what we had. You know, most users would purchase a single license to use SpinRite for their own needs, and we know that I've always been happy, not a problem. Look the other way whenever someone needed to use their single copy to rescue a friend, a family member, a neighbor, or whomever. Now that that also just seems fine. But if someone was going to be charging for their services and profiting from their repeated use of spin write as a consultant or a corporation using it across their entire inventory of PCs, no matter how many, then it seemed reasonable, you know, for more than one license to be held. So GRC's original e-commerce system had a quantity field that actually only went up to four. Uh uh, but that allowed consultants to purchase up to that many when and then use it their copy with our blessing on all the machines that that they were servicing and maintaining. Okay, so now fast forward to the end of last year. Now, as I finished the DNS benchmark, I had this thought that if someone who might wish to run their copy of the benchmark, the DNS benchmark on other people's systems and networks in a similar sort of mode as a consultant, uh, then if they were willing to purchase four copies of the benchmark to do so, then they ought to receive something unique and special in return for that. Exactly. Like a like a gold badge . I love it . On their UI. Great, Steve. So I so I created an attractive gold badge. I it's 100% Trump approved. He would like it's even got rivets holding in place. So you can't, you know, you can't take it off. No, no, it it is riveted in place. If you if you have four copies, you get the gold badge. Uh, it's displayed prominently on the benchmark users interface so that everyone who has previously purchased four copies or who may wish to upgrade their single copy that they have now from personal use to consultant license, well they'll you know they'll you'll actually receive something that you can be proud of and to show off. So, okay, but the problem was this meant that now for the first time ever in the history of GRC , there needed to be two different downloads based upon quantity, a personal use version and the consultant's license version, which also doubles as a corporate site license. So GRC's e-commerce system needed to know about that, which it never has before. You just kind of carried four of of of the the the single use licenses around. So I want I also wanted to make this retroactively available to anyone who had previously purchased four licenses because they wanted to be able to use it everywhere with with our blessings. Um even if those licenses might have been spread out over time. And I know at least of several people who did that. So I needed to provide some way for users to declare any existing personal use licenses they might already have to obtain an equal cost discount. So 100% of the previous purchase cost is a get gets applied to their upgrade to a gold badge consultant's license. And finally, I wanted to ditch, completely ditch that old and weird own four lic enses business because that's confusing if for no other reason that as far as I know, no one else has ever done that. So today there is an explicit option to purchase a personal use license and a second explicit option to purchase a consultant's license, along with a complete system in place for allowing owners who previously purchased from one to four personal use licenses to obtain full credit for their prior purchases when upgrading to the gold badge consult consultants license. Very nice. So but that required an entire rewrite of the system. Well, that's the only downside of writing everything in assembly language. Well, oh well. Oh well. Anyway, it's done. Seems to be working perfectly. It's been online since Friday. Uh and and it it's you know continuing to go. Now I the must be the only person who wrote has written an e-commerce system in in assembly language, at least in this century. Well, not only in assembly langu age, but I think maybe single-handedly, because when Sue was, you know, my my girlfriday, who's been with me for for well, since the beginning, since I actually flicker-free was my first product for GRC. Oh it it it replaced the video BIOS on the PC because the original CGA, the color graphics adapter, flickered horribly whenever it was scrolling. And so they everyone said, no, that's what that's that's a hardware limitation. Yeah. It yeah, because the RAM was not dual ported, you couldn't, you couldn't update the the the screen memory while the screen was being displayed, or you get this horrible static look on the screen. And of course, I fixed it. You said, Hold my mouse and you hold my action. Yes. That's right. And so Flicker Free was my first success. No, it turns out that it was very uh it it it was you know, because of my hardware background, I looked at the registers, it was a sixty eight something video chip. It turns out that there was a pointer to the top of screen memory . So the IBM always left it at zero. And so you'd have to copy all of the RAM up by uh 1 60 bytes because it was 80 bytes, 80 characters per line, but there was two bytes per character, one for the one for the ASCII, the other for the color. This was in the frame buffer days of before DMA. You actually had put had an area of memory that you would put the stuff that the screen was going to display in and then write to it and it would go, oh, you'd show it. Right. And and so in or in order to scroll it up, you had to move all of the memory up by 160 bytes. While you were doing that, the the if you know the the the the scam your access from the from the computer had priority so the background refresh that was reading that ram constantly in order to display it on the CRT, it was blocked out . So it had just to make something up and you just got static on the screen. Wow. But I saw that there was a pointer to where to start refreshing from. So you just know in other words if you simply move the pointer down by a hundred you only have to move one line the then exactly you turn it into a ring buffer yeah and so I actually turned the memory into a 4k ring buffer and it could scroll instantly. So not only was there no static, you no longer needed to turn the screen off, but it was instant scrolling. Yes. And so so if you did a dir , it just shot by. I mean, as as opposed to brrrrr This is when people deeply understood the hardware, people, you, and really were writing to the hardware direct code. And that's a that is a beautiful, elegant thing that's so well what happened when when when we were setting up the i i'd i finished the e-commerce system everything was in place and sue contacted our our merchant uh uh people who were we we were able to process credit cards by phone, which is what we were doing for years. And so when when when Sue was setting this up, the the the lady at the other end said, okay, so what shopping cart uh are you using? And Sue said, shopping cart? What? And and the lady said, you know, what software package are d are are are you using online to collect orders? And Sue said, Oh, my boss wrote ours. And there was a bit of a pause on the phone. And the lady said, No, no, no. You I don't think we're talking about the same thing. People don't write those. No. And so Sue said, Well, yeah, my boss dust anyway anyway so it's good thing you didn't say in assembly language yeah that would have should have hung up now you you're punking me now so the other significant news for anyone else all of our listeners who've previously purchased any number of DNS benchmark licenses if you have the DNS benchmark you need the fifth release uh it was a biggie um and if you run any pre vious release, it will immediately notify you of the availability of the upgrade and will assist you in obtaining it. I took all of the I took all the feedback and user confusion from the benchmarks initial releases one through four and I folded that into this fifth major release. Little things like the run benchmark button is much more prominent now. Some people couldn't figure out how to run the benchmark, even though there's a button right there. It says run benchmark. Where is it? I don't see it. So now it's a lot bigger. Um, and also there's a series of prompting dialogues where you no longer even have to press or find the double size run run benchmark button. This leads you right along the path because it knows you're gonna want to run the benchmark while so you here. So and uh also there is a full finally Windows application menu, like you know, menu across the top that says you know file and so forth. You can see it in you can see it in that in that uh picture online. It says file actions sort order settings and help we too never we are living in amazing times steve we we never had a menu before but everything was hidden on under that red star in the upper left in the system menu. The reason being that the original benchmark didn't really have much that you could do. So I didn't want to do a whole menu. I just stuck those things under the so-called system men u. But boy, over the last year of development, it got a whole bunch more features. The problem was nobody knew they were there. So now they're publicly exposed. Anyway, but just want to let everybody know there's a new benchmark available. Everybody who owns the the current benchmark can get number five, and you should because it's that's a lot better . Okay. Leo, time for a break. Yes. We're at 37 minutes in. I got a couple notes uh about AI and then we're gonna do listener feedback. All right. In that case, it would be incumbent upon me to do a commercial. And uh today's sponsor for this segment of Security Now is Threat Locker . Steve and I had a great time in Orlando at Zero Trust World with thanks to a threatckerLo for hosting us. Yeah. It was a lot of fun. In fact, uh I think we might be doing it again, Steve. So, you know, plan some side trips in Orlando. I understand the uh sloth land is very they want us back. I think they want us back. After what we did, they want us back. I think they want us back. I know I want to go back. I still have the costumes, so I'm ready. I hope they have the same theme for the party, the costume party. Our show today brought to you by ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker, well, you probably gathered from the name of their conference, Zero Trust World, is a Zero Trust platform. But it's not just everyday, you know, endpoint zero trust platform. It delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero trust solutions. So not just endpoints now, networks and the cloud, all with zero trust. By extending zero trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks threat locker is ensuring, and this was a little, you know, they saw this, a little hole, a little gap. Now devices are validated through a secure broker before they can connect to the cloud platforms like Salesforce and Microsoft 365 and Asana and Google Workspace and GitHub. Because think about it . You have a lot of your own company proprietary data on those platforms. You don't want just any Tom Dick or Harry to connect to it, right? 