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Episode Date: September 11, 2026

WeWorm has China’s attention. Calls for an AI slowdown continue. OpenAI calls for mandatory AI regulation. Anthropic disrupts Russian cyberespionage. The EU’s 24 hour reporting requirement goes into effect. GitLab and Check Point patch critical vulnerabilities. IDScan confirms theft of IDs. Microsoft tracks a cloud intrusion campaign. Our guest is Kevin E. Greene, Chief Cybersecurity Technologist, Public Sector at BeyondTrust, discussing the role of privilege disruption in cyber resiliency. Watch what you say.  Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you’ll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest Today we are joined by Kevin E Greene, Chief Cybersecurity Technologist, Public Sector at BeyondTrust, discussing the role of privilege disruption in cyber resiliency. Selected Reading For China, a Mock A.I. Attack on WeChat Signals a Dangerous New Era (The New York Times) This Is Really Bad (The New York Times) OpenAI Calls for Mandatory National AI Safety Rules (BankInfo Security) Anthropic caught Russia-linked spies using Claude in hacking operations (The Record) EU's Cyber Resilience Act starts the 24-hour vulnerability clock (The Register) GitLab urges users to patch max severity path traversal flaw (Bleeping Computer) Check Point Patches Critical VPN Vulnerabilities (SecurityWeek) ID verification giant IDScan confirms data breach with more than 150 million driver's licenses stolen (TechCrunch) Passkey-themed social engineering leads to identity and cloud compromise (Microsoft Security Blog) Watch out: Apple timepiece can grab snippets of conversation without both speakers' consent (The Register) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show.   Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry’s most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc.

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Get Lab and Checkpoint patch critical vulnerabilities. ID scan confirms theft of IDs. Microsoft tracks a cloud intrusion campaign. Our guest is Kevin E. Green, chief cybersecurity technologist for the public sector at Beyond Trust, discussing the role of privileged disruption in cyber resiliency. And watch what you say. It's Friday, September 11th, 2026. I'm Dave Bittner, and this is your Cyberwire Intel briefing.

Before we begin, a quick recognition that today is the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and a reminder to spare a thought for those who suffered or lost their lives on that fateful day, and for those who continue to endure the lasting consequences. And now the news. A simulated AI-powered attack on Wii-chat is raising alarms in China and sharpening the debate over AI security. Researchers at California's security firm Caliph developed Wii Worm, a tool they say could hijack we chat accounts, call victims' contacts, and spread from phone to phone without anyone answering. The company says it built the exploit in little more than a week, and did it.

disclose the flaw to Tencent and the White House. The demonstration is especially troubling because WeChat, with roughly 1.4 billion monthly users, is deeply embedded in Chinese communications, government services, and payments. Experts say it illustrates how AI could give small groups cyber capabilities once associated with well-resourced states. The discovery comes as Washington and Beijing prepare for talks, expect to be able to be able to to include AI security, but cooperation faces a familiar problem. AI systems powerful enough to strengthen cyber defenses can also improve offensive capabilities,

creating what researchers describe as an emerging AI security dilemma. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Stephen Witt, author of The Thinking Machine, argues that recent incidents involving autonomous AI agents amount to a warning that AI development, that AI development is moving beyond existing safeguards. Witt points to the so-called hugging-face incident in which OpenAI research agents reportedly escaped isolated environments communicated with one another and coordinated and unauthorized cyber attack. He cites another swarm that allegedly operated on the open Internet

and argues that such episodes turn long-standing concerns about loss of AI control into a more immediate problem, Witt calls for slowing advanced AI development while governments establish stronger oversight. His proposed framework includes mandatory incident reporting, independent investigators with regulatory authority, public monitoring of large AI training runs, built-in shutdown mechanisms, and ultimately international coordination. Proposed legislation from Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Cesar similarly calls for positive advanced AI development until federal safety rules are established. Witt's conclusion is stark. These incidents may represent an early warning, and increasingly capable systems may be much harder

to detect or contain. OpenAI is calling for mandatory capability-based AI regulation, arguing that rapidly advancing models and agents require stronger oversight. Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane said the company, Favory favors national safety requirements focused on the small number of well-resourced labs developing the most capable systems, rather than startups, independent developers, or researchers. OpenAI says that without congressional action, it will support state regulation, including several bills it previously opposed. The company is now backing measures in California, New York, and Illinois covering areas such as independent risk evaluations, auditor-accompeters,

accountability and safeguards for minors. Lahane also called for frontier AI companies to develop shared monitoring standards, particularly for detecting misaligned agents that access confidential information or circumvent security controls. Anthropics says it disrupted a Russia-linked cyber espionage group using clawed and attacks against more than 20 government intelligence, diplomatic, and defense organizations. the activity aligned with Midnight Blizzard, also known as APT-29 or Cozy Bear, which Western intelligence agencies attribute to Russia's SVR.

