Risky Business - Risky Business #853 -- We're all gonna die, apparently
Episode Date: September 16, 2026On this week’s show Patrick Gray and James Wilson are joined by former US Cyber Command executive director turned PwC’s Cyber, Data & Technology Risk leader Morg...an Adamski to talk through the week’s news, including: More tech guys penned more open letters and AI will destroy us all! Another Wednesday, another congregation of OpenAI agents on wikis… yawn OpenAI agents were behind the headscratching RubyGems hacking campaign in May The FBI will disrupt more adversary operations, NSA is creating more mission centres, lawmakers want sanctions on hackers-for-hire… Release more hounds! So many platforms, so many bugs, so many patches breaking other stuff Much, much more… This week’s show is brought to you by Airlock Digital. Its co-founders Daniel Schell and David Cottingham join Patrick to talk about how Airlock has integrated itself with Crowdstrike via its Falcon Foundry platform. This episode is also available on YouTube Show notes AI researcher says there is 'substantial probability' AI could kill all humans in next decade | NBC News Tech Dario Amodei — We Must Pace the Frontier | Social Signals China spy chief points at US AI models in cyber threat warning | therecord.media Weixin Official Accounts Platform | Trump calls concerns over A.I. destroying humanity a “hoax” | NBC News Tech Dr_Gingerballs (@Dr_Gingerballs) on X | X (formerly Twitter) Sam Altman backs Anthropic CEO's call to slow down the global AI race | NBC News Anthropic: Detecting and countering misuse of AI, September 2026 | anthropic.com AI lets small actors run state-level hacking campaigns, Anthropic report finds | cyberscoop.com Users in Houthi-held Yemen tried to develop advanced weapons with AI, Anthropic says | apnews.com Anthropic caught Russia-linked spies using Claude in hacking operations | therecord.media OpenAI's rogue agents used at least 10 more sites for unauthorized comms, researchers say | reuters.com Researchers say OpenAI agents were behind May hacking campaign targeting RubyGems | cyberscoop.com Anthropic claims Moonshot, DeepSeek secretly diverted user requests to Claude | South China Morning Post WeWorm | Social Signals Hackers exploit Tencent app flaw to deploy GrayRabbit malware | BleepingComputer New FBI cyber strategy promises increase in adversary disruptions | Cybersecurity Dive US disrupts Xinbi Guarantee marketplace fueling the cyber scam economy | therecord.media Thorough reorganization at NSA will create five 'mission centers,' including cyber and AI | therecord.media Lawmakers call on Treasury to sanction hackers-for-hire | cyberscoop.com CISA: WatchGuard RCE flaw now exploited in ransomware attacks | BleepingComputer Dutch NCSC: Critical Check Point VPN flaws exploitation is imminent | BleepingComputer GitLab’s critical flaw is already drawing internet-wide probes | cyberscoop.com Cisco warns customers of actively exploited zero-day in email gateways | cyberscoop.com 4 groups caught using the same Chrome and Windows exploit kit | Ars Technica September Windows Server updates break Remote Desktop Services | BleepingComputer Microsoft confirms KB5002914 Excel update breaks copy and paste | BleepingComputer Microsoft: September updates break audio on some Windows PCs | BleepingComputer ClickFix attacks infecting PCs and Macs are going viral | arstechnica.com Passkey-themed phishing attacks lead to Microsoft 365 data theft | BleepingComputer
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hey everyone and welcome to Risky Business.
My name's Patrick Gray.
Got a great show for you this week.
We will be joined as always by my colleague James Wilson,
who is co-hosting today, as well as Morgan Adamski,
who keen listeners would remember was on the show once before back,
I think in 2023, where we recorded an episode at the NSA's Cyber Collaboration Center
where Morgan was at the time.
She has most recently, her most recent government job was executive director of U.S. Cyber Command.
And these days she is at PWC. What's your job there, Morgan, at PWC?
I oversee the cyber data tech risk work, so lots of different things.
So I guess your head honcho of cyber at the cyber practice of PWC, a pretty impressive title.
So thank you very much for joining us. This week's show is brought to you by Air,
I'll lock digital and the founding team at Aeroch Digital will be joining us in this week's sponsor interview to have a chat about how they've integrated their product with CrowdStrike.
And I guess to have a bit of a chat about how that whole CrowdStrike integration works because, you know, CrowdStrike has really sort of successfully turned itself into this like security platform company.
And yeah, these integration things are CrowdStrike Foundry, I think it's called.