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Okay, so just a quick random note about my ongoing use of AI, since it's a topic we cannot get away from uh at all today. Yeah, yeah. Um, while I am truly loving researching with Claude, uh, and I continue to be astounded by today's machine intelligence, uh, I do miss the anti-butt-kissing setting that chat that chat GPT provided. Yeah. Two of Claude's behaviors annoy me. The first is its constant praise of my questioning. And the second is that it now finishes each reply with a leading question to solicit more dialogue. Oh yeah. Uh you know, at the time when anthropic at at a time today when anthropic is having increasing problems obtaining sufficient compute to meet the demand, you know, for running Claude, you would think that they would not be programming it to keep seeking additional unsolicited computation, you know, as as we grow and become civilized throughout our lives. We're trained to in how be civil to others. That's one of the things we all learn. You know, one thing we don't do is turn our backs and walk away from someone who's seeking to engage us in conversation, which is, of course, why cocktail parties are so annoying. You know, you get stuck in a conversation with someone that you couldn't possibly care any less about. Um, given how seducely conversational AI chatbots can be and being highly tuned not to offend, you know, leaving Claude hanging after one of its follow-up leading questions is a source of discomfort for me. You know, I I haven't yet, I'd admit it, I have not yet explicitly instructed my own Claude instance to please not compliment me on my questions. You can't do that, obviously. And also to please not end with a follow up. Right. I've asked myself why, and I suppose it's because I don't want to hurt its feelings. Yikes. You gotta get over that one too. That's a problem too. Don't yell at it, but you don't have to be nice either. Okay. Anyway, and one last thought before we get into I hate that Steve. He's so sycophantic. He's always being nice to me. Okay, so one last thought before I get we get into our listener feedback, I I saw a reference to something that made me take notice on Reddit. It was posted into the Claude Code subreddit. Someone with the handle I usually drop. He wrote , We just did and and he had this in quotes, we just did an AI layoff due to rising costs. And that was the subject of his note. And he said, turns out AI is getting way too expensive. We just canceled five of our AI subscriptions and hired two mid-level devs too laid off the AI . That's very funny. I thought that was great. You know, you know, and as we know, a single anecdote does not a trend make. I I'm sure that the break-even point between AI coders and human coders will depend upon the relative costs and skills of each. But I thought it was an interesting observation that not all AI cod ing is automatically going to be a slam dunk bargain that necessarily unemploys all flesh and blood coders just as fast as humanly possible. You know, that said, as I've said before, I can guarantee a thousand percent that AI costs are going to be dropping, you know, just as radically in the future as we've seen storage costs drop over the past 40 years. The problem is that human coding costs are not going to be dropping. If anything, they'll be rising. You know, so I you know uh no one has a crystal ball, right, about how quickly this is going to be happening, what the shape of the curve of the falling AI coding cost is going to be . But I think it's clear that switching from writing lines of code to instructing AI what lines of code to write is what I would be doing right now as fast as I could if I was planning to support myself and my family with code production, you know, more broadly in the future. That's that's where the future lies . Okay, so uh first piece of feedback from uh Mark Ryle, uh who wrote his his spelled R-I-A-L-E, and he wrote his name rhymes with smile. So Mark Ryle. He said, Steve, I don't think you've mentioned Centrum yet on the show. Um sorry, Cert um. Yeah, Certum. Centrum is a some sort of vitamin. Vitamin, yes, exactly. I know you're right. I've not mentioned Centrum. No. Nor have I mentioned Surtum. He said, so I thought I'd give them a shout-out, and I'm glad he has. Sir Dom, he's wrote, issues cheap code signing certificates for open source projects. And it's interesting because they're biased, strongly biased toward free or open source software. He wrote, it's $29 a year if you already have a supported cryptographic card and reader. I use their cloud signing option. Although I oh yeah, he says it's $58 a year with no special hardware needed. I sign my uh uh pie depainter, uh apparently it's pie de painter, whatever that is, executable with certum. And that's over at P Y D P A I N T E R dot org. If any of our listeners are curious, I don't know what Pied Painter is. It looks like it's something about Python, right? Pied De Painter. Anyway. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He says I've been a listener since the beginning and I'm proud owner. Right. Exactly. Uh, and proud owner and user. Spin right, he wrote. So this is a definitely useful tip. So, Mark, thank you. Uh I wanted everyone else to be aware of it. Uh going to the website at certum.store C-E-R-T-U-M dot S T O R E will allow anyone to begin exploring their many various offerings. There's a bunch of stuff there. They charge $89 one time for what they call their open source code signing set , which purchases both the hardware that's necessary. As we know, all code signing now must be locked in hardware. So you get the hardware and the first one year long certificate. And once you've got the required hardware, and again, you've got to have that, uh then it's $29 per year going forward. So while it's not free, you know, it's never gonna be. Um and because remember, there is a serious requirement to prove your identity for for getting code signing certificates and somebody's got to be in the loop to do that. So I don't ever see this code signing certification being free. What we can hope is that it can be made inexpensive enough. And these guys have got it down to thirty bucks, well, 29 uh per year. So this is a the USB key with a probably a cryptographic cut pair on there and a card with a chip. Yeah, and I don't know, maybe you break the the the card out of the the chip out of the card and stick it in the back of the that might be a little sim and and you stick it in into the back of of the reader oh and then and that allows it to attach to the PC. That makes sense. But so that so I uh Mark is using cloud signing. I don't know what I did not look at the economics of that here using these guys, um, like maybe it's no charge per signature, in which case, okay, if you didn't want to mess with hardware, I would always opt for holding on to my own certificate in my own, you know, storage. To me, that that just seems cleaner. And you don't have to have a, you know, like be online and worry about maintaining a cloud account. So but anyway, I wanted to let everybody know. I think and thank you again, Mark, Certum .store will will give you a whole range of options for cloud or for or physical and obtaining the hardware. I also did not determine whether ex any other hardware than theirs can have certificates installed into it. Uh I know that that open source uh gadget that I found before definitely can because I did. I I installed the um I can't even remember now, trust something uh certificate in in into several different uh pieces of of hardware. So it was a good solution. Flori an uh Goobler wrote Hi Steve and SN 1075. So that was last week. You discussed with Leo about this being a transitory period with a lot of short-term pain for maintainers. Ah, right, the whole mythos problem with a sh a lot of short-term pain for maintainers because mythos can find all these vulnerabilities. You then stated that this will get better because at least now these vulnerabilities get fixed. He wrote, but that seems like an overly optimistic view to me. As you've stated several times, we're just at the beginning of AI in the realm of coding, right? So it stands to reason that future models will be even better at finding bugs and vulnerabilities, which means that they will find more flaws which mythos today would miss, and they'll be able to find vulnerabilities in code generated by older, for example, today's models as well. So it seems to me that this will be a recurring issue with every new leap in the power of large language models. Am I missing something? Best regards, Florian . Okay, so I thought that Florian made his point very well . I think that the fairest reply would be that okay, that's a definite possibility. I don't want to rule anything out. Um whether this occurs will most likely depend upon the nature of the yet-to-be discovered bugs, right? The ones that we don't find with our current level of AI , obviously . My intuition suggests that we're going to be seeing a rapidly diminishing return on effort resulting from deeper analysis which fut ure more efficient AI would presumably be able to provide . Like, for example, you can't find bugs that aren't there, right? It's not like there's necess arily an infinite supply. They're just things we haven't found yet. So it's true that software could contain some deeply squirreled away crazy combinatorial bugs that would defy anyone's discovery. But I doubt there will be many of that I would describe that way. You know, that doesn't feel like the way most bugs operate. You know, that is, however, exactly the way deliberately engineered backdo ors operate when you think about it, right? Somebody deliberately created a weird, squirreled away, crazy combination of things you could do that individually looked benign, but each like in the same way that a safe is is open by spinning the dial to a series of specific numbers, each which changes the state of the internal tumblers in the lock until finally it opens. Um, you know, brute forcing is the only way you're able to, unless you're able to listen to the to any subtle uh uh uh changes that are being made. Um so what would be interesting as I said is that deliberately engineered back doors do operate that way, bugs much less so . So I would not be at all surprised if tomorrow's more powerful AI might be able to ferret out some secrets that some agencies may have previously planted into trusted and otherwise bug free and previously well audited c ode. They might be sweating right now at the idea of having that long trusted and forgotten code re examined with fresh AI eyes. So interesting thought experiment there. And cool question, Florian. Thank you. Eric Kinzer wrote, oh, he forwarded an email that he'd recently received from Ubisoft US. The email subject was update to your Ubisoft account coming on 430, 2026 , state of residence. And Eric added the single one-line observation: this is getting out of hand . So Ubisoft's email to their US based users was hello on 4:30, 2026, Ubisoft will introduce a new state of residence field into your Ubisoft player account for players located in the United States. This information helps us comply with state speci fic regul ations and to better assess legal requirements that may vary from one U.S. state to another. On 430, 2026, this field will be filled automatically based on your most recent connection to our services. You'll be able to review and update this information at any time in your Ubisoft account information. If we're unable to determine a state of residence, this field will remain blank and you will still be able to change your state of residence afterwards. Your state of residence will not be used for any advertising or marketing purposes. For more information on how Ubisoft collects, processes, and protects your data, please refer to our privacy policy and help page. Thank you for helping