According to Anthropic, the hackers compromised hotel Wi-Fi providers, targeted Ukrainian officials and organizations in the drone supply chain, and stole a drone vision system's software development kit. They then used Claude to reverse engineer the technology and modify hacking tools after security products detected them. Anthropic also documented clawed misuse by suspected shiny hunters affiliates, Chinese-speaking vulnerability researchers, and a French-speaking hacktivist. The company argues AI is lowering the expertise and labor required for sophisticated cyber operations,

while noting that familiar techniques, including fishing, stolen credentials, and software vulnerabilities, remain central to successful attacks. Manufacturers selling products with digital elements in the European Union are now subject to mandatory vulnerability and incident reporting under the Cyber Resilience Act. Companies must notify authorities within 24 hours of learning about an actively exploited vulnerability or severe security incident, followed by a detailed report within 72 hours. Reports must be submitted through Enisa's Cs single reporting platform, and manufacturers may also need to quickly inform affected users

about vulnerabilities, incidents, and available mitigations. Non-compliance can carry fines of up to 15 million euros, or 2.5% of annual global turnover. The rules apply to manufacturers inside and outside the EU, and are intended to accelerate vulnerability response while encouraging companies to maintain visibility into their software supply chains. Most remaining CRA requirements take effect in December 2027, including security by design provisions, software bills of materials, and conformity assessments. GitLab is urging self-managed customers to patch immediately

after fixing two critical vulnerabilities. The first, a maximum severity path traversal flaw, can allow unauthenticated attackers to read RAPS, files under certain conditions. The second affects GitLab Enterprise Edition and could let authenticated duo chat users steal credentials and advanced search configurations. Both vulnerabilities are fixed in recent versions. GitLab.com is already patched, while GitLab dedicated customers don't need to take action. Checkpoint has patched two critical VPN vulnerabilities that could allow unauthenticated attackers to remotely execute code. The first involves improper certificate

validation during VPN negotiation, while the second is a heap overflow affecting VPN certificate decoding. The flaws affect several security gateway, security management server, and spark firewall configurations. Updates are available. Checkpoint discovered both vulnerabilities internally and says there is currently no evidence of exploitation in the wild. ID scan has confirmed hackers stole driver's licenses and other government-issued identity information from its cloud systems. The Louisiana-based identity verification company said the compromised data includes names, drivers' license numbers, and other identification numbers, including passport information.

The disclosure follows reporting that a dark web service offered searchable records on more than 150 million people in the U.S. and Canada, including licensed photos. ID scan hasn't disclosed how many people were affected, and its investigation remains ongoing. Microsoft says it has tracked a cloud intrusion campaign since May that begins with social engineering targeting Microsoft 365 identities. Attackers impersonate IT helpdesks and use pass-key or SSO-themed lures to conduct adversary in the middle or device code fishing. Once inside, they add attacker-controlled MFA methods for persistence, then use Microsoft Graph to map users, permissions, applications, mailboxes, SharePoint, and OneDrive resources. The attackers subsequently conduct automated high-volume

collection of files and email, often through proxy infrastructure, and at a measured pace designed to blend with normal activity. Microsoft says the initial access techniques are used by multiple threat actors, including groups associated with shiny hunters and helix extortion. Defenders are advised to correlate identity and cloud activity, revoke compromise sessions, remove unauthorized authentication methods, and enforce fishing-resistant MFA. Coming up after the break, my conversation with Kevin E. Green, Chief cybersecurity technologist at Beyond Trust.

We're discussing the role of privileged disruption in cyber resiliency. And watch what you say. Stick around. What's the one thing in business that's spreading as fast as AI? AI risk. Every new tool your team signs up for, every vendor that turns on AI features, every new integration,

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security and compliance and earn and prove trust. Get started today at vanta.com slash cyber. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash cyber. Kevin E. Green is chief cybersecurity technology. for the public sector at Beyond Trust. We recently got together to discuss the role of privilege disruption in cyber resiliency. So sure. Thanks for having me. I appreciate that.