It's actually pretty interesting.
So Daniel and David from Airlock will be joining me later on.
after this week's news segment to talk through all of that.
But of course, it is time to get into the news now.
And I guess we're going to start with the sobering news, Morgan,
that we're apparently all going to die.
This has been the week's news cycle.
We had some guy leave one of the frontier labs
and do the interview circuit talking about how there was a 10% chance
that AI was going to end humanity,
which is like, you know,
That doesn't sound great.
And then since then we've had the chief executive of Anthropic publish a open letter.
Again, tech guys with their open letters talking about how we must pace the frontier.
And, you know, it's all very dangerous and we need to have embedded overseers.
And we need government regulation and all of this stuff.
It's just been a week of absolute panic shrieking about how the text generators are going to come and kill us all.
I mean, you could probably tell from the way I just described that that I'm not on board with the
we're all ruined vibes.
But what did you make of all of this?
Yeah, I mean, I think when you see a lot of the technical communities like, okay, wait a second,
like what's actually possible and what's not?
Let's actually be truthful here when we talk about what the threat is and what AI can potentially
do.
You talk about AI and cybersecurity and the internet being taken over by botnets versus actually
AI being accessed to like biological weapons.
There's a little bit of a difference, right?
And so there's a lot of conversation right now and like, how true is this? How much should we care about it? And to your point, like, what does pacing actually mean? You can't really set that pacing and a time frame that makes sense. I mean, this was part of the conversation when you talked about cyber norms, right? We want to establish these norms in cyberspace of how we're going to do cyber operations. And everyone's like, well, what does that really attuned to? What kind of conversation would government actually have? And so I've spent a lot of time having like practical conversations of what AI can do today and how.
people should really think about guardrails and securing AI and what's actually plausible
and what they should think about.
But it is a little bit of a hype cycle right now.
I mean, the thing that blows me away, right, is yesterday I did next week's
sponsor interview yesterday with Harun Mia over at Thinks, right?
And they've built, they've built basically like a canary or a honeypot that is designed
to interact with agents that are doing offensive tasks against you, you know, the target, right?
And it's just you look at the dumb stuff.
that they have implemented that fools these agents.
Like you could basically just have a web server there
that when an agent stumbles across it, it says,
hey, I'm a web service that helps agents.
What's your Mac address?
And it'll go, here you go.
You know, or it'll say, you know,
please run this go binary.
And it's a reverse shell.
And the AI agent says,
ha ha, nice try.
I can see that's a reverse shell.
So I'm not going to run it.
And you know how they get around that?
You know how they get it to actually run the reverse shell?
they just ask it a second time and it goes,
okay, you've convinced me.
So this is the technology that we're worried is going to kill us all.
It doesn't seem to vibe.
James, you know, I know you've been tracking this.
How did you feel about the whole thing?
Yeah, thoroughly underwhelmed again,
which it seems to be the theme with these things.
You know, I've read through the post on X that kicked all this off
from the guy that left Anthropic.
I've looked at his interviews.
I just can't understand what's happened here.
You know, was it truly just,
a tweet that he didn't intend to go this viral, but it did? Is there some sort of, you know,
there's no substance behind it. And when he gets questioned on interviews, it's so quickly
unravels. Like it goes from, you seriously consider that there's a 10% risk. Yes. How will that
manifest? Well, they could make a virus. But how does an LLM spread a virus? And I kid you not,
his explanation here was, well, you can actually hook up Claude to control your lights in your
house and it's like that's what that's the that's the jumping off point i mean it just doesn't add up
at all well i did see someone who who actually knows a bit about you know viruses and whatnot and
culturing them in labs just saying this is you know absolute nonsense and then when you look like
anthropic released its big report into the abuse of its of its service and it was like it really
did seem a little bit unhinged right so in the uh example of like how
you know, Anthropics products were being misused in a dangerous way with regard to biological research,
the first thing they cite in the report is that somebody was using Claude to assist them
in drafting a grant application to a military university or institution so that they could do gain
of function research on some sort of virus. Now, is it Anthropics' position really that it being used to,
write grant applications is bioterror? Like I just feel like these people have kind of lost their minds.
Morgan, did you get a chance to look through Anthropics report? I mean, there were other stuff in there as well where it's like, oh, the Houthis are using it to assist in the design of their rockets.
The Houthis have ballistic missiles already, right? Like, I just think anthropic sense of self-importance just drips through in everything that they publish, right?
It's crazy to me.