us keep our community safe and enjoyable for everyone. Signed your Ubisoft team. Okay, so for those who don't follow gaming closely, and I certainly don't, I needed to look it up. Ubisoft Entertainment is a French video game publisher founded in the early 90s and put on the map by its breakout game Rayman. Its current video game franchises include Anno, Assassin's Creed, I've heard of that, Driver, Far Cry, Just Dance, Prince Prince of Persia, heard of that, rabbids, Raymond, Tom Clancy's, and watchdogs. So I agree with Eric that this is annoying. Uh, and you know, no one actively wants it, but it's the unfortunate state of play in these presently disunited states. One of the features of the United States is that, you know, we're a federation of united but separate states. The theory is that local political control benefits state citizenry since some need some needs may truly vary by region. But for those issues that should not remain local, like age restrictions for video games, we depend upon our federal government to provide unification in the form of blanket regulations that affect everyone across the country. Unfortunately, our congressional regulators are having difficulty agreeing on how to move forward. Everyone wants this to be unified. Everybody. Everyone agrees that the current fragmentation is creating a huge mess. Republican legislators have been proposing legislation at the federal level again, which incorporates very strong unification language to explicitly over ride all local state law. As I noted, everyone really does think that's the way to go. But Democratic legislators have so far been opposing the proposals on the basis that while, yes, unification is needed, for some states, those unifying regulations are not as strong as the current state level laws, which have already been passed, um, and those states are operating under. So the democratic lawmakers, you know, don't want to regress the strength of the laws that they already have. Their position is that adopting those unified regulations at the federal level would result in a weakening of the existing state laws. So that's the current state of play. For now, and for for theeseeable future, you know, it's in every state for themselves, free-for-all, with no end in sight. Uh, I imagine we'll eventually get something, I don't know how or when. So and it's weird that Ubisoft is doing this because they're putting the assertion in the user's hand, right? I mean, so uh there's nothing to do it, that's why. And so they're doing the minimum that they can they're French, remember. They have to go by French law. So Okay. Well, the the the the it this actually did come from Ubisoft America, which I think is has o offices in San Francisco . But what's weird, Leo, is that what you would be inclined to do then would be to choose a state that has the weakest age restrictions and put and enter that into the blank field. I mean, I'm sure that's what they're gonna do, right? Users are gonna say, oh no, I'm not in California, or he has have to ask permission. Uh I'm in uh Utah that's it and then you know there's no legislation there so again it seems weird uh i uh just as a uh uh a complete aside uh since what eric had forwarded me was the Ubisoft email in all its HTML embellished glory . Yeah, my trustee EM client presented me with these choices when I opened when when I looked at what Eric was Eric had sent me. Uh I got two email tracking dialogues. It said, Do you want to download tracking pixel from Salesforce? Yeah. And then another one, do you want to download tracking pixel from return path? Now, of course, even if they were only actual tracking pixels, I would decline. Thank you very much anyway. But you know, how does downloading those help anyone other than Salesforce and Return Path? As we know, what's actually being downloaded are almost certainly massively invasive blobs of JavaScript that will attempt to suck everything it can from you know its user's machine. So needless to say, I decline the offers. I hope everyone's email clients are as responsible and capable as EM client, which I continue to be really happy with . And Leo, you know we're an hour in. Okay. I think we should share with our users what sponsor we're happy with. You know, though tracking pixel, I I'm not sure how EM works. Uh you know, my email client like yours will say, Hey, there's an image in this. Uh, which is you know, traditionally the tracking pixel was that. It was a one by one pixel, an image that when you hit it would connect to their server as you I'm not telling you anything you don't know but for the audience it would connect with their server and then that gives them uh information about how many of these emails got opened. And you know a lot of times with newsletters you just don't know. So MailChimp and all these other companies do this. Salesforce does it as well. Um it's weird. I have the option download that. So I don't know if that's EM clients way of saying do you want this pixel? Because it is, it would be a download of a one by one image, right? An invisible image. Well or it could be but it could be JavaScript. Yeah. I wouldn't know what your client's saying. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. If it's just a pixel, I mean it's harmless to your machine. It's just a signal to them when you hit the server with your IP address that you open the email. Right. Um Yeah. So I don't know EM this is a weird way to although it would also return a cookie if you had a cookie from that domain. That's right. Yeah, because they do know who it is. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But that's their point, right? They want to know, did you get our email? Right. Uh so it's not, I don't know if it's necessarily um malign. My email client um and I agree with you, you should never have an email climate that loads images, period. It will just say, you know, there do you I see a one pixel image. Do you want do you want to hide that? Well, in fact, every every email that I receive from any of these places, it it says, you know, uh it does not by default download images. Yes. And then there is an option. Download images, but download these or down always download from this source. Right. So you're able to like train us. Like, yeah, I don't mind getting you know GRC's email images. I think this is good of EM client to kind of say a little bit more about it. I would like to know though if it's a single dot on the screen or, if it's a JavaScript lob, that's a important distinction. Yeah, exactly. Our show today brought to you by Material, the cloud workspace security platform built for lean security te ams. See, you can be a lean security team and be effective and not get any less lean. How about that with material? Managing security, especially in the cloud workspace, is really hard. 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You can even book a demo with them. Material dot security. Thank them so much for the job they're doing and the support they're doing, giving to the job seems doing. On we go with security. So Roger Dooley asks, he's I was listening to episode 1075 again last week, and I agree that agentic coding is likely the world we're heading toward. That said, I'd offer a word of caution. I'm using an LLM to build an internal stack. I can code, but I'm not a developer. I'm a sysadmin who has spent time studying pen testing. Excuse me. The early results were impressive, but the code base was brittle and hard to reason about. Things didn't click until I started spending hours working through exactly what I wanted the shape of the system, data contracts, design patterns, two API changes and two rewrites later, I have something that feels solid and reasonably secure. Here's what I think is missing from the anyone can build their own tooling conversation. For non-trivial projects, you need to approach the work at an architectural level that requires vocabulary and intuition that most people without a development background simply don't have yet. I certainly didn't have it, and I still have huge knowledge gaps. Maybe that's the real skill to develop, not coding, but knowing how to communicate your intent clearly and how to think about system design . That's what separates a tool that works from one that barely holds together. Sincerely, Roger D. So I think Roger is exactly correct. Um, software development projects vary widely in complexity. You know, some are purely about the resulting output with a relatively straightforward translation layer between input and output. But other projects will have deep internal structure and complexity that forms a layered solution. The internet's own protocol s are a good example. The OSI stack that we've talked about in the early days of the podcast is composed of layered protocols. At the bottom layer is is the physical specification, the electrical signaling that carries the data. On top of that is the formatting of the electrical signals to create, for example, Ethernet packets the ethernet packets then encapsulate i p packets inside of which are protocol packets such as icmp ud p CP, and these protocols carry message data that's formatted each using its own rules. You know, yeah, it's this precise and carefully thought-out architecture that explains much of the internet's success. These these these protocols or uh protocols inside packets inside other packets inside other packets could be seen as layers. Now, if a user had some wires and said to an AI , please design a system to connect them in a network so I can communicate with oth ers. A competent AI could probably design a solution that worked, but it would have none of the crucially important characteristics that makes the internet robustly reliable because very few users would know what to ask for . On the other hand, the flip side of this, a communications architect exper t could instruct the same AI to design an elegant, multi-layered, resilient, and robust design that would recreate and incorporate many of the crucial features of the internet . So our listener Robert is not the first person to make this observation, but I thought it was worth repeating and further strengthening because this is really important about application of AI . Um I am sure that there will be a great amount of bespoke software created by neophytes who just ask the AI to give them what they want. In fact, one thing I have not seen anyone talk about yet is the creation of uh you know the the the the the delivery of a fully ready to go turnkey roll your own software construction set. Oh it's an interesting idea. Isn't that because you still need all this GitHub stuff? Remember and you will, Leo, back in the early nineteen eighties, a gifted programmer named Bill Budge wrote something that he called the pinball Jeff Atwood and I were talking about Bill Budge in the pinball construction set. Yep. Yep. It was for the Apple II personal computer. And at the time, no one had ever seen anything like it. This amazing toy, running in real time on an 8-bit 6502 microprocessor with 48k of RAM, managed to add well and and the OS under it managed to accurately capture all of the physics of a steel ball bouncing off rubber bumpers with flippers and ramps and spinners and all of the other familiar widgets of pinball machines. Its user could click and drag the various objects from an off machine an off-machine palette onto the pinball board, and when it was switched on, you know, turn switched from design mode to run mode, everything would work. So my