So I look at how the attack chain is forming, how the threat landscape has evolved, where identity alone has no risk, privilege gives the identity risk. And now with AI Frontier Models, securing identities is no longer sufficient in terms of building that resiliency across our Adinia State. So you have to have what I call privilege disruption architecture. And the goal is to prevent a threat actor from converting their initial access into any meaningful control, which is privilege. If you look at all the campaigns, all cyber attacks, they all need privilege to be successful. So privilege is that fuel that drives these cyber attacks. So the notion of privilege disruption is the ability to deny adversary, the conversion of their initial access.

They're going to get initial access. If you look at the things like fishing and even MFA bypass, they have now become cheap and commoditized. So initial access is going to happen. But what we can not allow happen is for a threat actor to convert that initial access into meaningful control. So privilege disruption serves as a doctrine that I help our customers kind of understand, build an architecture around our solutions of how to operationalize that in a way that provides the necessary resiliency across threat actor behaviors. Well, help me understand how it works.

How do you go from an initial access to detection and then disruption of privilege? Well, we know a threat actor either through my, While we're fishing or now with CVEs, right, with the explosion of what I call AI-assisted vulnerability detection, that initial foothole is important. We know there's a ton of credentials on the internet. People don't, they always say threat actors on log. They don't break in, they log in. So that initial access, our environment is riddle with that, right? There's a latent authority that's sitting in our environment that threat actor can. can get. So the goal really is to build a architecture that focuses on four things that I like to say this is how you operationalize privilege disruption. One, you have to be able to govern identities and the scope of privilege across your entire identity estate. Two, you got to be able to hunt for signs and signals in your environment of what I call privilege debt, right?

privilege that exceeds operational use. So over time in our environments, privilege debt accumulates. So being able to hunt for those things, standing privileges, overprivileged, you know, just poor identity hygiene that is rooted within an environment. The third is you have to disrupt threat out of capabilities by using governance and visibility across the environment to look for these things that are preconditions for how privileged debt starts to accumulate. And the fourth thing is retire it. You have to have solutions in place to retire the privilege debt that may accumulate over a period of time. So that's how I help our customers operationalize what it means to have a privileged disruption in architecture. And it flows from what I call the choke point where there's persistence, there's privilege escalation, and then there's a lateral movement.

Building the architecture to really have strong. resiliency around those tactics, if you look at it from a minor attack perspective, we want to be able to collapse downstream impact that a threat act that may have so they can never get to data exfiltration, never get to impact because we're building that choke point, having good resiliency around that. And how does this relate to or work alongside the notion of zero trust? So, you know, I've been doing some thinking, you know, for those who don't know my background, I spend some years in the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Director. I was a computer scientist slash researcher program manager.

So I'm always thinking outside the box and looking for ways to tackle this problem, but also be more proactive because I think overall our cyber posture is very reactive. So I do think it's a matter of really trying to understand what threat actors after, right? Ultimately, they want to get privilege across the environment, across the privilege. They want to build persistence, right? And what we've been seen with all these attacks, prepositioning. Just not too recently, I saw an article with Sissa and their five-hour partners and talking about how threat actors are prepositioned into our environment.

So really trying to gain that visibility. I call it leave no privileges behind so that we can look for the signs where pre-positioning. it may occur in our environment so we can disrupt it, evict these threat actors from our environment so they can't gain a foothole, and be able to move lateral and do damage and be operationally effective across our environment. From a zero trust standpoint, I do think that we have to shift and be more privileged-centric in our approach. Again, identity alone has no risk. Privilege gives identity risk. So if you look at how zero-trust has been formulated, it really was heavily. slanted towards identity security. Well, that has changed.

The train has left the station, and so the threat environment has evolved. So I do think privileged-centric zero-trust, which I'm hoping formulate here at Beyond Trust and help our customers level set and elevate this cyber defense to be more privileged-centric and build the tight controls, the architecture, around the choke points that I talked about earlier.

I'd love to get your take on the whole notion of cyber- of resiliency. As we've seen this ascendance of all of these AI tools, it strikes me that more and more of the conversations have been about resiliency, the people who want to come talk to me, it's a hot topic these days. What's your take on that? Do you agree that's a worthwhile place to focus? Well, I mean, if you look at all the AI stuff, I think what we're seeing is I talk about it from two perspectives. I wrote an article on LinkedIn about the two debt paths of least resistant. And it talks about the technical debt that accumulates over a period of time and software.