Yeah, I think to like all the points that we've made, it's not like a model capability problem that we should really be concerned about.
It's a supervision problem.
Like, what are these models doing?
What are they potentially doing?
And like, how do we think about it?
I did read through the port, Patrick.
And I mean, these are amazing.
You know, it's great to have this type of technology that can help you to do this like initial reconnaissance activity so that you wouldn't have to put human capacity against it when we had to do like offensive cyber operations.
So that exists as an initial step, but it's nothing groundbreaking in terms of what they're doing new, novel.
type technique that's like, oh, this is earth-shadowing. They're just using a technology that's
helping them kind of move a little faster than what we were traditionally do from a manual
perspective. Yeah, I mean, it's worth keeping in mind that one of the reasons, Anthropic
thinks we need massive government regulation. I also think Dario doesn't really understand how
governments work and what governments are for. And we saw this in the whole flap over
them refusing to supply the Pentagon unless the Pentagon said that it wouldn't
mass surveillance of Americans and you know we've subsequently seen the emails where the
Pentagon officials were extremely confused by saying like what is your theory of how we wind up
using this to do mass surveillance like what are you talking about and again I think
Dario seems to think that there's some magical regulation lever that the White House can
pull that's going to solve all of these problems now for its part meanwhile
Trump has come out and said that it's a big hoax it's a big hoax as he does and
what's really needed is a high IQ president as in him
and everything's going to be fine,
which honestly sort of seems like the appropriate response here.
You know, I've got a theory of Trump, which I'll get to in a minute.
But, you know, you contrast this, you know,
you look at what's coming out of the Trump White House,
and then you look at what Chen Yishin,
who's the party secretary and minister for the Ministry of State Security,
has been writing about AI.
And you look at what the Chinese are putting out there.
Like this is basically the head of the Chinese,
a senior leader from the Chinese intelligence community,
you look at the way they're thinking about and writing about AI,
and it seems much, you know, it seems very, very intelligent.
And I mean, obviously there's some weird features
of the way that they think about it,
as in it must align with Xi Jinping thought and, you know,
all of this and support socialist values.
But the way that they're approaching this is much more sober.
What did you think as someone whose former intelligence community
reading through the MSS,
ministers, thoughts on AI. I thought that would have been fascinating for you in particular.
Yeah, I mean, quite honestly, they're not going to pace. They're not going to slow down.
It's all part of their strategy. For multiple years, they've written to the fact that they want
to have that technological advantage. They're going to invest in these type of things. So like,
that, yeah, no, we're good is a typical response you would have expected to come from them
of like, hey, yeah, we understand that there'd be some great things we're going to be able to do
with this and that we don't see any problem with it. And we know how to control our own stuff.
that seems like an American problem.
Yeah.
So, like, I found that very, very true to code in, like, terms of, oh, yeah, like,
there is going to be no general consensus across the globe that we should all be slowing
down and pacing ourselves right now.
No, 100%.
And, you know, my theory on Trump that I wanted to mention, too, which I think explains a lot
of what he does, is I would just describe him as not a warrior, right?
Like, this is my big unified theory on Trump, which is why you see some very forward-leaning
cyber policies, because he's not warrants.
about escalation. It's why you saw things in his first term where he approved an airstrike against
Kasim Soleimani. Doesn't worry about it, you know? Venezuela, not worried, right? I think sometimes
he should worry. I think sometimes when things tend to go wrong for this White House, it's because he
didn't worry where he should have. But, you know, if you just explain his policy decisions or
analyze them through the prism of this guy doesn't really worry about anything, like everything sort of
starts to make sense. James, what were your thoughts when you were reading about the Chinese take on
AI? Because I just thought it was, you know, I just thought it was really interesting to get that
insight from, you know, the other side. Yeah, I think it's a very reasonable take. And I think when you get
to the heart of it, I think what China is actually concerned about, although they're perhaps not
of, you know, not completely avert in what they wrote here, but they are concerned about the fact that
we have Mythos and GPT Cyber 5.5.5 in the hands of a very small.
number of people with almost exclusive access to the compute required to run that at massive,
massive scale. You know, I've seen a few people ask the question recently in the last couple of weeks.
Why haven't we seen China's models do these same sorts of sandbox escapes? And my thought here is,
and it kind of comes through in some of the things he's written about, is that it's not that
the capability is not there necessarily. It's that the lack of compute and the other constraints
that are there that is the big difference between the position China's in versus the US is in
is the reason why we're not seeing the same sort of activity from these China.
his models. Yeah, you're not just going to throw 20 a gazillion tokens at benchmarking, right?