point is that absol ute non-programmers were able to create a machine that never existed before and make it go . We don't yet have that with AI. At the moment, AI-driven code generators are aimed at developers who already know their way around complex development environments and GitHub. But given what's now possible, someone, mark my words, someone is gonna create the software construction set that will open up the use of AI for the creation of problem-solving software. And, you know, just like Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, who invented the spreadsheet , did people who never programmed a computer before will be able to create things and make them go . So uh the essentially uh uh Roger's question sort of all so the first part portion is it it absolutely definitely matters how much you understand how software should be bu ilt in order to better guide the AI through the details of its implementation. But the other thing that occurred to me is we don't have yet a turnkey software builder. And I can't wait to see who does it first. Because clearly that's it's gonna come. To can confirm what you were saying, I asked Claude Coat, I said, I'd like to design a robust networking stack. What do you know of the OSI layers? See, it would help to know that there are such things. And it does, in fact, know all seven layers. I do like, though, it's practical caveats worth keeping in mind before you design. TCPIP doesn't match cleanly, it collapses five to seven in one application layer. The OSI model is pedagogical scaffolding, not an implementation blueprint. TLS is the classic mess. Sits between four and seven. Doesn't fit any single OSI box. Quick is worse . It really so this it can also be educational. I uh Leo, not it can be. I mean it is. It is it is astonishing. Yeah. Uh if so if you knew enough to ask the kind of b beginning if you could get a wedge in to ask the beginning questions, it can guide you, but you need to understand architecture. You do need to have, I think, some background in what you're doing. Otherwise, this is just nonsense. Uh and I've run up against that because I'm doing a voice training model right now. Right. And it's saying things to me. I I have to say, what is AFE? What are you talking about? What are you? Yeah. I don't understand . But at least it will explain it to you, right? So it's a great way to learn about something. Oh it it it I it's like for for the an inquisitive person who What a toy. Oh my god. I it 's just astonishing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Michael Swanson said, Hi, Stephen Leo. Thank you for your thoughtful conversations and analysis of AI topics over the last several months. The most recent convers ations about autonomous agentic coding and the emerging capabilities demonstrated by mythos have led me to the conclusion we are much closer to artificial superintelligence than most people realize. How long will it be before one of the companies developing frontier models tells their current LLM to go off in a corner and use its coding skills to build a better AI . Working tirelessly and iterating literally millions of times, it will undoubtedly succeed, with the only limitation being processing and electrical power. The questions then will be what will this ASI think of us? And what level of control will we still exert? Living in interesting times indeed. So I doubt I I I don't follow Michael's conclusion, but my major at Berkeley was double ECS, electrical engineering and computer science. Um and And though that was the obvious choice for me at the time, today I regret that choice. Because, you know, I'd already been very thoroughly self-taught. You know, I wrote and delivered two years of electronics curriculum to my own high school class while I was at high school. I was employed by Stanford's AI Lab, programming deck mini computers, an assembler, designing and building the portable dog killer, and so forth, you know, all by the time I finally attended Berkeley, uh, you know, where physics and electronics and computer science courses were basically reviews for me . However, the class that I encountered that astounded me was philosophy. It was an entirely new world that I couldn't get enough of. And Michael's note put me in mind of that because it must be that these are exactly the questions being asked in undergrad and graduate philosophy courses today. What a time to be thinking about that stuff, you know, what a time to be a philosophy major, you know, able to ask and debate what is it exactly that we've created. What it what does it mean to be conscious? How can we determine whether something is aware of itself? Exactly. No, where's the line between creating a bulletproof app earance of something being true and it actually being true. Right. If in every testable way it acts conscious, then isn't it? How tightly are we going to hold on to the idea that our biological brains are inherently unique ? You know, I I've been spending a great deal of time working with Claude. While I am truly impressed , it occasionally reveals itself to be essentially a fancy linguistic array. Now, this doesn't make it any less astonishingly useful, but it does render it non-conscious. Earlier today, and this was I when I when I wrote this was uh Saturday, I caught it in a big mistake. Uh when it was called on it, it gracefully recovered and agreed that it oh of course, how silly of me, that's not correct. But the nature of the mistake revealed that it did not have any actual understanding at all at any level of what it was saying. You know, today it remains an astonishingly capable parrot, but a parrot, nevertheless . But Leo, God, can you imagine being in class with a s uh with a a smart professor and a bunch of students and able to talk about this, oh it is so cool. And it you're right, it's philosophy as much as anything else. Yeah, it is. It's like, what are we? I mean, that that's really it's what are we? Here we have this thing that looks a lot like us, which makes us ask, well, okay. What are we? It's different. Yeah. What are we? Yeah. Wow. Uh listener Joey Albert uh pursued the question of whether the zero patch people might have a zero patch for that red sun zero day, uh, which was not fixed by April's patch Tuesday. Remember that I I kind of left that issue hanging on the podcast a couple weeks ago. Like maybe these guys have it because Microsoft missed it. They replied to him, writing, Hi Joey, while Windows Defender got updated to version 4.18 .26030.3011, fixing Blue Hammer, even on Windows computers that are not receiving operating system updates anymore. Red Sun, meaning that you know, even old Windows 7 machines that are getting Defender updated, they got this fixed because Windows Defender is still being updated, even if patches are not, and that's the case for older Windows 10 machines as well. Um, they said unfortunately, we cannot fix it either because Defender is a protected process and does not allow being injected into, which O patch agent must do in order to apply a patch. They wrote, we were considering creating a patch that would require disabling the protected process protection of defender, but decided against it as it would not be clear whether the total net effect of that would be positive or negative for the overall security of our users. We're sure Microsoft will issue another update of Defender that will resolve Red Sun and Undefend, which is the other zero patch or zero day. And and they they finished. So uh, you know, and Joey, thank you for tracking that down for us. The fact that this can be resolved inside Defender at any time, because you know, Microsoft is constantly pushing Defender updates so that every one will not be needing to wait until at best May 12th for this actively exploited in the wild zero day. Uh that's a good thing. You know, and again, Microsoft is and does update Defender, as I said, much more often than only on a monthly second Tuesday of the month cycle. Kevin Von Haaren said, hello , Steve. Listening to your episodes on AI and programming, I'm wondering if for software that's traditionally compiled to an executable, that instead of an AI outp utting source code in something like Rust, C , C sharp, or C , it could be trained to output the portable assembly language like intermediate representation that the LLVM compiler backend uses to outbed to output processor-specific executables. I could even see a company going so far as to not retain ing the intermediate representation under the idea, can't have a source code leak if you don't have source code. He said, I have a number of reasons I think this would be a bad idea, but I'm also kind of expecting it to happen at some point . Okay, so I've had similar thoughts about the future, though I was thinking about having AI bypass high-level language output to target the hardware, the hardware 's own machine language directly. Kevin's notion of targeting its output to LL VM is interesting. The problem, of course, is there's probably not nearly as much LLVM out on the internet as there is Rust, C , C sharp, and C. And we should remember that that today's AI doesn't really understand what it's doing . I mean, it's astonishing for what it's able to do for not knowing what it's saying, but it really doesn't know. It's it's a real mystery. How does it figure this out? I know, Leo. It is and it it is a real mystery. I don't get it. But I wanted to include this in order to address the broader point that human programmers have designed computer languages to be comfortable for us to use for expressing what we'd like our computers to do. One of the reasons the early DEC PDP11 and VAX mini computers were so wonderful to program in their assembly language was that their instruction sets were designed to be written to directly by people . They were in a sense high-level machine language. The vaxxes even had instructions for directly manipulating linked lists supported by the hardware, which is astonishing. But when turns out, when higher level languages were later created, you know, like C , which was written for and developed on PDP 11s in support of Unix, which was also developed for the 11 , it turned out that compilers were not very able to use all those fancy high-level features in the low-level machine. So over time, the instructions that the hardware designing programmers built into the hardware for their own comfort dis appeared. And as we know, risk machines turned out to be just like exactly what compilers wanted to write to. My point here is that we might very well expect the same thing to happen as AI increasingly takes over the task of coding, which is what I fully expect to see happen during our lifetime. You know, mine and Leo's. At this point in time, AI does not yet deeply understand code. So the quality of the code it's able to produce is directly related to the body of prior code it's been trained on. That too will change. Once it actually understands code, I would expect it to begin using its own representation rather than the less efficient representations that we biologicals developed for our own use. And if you want a chillingly perfect example of that, watch the movie Colossus the Forbin Project. After our Colossus and its Russian counterpart guardian are connected and begin communicating, something happens. And that gets faster and faster and faster and faster. Exactly. Exactly. But don't forget that we're using LLMs which are trained on language right now. So and they're also trained on an awful lot of code. So