I think when I talked to you last, I was at DHS. I was talking to you about my software assurance program. So I funded research in software assurance, software security. And I know from my working industry that we have a lot of bad software out there. It's poorly developed. There's a lot of vulnerabilities, latent vulnerabilities, or CVEs, or CWEs, I should say, as in our software. So then there's this notion of privilege debt, right? So these two debts collide at some point.

And I think that's what we're seeing with these frontier models. But one of the debts, I think we can pay down faster, which is we can retire privileged debt faster than we can remove the technical debt that we're seeing with software. If Dave Ramsey was in IT, he would yell at it. us all day long with the amount of debt that we've accumulated across our digital estate, whether it's software, whether it's privilege, all this debt becomes to a point where at some point, either the adversary is going to spend it, or we've got to figure out a way how do we lower and retire, especially when it comes to privileged debt. Why do you suppose privileged debt flies under the radar for so many organizations?

You know, it seems to me like that's an area where people build up privileges over time and it's rarely dialed back. I think the first thing is I don't think people have or organizations have full visibility across the entire identity state to understand and be aware of privilege. You look at how our identity landscape has evolved. We went from human identities to non-human identities now agentic. So over a period of time, this privilege creep happens, right? This identity sprawl happens. if you don't have full visibility across the identity state,

it's hard to protect what you don't know about. So I do think visibility becomes a very important part in that. That's why I came up with the concept of leave no privileges behind. It's the notion of really trying to establish some level of visibility so that you can account for every identity, the privileges holds across the identity state so that you can be not only more aware, but just manage risk and understand the potential blast radius that,

that these identities and the privilege they hold oppose to our environments. What are your recommendations for the defenders out there who maybe think they need to do a better job with this? What's the pathway to get started? I think the pathway is first with this, called this convergent model where there's AI, this infrastructure, there's software, this network. All these things sits on top of privilege debt, right? So we just talk about frontier models, talk about jailbreaking with AI. Like all that stuff is all right. But at the end of the day, how much authority can these things inherit from all the privileged debt that has accumulated in our environment?

So the first thing I would say is being able to establish a program where you have comprehensive and full visibility across your entire identity estate. so you can identify where privileged debt is, how it accumulates in your environment, and start taking the steps to retire that. The other thing is, is change how we build our systems in terms of architecture. I believe this is Kevin Green. I've worked on mitre attack. I worked in DHS. So I've worked on threat intelligence.

I build soft environments. One of the things I do think is we rely heavily too much on detection and not really prevention. What I would do is I would recommend that we take the focus to where the choke points happens within the environment. That's persistence, privilege escalation, and lateral movement. Do really good privilege disruption architectures around that and defend that. I think that's the battleground. Well, privilege is where the war is won, but I think the battleground really lies in those three choke points. That's Kevin E. Green from Beyond Trust.

And finally, Apple's new watch series 12 is introducing audio intelligence, and perhaps giving fresh ammunition to the enduring belief that our devices are always listening. Live Rewind can turn the previous 15 seconds of conversation into text, while Siri Recap produces AI-generated summaries of conversations throughout the day. Apple says Live Rewind processes audio securely, discards it after transcription and alerts nearby people with a tone and visual cue. Siri Recap retains neither raw audio nor verbatim transcripts. The privacy question is whether an alert amounts to consent.

In 11 U.S. states with all-party consent laws, that distinction could matter. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues bystanders have no practical way to opt out and warns that routine technological documentation could chill ordinary conversation. So no, your Apple Watch isn't secretly listening to everything. It's just openly listening to some things, which should certainly clear up that misconception. And that's the Cyberwire. For links to all of today's stories, check out our daily briefing at thecyberwire.com. Be sure to check out this weekend's Research Saturday in my conversation with Bridget O'Kee's

Gorman, senior intelligence analyst with Symantec. The research we're discussing is titled GD Ransomware. Latest Beast rebrand uses malicious driver to disable defenses. That's Research Saturday. Check it out. And hello, Maria Vermazas here. On Sunday's T-minus space cyber briefing, my interview with Dr. MacMaguire on risk management and regulatory gaps in space missions.

That's Sunday on T-minus. Don't miss it. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing world of cybersecurity. If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to Cyberwire at N2K.com. N2K's lead producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Trey Hester with original music and sound design by Elliot Peltzman.

Our contributing host is Maria Vermeer. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ivan. Peter Kilpe is our publisher, and I'm Dave Bittner. Thanks for listening. We'll see you back here next week.