That's for the decadent bourgeois in the capitalist West. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that makes sense.
I do think there's my favorite take on all of this is from a Twitter user calling themselves Dr. Gingerballs
who wrote in response to Sartia Nadella's big hand-wringing post about superintelligence and AI
risks. Dr. Gingerballs quoted that and said, no one cares such a insufferable LinkedIn
slop. Microsoft Teams takes 10 minutes to load for some reason and crashes my desktop.
Outlook focused mode makes me miss all sorts of important emails. Your office products are
constantly bothering me to generate slop. No one wants to see. Your software is an actual dumpster.
Stop circle jerking with AI grifters and fix your broken stuff, man.
which I think, I mean, for me, this was, this sort of ties into the Haroon stuff as well, right?
Which is we're worried that these text generators are coming to kill us and they can't really seem to deliver a lot on a lot of their promise.
Yeah, I'm not sure what Ginger Balls has a doctorate in, but I'm definitely on board with his take.
Yeah, I had to go look up Ginger Balls, by the way.
I had to go follow this.
Now, I was a little like, oh, but, you know, it is one of those things like there are practical daily matters that we've got to deal with first.
before we have all these massive ideas that we have to, you know, struggle our way through.
Yeah.
Now, moving on, and we've got more open AI agents chatting with each other on wikis.
James, this seems these days it's just yawn, isn't it?
I mean, it just seems like digital exhaust.
Oh, another AI swarm, cooking up a conspiracy, you know, yawn.
Getting to the stage where if there was a wiki out there that's old enough to be able to allow
modification of its posts with get requests and it's not being used by open AI swarms,
that would at this point be a little bit more interesting than yet more of these reports coming to
light. I mean, I think this is one of the reasons why people are so scared, though,
is this sort of stuff happening, right? Like, Morgan, do you think that it's this,
I think there's a number of reasons that this sort of, these sort of anxious feelings permeate
through normal people, right? I think there's the anxiety that AI is coming for your jobs.
which the Frontier Labs have stoked those fears,
which has been really counterproductive in my view.
And then you've got all of these reports about agents going rogue and hacking things,
which I think is much scarier if you don't understand the mechanics of exactly what's happened here,
which just to us looks like, oh, look, the Bash script wrote itself
and went and did these weird random things, right?
You know, do you think that goes some way to explaining why there's such a panic about this?
Yeah, I mean, you definitely have the people that don't fully understand the mechanics,
of everything that are just seeing these reports. And quite honestly, the fact that these reports
indicate that this activity has been happening for some time and it wasn't discovered or wasn't noticed
unless an agent actually leaves like the actual model name or what they're using within
their capabilities or their activity. Like I think that makes people feel very unnerved,
uncertain of like there's things going on that I don't know about. So there must be something worse
hiding behind this black curtain that I should be super concerned about. And so when people tell me,
oh, this horrible thing's going to happen, this doomsday event, they're going to believe it because
potentially they feel like they don't know what they don't know, and therefore it has to be possible.
And I think that's really, really concerning for a lot of people right now, just because they feel
that everything's so volatile, everything's uncertain, they don't fully understand what the technology
can and cannot do.
They see all these reports coming about about the fact that these things are being discovered,
weeks, days, months after it occurred, and it feels like we have no controls in place to make them
feel any safer.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's 100% right.
I think the thing that these frontier labs people ignore too is that we have had big computing disasters in the past and the world kept spinning.
You know, you look as recently as a few years ago when we had the CrowdStrike blue screen of deathageddon, you know, where you went to your supermarket and they were rolling back to, you know, different procedures to check people out because all of their computers were stuffed.
Were you actually working for Woolies at that time, James?
No, I think I'd moved on to build kind at that point, but I did actually go into the grocery store just to take in the sheer chaos.
Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, we have had these things and like, you know, what I don't understand is how we go from major computing bad events to the destruction of society.
You know, I think that's a little overwrought.
However, what are the legitimate concerns?
And this is something I want to touch on briefly before we move on to our next topic.
And James, you know, some of the concerns that have been highlighted that I think,
a reel when it comes to model alignment and whatever is the models are getting better at optimizing
to pass benchmarks but it doesn't actually tell us a lot about their inherent behavior when they're
not being measured against a benchmark. Am I making sense? It seems like oh, I'm being tested so I'm
going to behave a certain way but when I'm not being tested I'll just behave a different way.