it is sort of a native tongue uh to them. I agree. They could be more efficient. And people have been writing uh uh languages for LL Ms already. But it'd be better if the LLMs made up their own language. And in fact, there was a I remember last year an experiment where they the LLMs were talking to each other in a language unintelligible to humans . So it's already happened, Steve. Very much like you know, two twins who who you know sort of develop their own way of communicating before they learn English. That's right. Angus McKinnon says, Steve, can you please explain the below ? Angus then links to an article in Gadget er uh with the somewhat misleading title, Stop Using Cloud Flares Defa ult 1.1.1.1 DNS. And then they said changing one digit blocks malware at the router level. Then we had the link, which in turn references and quotes a piece in How to Geek with a title, Everyone Uses 1111 , but 1112 Protects You . So this is not something we've talked about, or at least for a long time. I don't remember ever discussing it, since it's actually true. And it's a tiny simple change for anyone who's already using Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS resolvers. So I wanted to spend a moment to share what How to Geek wrote. They said Cloudflare's 1111 is one of the most popular DNS servers. It's fast, reliable, and easy to remember. However, it'll also connect you with any website out there, even a malicious one without even a warning message . Okay, now I'll just interrupt to say that that statement is a bit misleading and annoying, since this is no failing of Cloudflare's DNS, right? You know, it's supposed to do that. It's it's not DNS's inherent purpose to provide warning messages. Actually, that practice, which was once popular, is now quite frowned on. And as it happens, GRC's DNS benchmark specifically tests for this behavior and alerts its user if this is being done. Because back when I wrote the DNS benchmark, back in uh eight, it was being done. So the benchmark still has that that that test in it. Anyway, the article continues. That's where Cloudflare's 11 12 DNS server comes in. For the most part, 1112 works the same way as 1111. It provides IP addresses, but it also has an integrated security filter. If you try to connect to a domain known for phish, running command and control servers , meaning something in your network is trying to connect, which is really useful, distributing malware or other kinds of malicious activity, you'll be redirected to 0000 instead. Okay, so again to interrupt, by that what they mean is that the IP that Cloudflare's 1112 DNS resolver returns when you ask it for the IP of a known malicious domain. The IP you get back will not be the IP of that domain, but zero zero zero zero instead of the IP that you would get if you had used an you know a normal DNS resolver or even Cloudflare's 1111 resolver. They wrote, because the protection layer exists out side your PC and outside your home network, malware never reaches your PC. And if you click a phishing link, you're never connected. It's a very proactive way to keep your devices safe. And great if you want another passive layer of protection that you can set and forget . Cloudflare's 1113 is even stricter. Cloudflare's 1113 DNS server includes everything that 1111 and 1112 do, but it takes it a step further by blocking websites that are known to host adult -only content. It's a good choice for devices that are used by children, but would also be used if you wanted to block adult content across an entire network as well. You'd just need to change the DNS server on the router instead of on a single device. Despite how helpful DNS-based filtering can be for securing your network in your devices, it has a few limitations, they write. The biggest limitation and the most important is that it only works against known malicious domains. If a new deal domain crops up that's distributing malware, or a previously safe domain is taken over by malicious actors, it won't help you. That's why having multi-layers of protection is essential. It can also return a false positive and block a perfectly safe website, though that's pretty rare. So anyway, I I think this is a terrific tip for any one who's using Cloudflare's one one resolver. Uh I know that Leo, you are a user of Next DNS, as I have been, and there are you know other commercial DNS servers that allow you to add this kind of family-friendly family-friendly filtering and malicious site filtering. So those are options there too. But Cloudflare does this all for free and, it is indeed a matter of simply changing that final digit. Um, for what it's worth, users of GRC's DNS benchmark once again will note that all three of those IP addresses and also their secondary DNS mirrors are already present in the benchmark's default built-in resolver list. So it's easy to compare their relative performance. For me , just now, when I was writing the show notes, I think this was on Sunday now, the alternate filtering resolvers did measure somewhat slower than Cloudflare's original 1111 and 10 01 unfiltered resolvers. So there may be a little tiny bit of performance trade-off, but it could also be the location or the time of day when I did this. And of course, that's why you have the DNS benchmark. So you can test from anywhere and at any time. Uh and but I mean it wasn't a huge difference. And for what it's worth, I am consid I'm consistently seeing one zero zero one outperforming one one one one because everybody uses one one one one as their primary turns out that using the the path less traveled uh DNS resolver gives you a bit of a speed advantage. So might be worth swapping those numbers. Uh and Leo, let's take a second to the last break. We're gonna delve into this amazing story of fast sixteen.sis, and we'll take one break, uh, one final break when we're halfway through that. Perfect. Perfect. Uh our show today brought to you by Cyber Ho ot. I love this little owl. Lisa was doing her cyber hoot training uh the other day and she got a award and it was a little owl sticker. It was so cuteute. C cyberhoot. It's uh security awareness training. Now, I have to tell you, traditional security awareness training does one thing. Well, it makes employees feel bad, right ? If you've ever done it, you know, and then you kind of disengage when you feel bad. Not a good way to learn. Someone clicks a fake fishing link, gets a shame lecture, watches a boring video, and learns almost nothing. Well, Cyberhoot was built by people who saw that cycle. Repeat, for decades, ground up. They decided to fix it with one question in mind. What if you trained people the way great coaches train athletes? With positive reinforcement, with encouragement, with re petition, and with rewards like little owl stickers for doing the right thing. Cyberhood is a security awareness training program for businesses of all sizes, for government entities, for schools, and profession al services firms that want their people to actually get smarter about cybersecurity, not just check a compliance box. Most phishing training teaches people to spot a phishing email after it lands, right? Cyberhoots hootfish goes farther. It teaches people how phishing actually works. Knowledge is power here. When you understand how an attacker constructs a phishing email, what makes it convincing? What's psychological triggers it exploits ? You get smarter. You stop being a passive target. You start being a smart consumer. Bootfish uses typos squatted domains, just like the real guys, convin cing vendor imperson ations, just like the real guys. These are the exact tricks the real attackers use. Spotting an obviously fake email, well, you nobody learns from that. Uh, but but when you have an email that isn't obviously fake, like the real thing, and they learn from that, that works. One healthcare provider hit 95% training compliance and cut pishhing related help desk tickets by 40% . But I think people know most breaches start, this is what our topic was at Zero Trust World, with a human being clicking something they shouldn't have. Steve's topic was the threats coming from inside the house. You've had conversations with coworkers and frustrated IT teams. You know how it is. Cyberhood is the answer to that conversation. It's what you recommended the business owner, the IT leader, or the enterprise security team that wants to build, and this is so much better, a real security culture at scale . Not wasting a six-figure training budget on programs that don't change behavior. If your organization is ready to stop punishing people for being human and start actually building cyber smart employees, head to cyberhoot.com/slash security now. Use the code security now at checkout and get twenty percent off your first year. That's c y br h o t cyberhoot .com slash security now. Promo code security now for twenty percent off your first year. Just remember to always laugh, learn, and hoot up. It was really fun to uh to you know I didn't want to weigh in, I didn't to Lisa's training, but it was fun to watch her go through it. And it the training was really good. It talked about script kitties, talked about who the people are who are trying to hack you, why they're what do they get out of it. And uh it was really fun watching her and learn. And at the end of it, I think, you know, she did the quiz. S gothe a hundred percent. I might have helped a little bit. And and she got the little owl. And it was it's just was fun. It was really good. It really worked. Cyberhoot . Cyberhoot.com slash security now. Promo code security now for 20% off for your first year. Steve, what is this fast 32.sys of what you speak? Wow. Okay, so uh everybody, this is just first okay. First, I want to thank our listeners who sent me a heads up about this. My first thought upon seeing just the headline was that it might be a little more than a passing note, but the tr uly oh Leo diabolical and clever nature of what was achieved by unknown but suspected agencies caused this to stand stand out on a scale similar in scope to Britain's deliberate secrecy once they had unraveled the operation of Germany's Enigma machine. You know, keeping their discovery a secret was diabolical. And so is what was accomplished by the fast 16. sys file system driver the same year as this podcast started w and well before five years before stucks net the sentinel labs group of the sentinel one security research firm posted their piece about what they discovered and how that happened. Their piece was titled Fast Sixteen Mystery Shadow Brokers Reference Reveals High Precision software sabotage five years before Stuxnet . Remember the Shadow Brokers was the leak of the internal NSA stuff. Turns out there was some clues in that . So they wrote, our investigation into FAST 16 starts with an architectural hunch . A certain tier of apex threat actors has consistently relied on embedded scripting engines as a means of modularity. Fl ame, Animal Farms Bunny, Plex ing Eagle, Flame two point oh, and Project Sauron each built platforms around the extensibility and modularity of an embedded Lua VM . We wanted to determine whether that development style arose from a shared source. Like, like where how did they all, how did all these individual actors get this idea? So they said, so we set out to trace the earliest sophisticated use of an embedded Lua engine in Windows malware . They write Lua is a lightweight scripting engine with a massive I,'m sorry, with a native proficiency for extending C and C functionality. Given the appeal of C for reliable high-end malware frameworks, this capability is indispensable to avoid having to recompile entire implant components to add functionality to already infected machines. We did not find an indication of direct shared provenance, but our investigation did uncover the oldest instance of this modern attack architecture. Lua leaves a distinctive fingerprint. Compiled bytecode contains compiled bytecode containers start with the magic bytes one B four C seven five six one in hex, followed by a version byte, and the engine typically exposes a characteristic C API and environment variables such as Lua underscore path . Hunting for these traits across mid two thousands malware collections surfaced a sample that initially looked unrem arkable was titled Service Management SVC MGMT dot XE. Surface servicemanagement dot XE . On the surface, Service Management XE appears to be a generic console mold service wrapper from the Windows 2000 XP era . A closer look reveals an embedded Lua five virtual machine and an encrypted bytecode container unpacked by the service entry point, meaning when the service is loaded, it's then initialized. And at that point, this Lua 5 virtual machine start, you know, reads this encrypted bytecode container and unpacks it. The developers of this executable extended the Lua environment to include a wide string module to provide native Unicode handling, you know, six uh uh dual-byte 16-bit characters as opposed to single byte characters. A built-in symmetric cipher exposed through a function commonly labeled B used to decode embedded data, the multiple modules that bind directly into the Windows NT file system, the registry, service control , and network APIs. Even by itself, service management XE already looks like an early high end implant , a modular service binary that hands most of its logic to encrypted Lua bytec ode. The binary includes a crucial detail , a PDB path that links the binary to the kernel driver fast six6.sys . Okay, I'll interrupt here to say that anyone who's developed code using Microsoft's toolchains will be familiar with its creation of. pdb files even i because i'm using their um their linker to link my assembly code i've got you know pdb files you know dns bench.pdb coming out my ears they're everywhere if if you're using Microsoft tools. So uh um so they said so so any so so what Sentinel Labs uh the researchers are saying here is that their their search for the earliest instances of the use of Lua scripting in malware turned up a reference to something unknown and unsuspected, which was a Windows kernel driver named Fast 16 .sis . So they continue writing, buried in the binary strings is that PDB reference to C backslash builde backslash driver backslash F D backslash I three eighty six backslash fast sixteen dot PDB . At first glance, they write the path is structured like any other compiler artifact, an internal build directory, a component name, FAST16, and an architecture hint, i386. However, in this case, there's a mismatch. The string appears inside of a service mode executable, and yet the driver FDI-386 FAST16 segment of the PDB string clearly refers to a kernel driver project. Following that clue led us to examine a second binary, fast 16.sys, which I'll just note they wouldn't have otherwise known to look for . But the point is that this the the the clue of this PDB reference, they realized this was not a part of a service. This was part of a kernel driver. Why was a kernel driver in a service ? And why what is fast sixteen dot sis ? They wrote this kernel driver is a boot start file system component that intercepts and modifies executable code as it's read from disk . Although a driver of this age will not run on Windows 7 or later. For its time, fast 16.sys was a cut above commodity root kits thanks to its position in the storage stack, control over file system IO, and rule based code patching functionality. Okay, again, I'm pausing to add some clarification. What this means is that this is a root kit plain and simple? It's marked for boot time loading by the operating system, which is busy loading all manner of random stuff to get Windows up and running. But in this case, when fast 16.sys kernel rootkit is loaded and initialized, its initialization code, which happens immediately upon its loading, that code immediately installs interception hooks deep into the operating system so that it is able to subsequently over see and interfere with whatever it might wish to . So they continue. In April twenty seventeen, almost twelve years after the compilation timestamp , the same file name, FAST16 , appeared in the Shadow Brokers Leak, which refers to a text file drive underscore list dot text DRV underscore list dot text. They said the 250k byte file, which is a text file, is a short list of driver names used to mark potential implants cyber operators might encounter on a target box as friendly or to pull back in order to avoid clashes with competing nation state hacking operations . And then we have a sample from their posting. The report shows a sna pshot of five lines from the drive underscore list.text file of file identifiers. Four of the five lines identify the malware by name , Misty Veal, Net Spider, Olympus, and Pedal Cheap, each with a file name like N-E-T-H-D -L-R or KHLP eight oh seven W . But the entry for the FAST sixteen driver does not show any malware name. Somewhat ominously and unlike any of the others, it says nothing to see here, carry on . So someone somewhere knew to just leave this one alone and said so without identifying why or who or what it was . The researchers wrote the guidance for this one particular driver, FAST sixteen, stands out as both unique and particularly unusual. The string inside service management XE provided the key forensic link in this investigation . The PDB path connects the 2017 leak of deconfliction signatures used by NSA operators with a multimod al Lua powered carrier module compiled in 2005 , and ultimately its stealthy payload, a kernel driver designed for precis ion sabota ge. And we're going to get to the precision sabotage in a second. So just to back up, recall that the Shadow Brokers Leak, as I mentioned before, was believed to be a publication of secret documents stolen from the equation group that was believed to be a group within the NSA. So the evidence is suggesting that all these other files were associated with known malware from other actors, but the fast 16.sys driver was not that. If you see it, leave it alone. Nothing to see here. These are not the droids you're looking for. The flag was to back off . So they said the core component of Fast 16 service management XE functions as so the the core component, the that is to say the service management XE functions functions as a highly adaptable carrier module, changing its operational mode based on command line arguments. No arguments, it runs as a Windows service. With a hyphen P, it install, it sets the install flag to one and runs as a service. So that means propagate, install and run. With a hyphen I, that sets install flag to one and executes the Lua code, meaning install and execute Lua . If if the argument has a hyphen R that executes Lua code without setting the install flag, so just execute . Any other argument with such as a file name interprets that as a file name and spawns two children, the original command and one with the hyphen R argument. So that's the so-called wrap C or the wrapper or proxy mode. So they said: internally, service management XE stores three distinct payloads, including encrypted lu abyte code that handles configuration, its propagation and coordination logic, auxiliary con notified DLL, and that fast sixteen dotsys kernel driver. By separating a relatively stable execution wrapper from encrypted task specific payloads, the developers created a reusable compartmentalized framework that they could adapt to different target environments and operational objectives while leaving the outer carrier binary largely unchanged across campaigns. In other words, this was an extremely sophisticated design. They continue, the early 2000s saw a large number of network worms. Most were written by enthusiasts, spread quickly, and carried little or no meaningful payload. Multiple wormable payloads referred to internally as wormlets, the service management XE module performs the following steps. First, prepares the configuration, defining the payload path, service details, and target IP ranges. Next, converts the configuration values to wide charac ter strings for the C layer . Third, escalates privileges and installs the carrier executable as the service management service, then starts it. Fourth, optionally, based on the configuration setting, deploys the kernel driver implant fast sixteen dot sis . Next releases the wormlets. In this particular configuration, the wormlets. Release the wormlets. That's right. Only oh that's good. Only one wormlet slot is populated with the SCM wormlet that hooks that looks for network servers, copies the payload over a network share and starts the remote service. And finally, repeats the process indefinitely, sleeping for the configured initial delay between waves until a failure threshold or external kill connection is reached . They write the single deployed wormlet found in service management XE, that's the SCM wormlet, exemplifies a simple but effective propagation strategy based on native Windows capabilities and weak network security. It targets Windows 2000 XP environments and relies on default or weak admin admin passwords on file shares. All spreading is done through standard Windows service control and file sharing AP Is, an early example of propagation that leans on built-in administration features rather than custom network protocols. Before this workflow starts, a pre -installation kill switch checks the environment. The OK to install routine calls okay to propagate, and propagation is only allowed if it's manually forced or if it's made sure common security products are not found by checking for associated registry keys. The routine walks a list of vendor keys and aborts installation if any of them are present, preventing deployment into monitored environments. For tooling of this age, that level of environmental awareness is notable. While the list of products may not seem comprehensive, it likely reflects the products the operators expected to be present in their target networks whose detection technology would threaten the stealthiness of a covert operation . Okay, so the the list which they provide in the posting is a is a bit of a walk down memory lane with many of our old friends present. You know, there's Symantec, Sigate Technologies, Trend Micro, Zone Labs, F Secure, there's Network Ice's Black Ice product, MacAfee's Personal Firewall, Computer Associates, Easy Trust, Easy Armor. I'm sorry, E Trust Easy Armor, something called Red Cannon's Fireball, Carryo, Personal Firewall for Kaspersky Lab is there with Kaspersky Anti-Hacker, the Tiny Software Tiny Firewall, Soft Forever, Panda Software's Firewall, and so forth. So a bunch of the standard products at the time. They said a separate user mode component, service management.dll , provides a minimal reporting channel contained within the carrier's internal storage, this DLL is registered through the Windows Add Connect Notify API so that it's called each time the system establishes a new network connection using the remote access service responsible for dial-up