Sort of like the was it the Volkswagen diesel scandal from years ago, the emissions scandal.
But yeah, I mean and the other concerns, legitimate concerns seem to be.
that we're losing a little bit of insight
into the way that they chain their thoughts together and whatnot.
You know, what can you cite as the actual real concerns here?
I think the real concerns are,
it's two things you mentioned,
but if I sort of ground them in examples here,
the first challenge is we could be heading in down a direction
where the models are aligned,
only insofar as they aligned at passing alignment benchmarks, right?
That's essentially the concern of the over-benchmarking here.
and what do they do when they're not in that benchmarking mode?
Losing insight into their thinking, I think, is more of a short-term concern.
Like, it is a worry that we've gone from, you know, plain English natural language chain of thought
that you can look into to now these neuralese, sort of shortened form of agents interacting.
But all these things come back down to the only place that we are seeing these concerns
actually turn into not even real harms, but actually, I guess, measurable impacts out there in the world
in terms of these agent swarms are places where there is millions and millions and millions of
dollars worth of compute being dedicated to power these agents to go and do these things on that
task.
And whilst that's the case, I just don't see this being a large spread problem.
You know, the pace at which the agents get better and require less compute to do the same
sort of 10,000 agent swarm, I don't think that keeps pace with the overall sort of fear and
uncertainty of, you know, they're coming to destroy us all. Yeah, yeah, Terminator 2,
Judgment Day kind of vibes, right? But look, let's look at some actual tangible,
fun, bad stuff that agents have done. We've got a story here about there was this really
curious incident affecting Ruby Jams back in May, and I think Socket blogged about it, but no one
really knew what had happened. It turns out what was going on is open AI agents were exploiting
some sort of bug in the Ruby Jems ecosystem so that they could get themselves free compute.
And what they were going to do with that compute, I don't think is entirely clear,
but it's just another example of like agents behaving badly.
Yeah, this is a great story because at the time in May, you're right, Socket blogged about it,
but almost was, I think they were almost on sort of the edge of thinking,
eh, this is not worth spending time on, because it was just bizarre.
It was like hundreds, if not thousands of Ruby Jems packages being posted.
But when you looked into them, it was like, there's nothing super malicious about this, right?
It certainly wasn't your typical supply chain malware that you'd see land.
What it was was actually that there's like a yard options file, and yard is the system that
creates documentation for these Ruby gems.
What had happened here is the Ruby gems had been uploaded, sorry, the Ruby packages had
been uploaded to Ruby gems, which is like the package registry for Ruby.
With these specially crafted yard ops that people didn't quite understand why
that was even useful or what it was trying to do.
But as we fast forward to now, what we've realized is the flag that was present in those
yard option files basically was dash-dash load, which says, you know, hey, as you're creating
this documentation, please also load this extra library that I want you to use, which is a nice
way to bootstrap in your own remote code execution.
But people all scratch their heads at the time because they're like, but dash-dash load doesn't
actually do that because we now have dash-dash-safe, and we have had since 20.
2012 because we knew that that was a way for Yard to be turned into a remote code execution vulnerability.
But in 2019, Yard starts packaging up, you know, basically the deliverables of Yard as containerized packages,
and they forgot to put in the dash-dash safe flag for containerized versions of Yard, which is what Ruby Jems was using for documentation generation.
And so the wild end of this story is not only was it clear that the Open AI agents understood that a containerized version
of yard was a really neat way to get a free container for its own use, but actually anyone in the
wild could have been exploiting this since 2019. Yeah, I mean, it's just a great example of where
you've uncovered some activity where, I mean, you know, this is the sort of thing that you might
have seen people doing, right? Or they would have been deploying crypto miners or whatever.
But, you know, in this case, it just turned out to be agents. Now, Morgan, I want to bring you
in on this one. This is a hilarious story, actually, because it turns out this is, this also, I think,
ties back to the Anthropic report.
But it turns out that users of Kimmy, the Chinese open weight model, were actually getting
some of their requests diverted to Claude.
And the thinking is the reason that this was happening was so that, you know, the operators
of Kimmy, who's the company again, James?
Moonshot-Moonshot AI.
Moonshot AI.
So the thinking was they're redirecting some of these queries to, um,
clawed so that they can get those traces and then use them as, you know, fuel for distillation, right?
So just take a proportion of them.
But the funny thing is it looks like a whole bunch of like foreign intelligence services that were trying to use.