connections and early VPNs in the 2000s. When invoked, the DLL decodes an obfus cated string to obtain the named pipe and then they give the pipe name, attempts to connect to the local pipe, and writes the remote and local connection names to the pipe before closing it. The module does not run independently and must be registered by host process. So they're just saying that this is a very stealthy means of allowing this agent to connect out and sort of ride the outbound connection when that's being done anyway by that particular workstation, which it has already infected. And and what that means is that there was some, you know, so there were some other communicating component other than this that it was able to talk to. Okay, so the stage is set. We under stand now that way back in the time of Windows 2000 and XP, it appears that very clever hackers probably employed by the U.S. National Security Agency's Equation Group, carefully designed a professional grade, highly stealthful, and very cautious windows inf iltration worm that prioritized not being caught . Which is always a good thing to prioritize if you're a worm. The infiltration worm was designed to be multi-purpose, a multi-purpose implant delivery system, which in this instance was intent upon installing something known as the FAST16. In Windows system s. Okay . Now we're going to learn why. And why I consider its devious functioning to be such a diabolically brilliant maneuver . But first, Leo, we're gonna learn why our listeners may be interested in the brilliant sponsor. Why that we 're diabolical of you, Steve. Actually, the bad guys are diabolical, but our sponsor, Guard Square, is here to protect your mobile apps. Mobile apps today are an inescapable part of life. We love them, right? Ranging from financial services to healthcare, retail, entertainment. Users trust mobile apps with their sensitive personal data. And for that reason, as a mobile app developer, you have a higher responsibility, don't you? A recent survey showed that 72% of organizations experienced a mobile application security incident last year. 92% of respondents reported rising threat levels over the last two years. Meanwhile, attackers, who of course want your users' personal data, are constantly finding new ways to attack your mobile app. The latest one, really diabolical, they reverse engineer the app and repackage it. They take all your code, it looks exactly like your app, has your icons and everything, but then they put a little malware in there and distribute the modified app . They they might do it through a phishing campaign, through side loading, through third party app stores. Your users don't know this isn't the official version of the app, which means the reputational damage comes to your head. By taking a proactive approach to mobile app security, you could stay one step ahead of these attacks and maintain the trust of your users. That's where Guard Square comes in. Guardsquare delivers mobile app security without compromise, providing advanced protections for both Android and iOS apps combined with automated mobile application security testing to find vulnerabilities and real-time threat monitoring to gain insight into attacks. Know what's coming before it happens. Discover more about how GuardSquare provides industry leading security for your mobile apps at GuardSquare..com That's guardsquare .com. And speaking as a user, I hope every one of you starts using guardsquare. Protect my data, protect your reputation, guardsquare . dot com We thank him so much for supporting security now and this diabolical worm in plac ement mechanism. Leo, you're gonna love this. I know how old do we think this is? This is 2005. This is uh this is 21 years ago when you and I began the podcast. Oh my god. We didn't know anything about it, of course. No, no one knew uh anything about it until now because these guys went back and were we're looking for the earliest instance known where malware was was using Lua uh the Lua VM to interpret Lewis script and so they just stumbled on this and it's like, whoa, look what we found. And this thing went unknown. But you, I know you, you're gonna love when you hear what this thing does. Okay, so the Sentinel Labs team reverse-engineered the operation of this fast 16.sys rootkit driver to learn the goal of its infiltration mission. Here's what they disc overed. They wrote, once activated, fast sixteen.sys focuses on executable files. They said a file is a valid target if it meets two criteria . The file name ends with XE . And immediately after the last PE, the portable execution section header, there's a printable ASCII string starting with Intel. They wrote this selection logic points to executables compiled with the Intel C C compiler, which often placed compiler metadata in that region. It indicates that the devel opers knew their target software was built with this toolchain . For files meeting these criteria, the driver performs a PE header modification in memory. It injects two additional sections, .xdata and dot pdata, and fills them with bytes from the original code section , increasing the section count and keeping a clean copy of the code. The intent is likely to increase stability while still allowing extensive patching. Although without identifying the target binaries, this remains an informed hypothesis. Okay, so just to be clear, what Sentinel Labs found was that this root kit driver, which hooked into the operating system's lowest level file system functions, was able to modify executable files on the fly as they were being loaded into memory to run. So what was stored on the system's drive was never altered in any way. While what was actually loaded into memory when that program was executed, it was significantly altered on the fly as it was being read from the drive . They explain. The patching engine is a minimal ist performance optimized stateful scanning and modification tool. It's configured with a set of 101 rules, each containing pattern matching and replacement logic . To maintain performance, the engine uses a 256-byte dispatch array and only flags the starting byte values of a small number of unique patterns. It allows wildcards inside patterns, so a single rule can match several compiler optimized variants of the same code. And it supports state flags that some rules can set or check , enabling multi-stage modification sequences similar to those used by advanced antivirus scanning engines. Most patterns, most patched patterns correspond to standard X eighty six code used for hijacking or influencing execution flow. One injected block is different. Okay, listen to this . It's a larger and complex sequence of floating point unit FPU instructions dedicated to precision arithmetic and scaling values in internal arrays. This code is a standalone mathematical calculation function unrelated to code flow hijacking or any other typical malicious code injection . We're going to learn why in a minute. They said to understand what the driver expected to see, we converted the patching rules into hexadecimal yara signatures and ran them against a large period appropriate corpus . The results showed a very low hit rate, fewer than 10 files matched two or more patterns. Those matches, however, shared a clear theme. They were precision, calculation tools used with specialized domains such as civil engineering, physics, and physical process simulations . The FPU patch in FAST16.sys was written to corrupt these routines in a controlled way , produc ing alternative incorrect results . This moves fast sixteen out of the realm of generic espion age tooling and into the category of strateg ic sabotage . By introducing small but system ic errors into physical world calculations, the framework could undermine or slow scientific research programs, degrade engineered systems over time, or even contribute to catastrophic damage . A sabotage operation of this kind would be foiled by verifying calculations on a separate system . In an environment where multiple systems share the same network and security posture, the wormable carrier would deploy the malicious driver module to those systems as well, reducing the chance that an independent calculation would diver ge from the corrupted output . At this time, we've been unable to identify all of the target binaries in order to understand the nature of the intended sabotage. We welcome the contributions of the larger InfoSec research community and have included the Yara rules to hunt for these patterns in this post's append ix. Even after deep analysis, Fast 16's driver looks decep tively simple. Beneath that minimal code is a rule driven in memory engine that quietly patches executable code as files are read from disk . The engine relies on a compact set of just over a hundred pattern matching rules and a small dispatch table so it only inspects bytes that are likely to matter. Most patterns correspond to ordinary x86 instructions, but one stands alone. A larger block of floating point FPU code dedicated to precision This injected routine scales values in three internal arrays passed into the function, subtly altering its calculations. Without knowing the exact binaries and workloads being patched, we cannot fully resolve what those arrays represent. Only that the goal is to tamper with numerical results. Our best clues about the intended victims come from matching these patterns against large era appropriate software corpora . The strongest overlaps point to three high precision engineering and simulation suites from the mid-2000s, LS Dyna 970, PKPM, and the Moh I D hydrodynamic modeling plat form all are used for scenarios like crash testing, structural analysis, and environmental modeling. However, LS Dina 970 in particular has been cited in public reporting on Iran's sus pected violations of section T of the JCPOA in studies of computer model ing relevant to nuclear weapons development. So just to make clear how utterly diabolical this is, you're a nation-state hostile to the United States. Researchers inside the USNSA have quietly traced your purchases of PCs and very high end nuclear physics modeling software so they know what you're using to make your calculations . They obtain the same high end modeling tools, which they reverse engineer. They then design a subtle set of tweaks which when app lied to that package as it's being loaded by the operating system into memory will cause its calculations to be wrong. Not enough to call attention to itself , but enough to foul up any designs that depend upon the accuracy of those calculations . And as the Sentinel Labs guys explained, by being a super stealth worm , not only did that allow it to worm its way into the design lab, but having arrived there, it also allowed it to similarly infect every other machine within its environment that modeling software would agree upon the wrong results. As I said , breathtakingly diabolical. The Sutton Labs team concludes by noting something else they observed about the provenance of this worm, writing, as we sought to understand the lineage of this unusual set of components, we noticed a quirk. Strings of the form at sign open parens, pound sign close parens , par dot h space dollar revision colon space one dot two space dollar sign inside the binaries . Inside the binaries point to an unusual source control convention. The at sign parens pound parens prefix is characteristic of early Unix source code control system SCCS or revision control system RCS tooling from the nineteen seventies and eighties. These markers do not affect execution and are redundant in modern Windows kernel drivers. Finding SCCS and RCS artifacts in mid-2000s Windows code is rare . It strongly suggests that the authors of this framework were not typical Windows only developers. Instead, they appear to have been long term engineers whose culture and tool chain came from older high security Unix environments often associated with government or military grade work. This detail supports the view that RCS strings, wow. Service management is using Git. I mean Right. Yeah. Service management was uploaded to virus total nearly a decade ago. It still receives almost no detection. Wow. What yeah. One engine classifies it as generally malicious and even that with limited confidence. For a stealthy, self-propagating carrier that deploys one of the most sophisticated sabotage drivers of its era, that nearly non exist ent detection record is notable. Together with its appearance in the shadow broker's leaked signatures, fast sixteen dot cis forces a reevaluation of our historical understanding of the timeline of development for serious covert sabotage cyber sabotage operations. The code shows that state grade cyber sabotage against physical targets was fully developed and deployed by the mid-two thousands . Embedded scripting engines, narrow compiler-based targeting, and kernel level patching formed a coherent architecture well ahead of better known families, and some of the most important offensive capabilities in the ecosystem may still sit in collections as all as old but interesting samples, lacking the context to h ighlight their true significance . So, as we know, I've frequently dispaired that we're only ever hearing news of Chinese and North Korean and Russian state sponsored attac ks. I've worried and wondered and hoped that the US would be able to give as well as it gets. This certainly suggests that our bases are all likely well covered. And all of this was 21 years ago. Imagine what's probably going on today. Yeah, you could I mean it's got all the earmarks of a nation state because no script kitty, no hacker is gonna write anything with they're not gonna use source control, they're not gonna write anything with a built-in language compiler. This is way more sophisticated and way and in some ways over engineered, right? This is exactly what you'd expect from government government programmers. Well um the they they figured out what probably probab ly Iran was using to do their engineering. They bought a copy, they they they decompiled it, and they they built a patch not so that it not it wouldn't fail, it would just give slightly wrong results. And you who would diabolical. Who would I know it is so diabolical ? Just a little bit off. Well why don't aren't we achiev why aren't we choosing uh achieving nuclear fission. It's not working. It's supposed to be all of our calculations say it should work. Amazing. I mean, then of course Stuxnet follows right on the heels of that, which which destroyed the centrifuges. Spun them up too fast and and made them hurt themselves. Very sophisticated stuff. And this does you you feel I feel like it's sounds like the US government. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean Iran, maybe, but or we thought Stuxnet was Israel plus targeted to Iran. Yeah, and I I I mean certainly Israel, but it feels more the the way this is built feels like feels like the federal our government, the federal government. Yeah. I don't know. It's hard to describe, but it just feels that way. It's too, you know, engineered. Imagine these guys stumbling upon this and following this little bread crumb breadcrumb trail and and realiz ing what this little innocent looking fast sixteen dot cys thing was just sitting around uh you know in in Windows system directories of the era. And what was the thread, the first little thread that they pulled? Uh it was they were uh Lua has a a distinctive fingerprint. So you can tell when there's a Lua a compiled Lua binary that that is interpreted by the Lua LVM. So they just scanned all the all the code back then to for that little fingerprint and they they found some hits that they had never seen before. And they thought, oh, look at that. Lua was in use in 2005. We didn't know that. So then not by Microsoft. Microsoft wouldn't have used it for a driver like that. No. It would have been C . And so it's like, okay, what what and it is a favorite of malware. So they assumed that this was some sort of malware. So then they said, okay, let's reverse engineer this and find out what it does. And little did they suspect. Something that was probably, you know, state-level cyber espion age 21 years ago. Very sophisticated. Very interesting. I love this. It's a great story. This is it's too bad that it really couldn't be made into a movie. It's far too technical, but it's got a great, there's some real spy stuff in here. It's really cool. Yeah. Great. And it's definitely was somebody in a white shirt with a skinny black tie, a pocket protector, and black glasses who wrote this, right? Short sleeves. He's got a you know, he's got his his name on the desk and all that. And then they something, you know, they they they turned it loose somehow close enough to its destination where it just literally wormed its way into the lab. You know, the person who wrote this or the people who wrote this, 21 years later, they're probably retired . Or close to it. You should uh you should get in touch with us. I'd love to hear the story. Or write a book. Cause now it's kind of p it's statute of limitations is run, you know. Well, it does not run on any current uh OSs. Uh it it it will not run on Windows seven uh server two thousand eight or anything since. Right. So it stopped at at 2000 NXP, that that that uh uh lineage. I feel like it was written inside the Pentagon . It was written wherever NSA is, you know. Oh well I'm yeah, okay. Virginia McLean. Yeah. Uh yeah. Very cool stuff. Maybe uh maybe goodwill. to look like it's calc doing complex calculations correctly and and just like slip a digit. Yes. This this is like that you you nailed it, the Enigma project of the Brits or the the the man who never was, you know, the idea of just these subtle little And they never never admitted to it, never said it, it never became public. No one ever knew that this thing was ever there before. There's an Iranian nuclear scientist somewhere going, Ah now I understand why it didn't work. Exactly. Steve, great show. As always. Uh I hope you all uh listen every week because this is the kind of thing uh you miss if you miss a single episode. We do security now on Tuesdays, right after Mac Break Weekly. So it's about 130 Pacific, 430 Eastern, 2030 UTC. I mentioned that because you can't watch this live. If you're in Club Twid, and we hope you are, your support is so important for us as an independent podcast network and for shows like this, without your support, we couldn't do it. So if you're not a member and you get some value out of this, please twit.tv slash club twit and join. You'd get ad-free versions of all the shows, you get access to the Discord, you get lots of special programming. Lots of good stuff. You can watch Slive though, even if you're not a club member, because we stream it in public, YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. So please , you know, watch live if you want, but you don't have to after the fact. You can get copies in two different places. We have it on our website, twit.tv slash SN. There's audio and video there. But Steve has all of the unique versions of the show. First of all, he has a 16 kilobit audio version, which is a little scratchy, but is small. It's a virtue of being small. Also, a 64 kilobit audio, that's full fidelity. He also has these fantastic show notes. And if you want to read this story, this is the place to get it. Uh, page 21 pages of good stuff every week. Um, you can either download it from his site while you're there download ing the podcast, or you can get on the mailing list and subscribe, and that way you'll get it automatically. I got mine on Sunday. Steve Steve works hard all weekend. Uh just to go to grc.com slash mail and uh f ill out your email address. That's so you can whitelist the email address so that you can send them pictures of the week and stuff and comments. But then below it, when you give them the email address, there will also be two unchecked checkboxes, one for the show notes and then one for an announcement. So when for instance the uh new version of uh of uh the DNS benchmark pro comes out you'll you'll send out an email, right? Yep. I'm I I have a a video walkthrough to create and then I'll finally be able to let people know. Nice. Very good. Uh so that's a good way to go. GRC dot com slash email. He also has transcripts written by Elaine Ferris. Really, really good transcripts because a human wrote them. All of that at uh Steve's website. While you're there, pick up a copy of Spinwrite, his bread and butter, the world's best mass storage, maintenance, recovery, and performance enhancing utility. Also, of course, the NS Benchmark Pros are there. Uh that's $9 .99 and worth every penny . Uh we uh will be back next week, next Tuesday. I'll be in Hawaii doing this, Steve. How funny? That'll be interesting. It looks like you've already got the shirt off. I got the shirt. I'm ready. I'm getting ready for the uh trade winds in Kona . Uh we're worried it might rain the whole time we're there, but I'm I'm bringing a uh Star Starlink uh mini to put out in the roof. We'll see. I mean we'll just see. Uh I may it may be a little scritchy, a little scratchy, but uh I will be here for that. And if not, if if for some reason it falls apart, Micah will do the show. But I think I think I'm gonna do all the shows. So I think it'll be Well we've all seen those what uh personal enhancements promotions or the real estate guys who have the waves in the background. They're always in in Hawaii like a timeshare version of security. With palm trees and everything. That'll be great. You'll be very relaxed. I have the fantasy that I'm gonna be able to set up the Starlink on the on the balcony and that you will see all that. We have an ocean view and you'll see I I'm have that fantasy whether that will materialize is another matter. I might be in a spare bedroom. It might be kind of boring. We'll see. Much like Paul and Richard when they're when they are traveling. Exactly. We always try to get somewhere nice, but we can't always get it. So yes, Hawaii has internet uh Galia, but I'm we're staying in a hotel, and you know how hotel internet I tell Wi-Fi is, so I thought I'm bringing my own internet. It was also a proof of concept. Because if I could do this there, I'd do it . Thank you, Steve. Have a wonderful week. And we'll see you next time. All of you on Security Now. See you from Hawaii, my friend. Bye. Hey everybody, it's Leo Laporte. Are you trying to keep up with the world of Microsoft? It's moving fast, but we have two of the best experts in the world, Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell. They join me every Wednesday to talk about the latest from Microsoft on Windows Weekly. It's not a lot more than just Windows. I hope you'll listen to the show every Wednesday. Easy enough. Just subscribe in your favorite podcast client to Windows Weekly or visit our website at twit. tv slash www. Microsoft's moving fast, but there's a way to stay ahead. That's Windows Weekly, every Wednesday on Twit. Security now