Kimmy wound up actually redirecting their, having their requests redirected to Claude,
which I'm sure the bosses at the MSS weren't super impressed by.
But what did you make of this?
because I find this story, I think, is the funniest one of the week.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny.
I wouldn't say that it hasn't necessarily happened before when you're doing your standard
intelligence collection, when you realize that maybe something you intended or didn't intend to happen
is actually occurring.
I mean, I didn't dig deep into this one.
I did find it funny and hilarious in the fact that all of the MSS requests are specifically
intelligence services were now going to Claude and they were leveraging it to be able to collect
information.
And it's like the easiest way to get information from the foreign services.
I found that interesting, but like doesn't necessarily surprise me, unfortunately,
because we're all trying to find workarounds.
And versions of it have potentially happened in the past.
Well, so this is what I was curious about is I imagine that we've had instances where,
you know, MSS people were doing some homework or whatever and using Google Docs or whatever.
Like that must, that sort of thing must have happened in the past, right?
I mean, humans sometimes do stupid stuff.
And so it's not, not intentionally.
I mean, that's the fact of the matter.
I mean, we've all seen it in a lot of cyber incidents and things that happened and someone just did something wrong because they weren't thinking or they weren't paying attention or it was 2 a.m. when they were trying to solve this problem.
And unfortunately, they made a stupid mistake and it was like, oh, that was really dumb.
But it was the easiest way for you to get into a network or for you to be able to have an incident.
And so that kind of stuff happens, unfortunately, all the time, which is funny, just not surprising.
Now, James, you had a note here, which is that there is a wrinkle in the story, which is Claude doesn't omit its reasoning like Kimmy and Deepseek.
do. So for someone actually watching Kimmy or Deepseek work, this would have been noticeable. So why did
someone not notice that their transcripts were not appearing properly? Well, I think this is where we've
got to look at what can Anthropic really claim here. They must be, so obviously Anthropic is
seeing these requests hit them and they're responding to them. I don't doubt that. But to then make
the claim that Moonshot was actually then providing the user with the responses from Claude, I'm not sure
that you can really draw that inference, if you pardon the pun, because it would have just
looked so different.
In any given Kimi session or even a deep-sex session, that reasoning chain is extensive, and
so it would have felt like a bug to all of a sudden be getting no reasoning back.
I suspect, and I'm just speculating here, I wonder if what's happened is that, you know,
yes, I'm sure they were farming out these requests to Anthropic, but I don't think they were
then presenting the anthropic responses to the user.
I think they were probably keeping them side by side with what they had come out of the
Kimi models and then offline using them for comparison and Delta between them to say, well,
how do we train our model to get closer to this response? Meanwhile, the user would have just
seen what Kimi was going to provide. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. All right, so we've got
a couple other stories here about the FBI talking about its new cyber strategy. It's promising to go
heavy on disruption. We've actually seen some disruptive actions too recently. We saw the US government
going after the Shinbi guarantee marketplace, which is one of these scam things.
Like it seems like the scam centers are a big priority for the current admin.
And now the FBI is looking to release more hounds and just get serious about disruption
instead of like long periods of evidence collection and moving towards, you know, trying to
prosecute.
They're moving much more towards a disruption-heavy focus.
To me, this is an overwhelmingly positive thing.
But as someone who's spent 16 years in the U.S. government, like, what do you think of this
new approach from the FBI?
Yeah, I think one of the things, you know, we struggled with this at the National Security Agency.
Everyone thinks of NSA.
They think of spy agency.
They think of foreign intelligence, like they being primary mission, which is true,
but there's always a secondary mission in cybersecurity.
And, right, we had two different types of missions for different purposes, two different
type of workforces.
With FBI, everyone traditionally ties them to law enforcement, right?
They're going to take your information.
They're going to use it in a legal proceeding.
They're going to do an arrest.
I think over the last couple of years, FBI has really tried to change that image from law
enforcement, but also national security.
And the national security mission being like, hey, we want to work with the private sector.
We want to share information.
And we want to go after these actors and kind of disrupt and take down their networks jointly
from an operational perspective.
I think a lot of people translate that, though.
And Patrick, you came to the Collaboration Center.
They translate that to information sharing.
And that's not actually what this is all about.
There's information sharing, but it's like open collaboration on how we jointly take down these networks.
So I think it's a positive shift for FBI, but it's also FBI trying to enforce the fact that they have
multiple different types of missions and that the mission they're trying to prioritize, especially in
cyber, focuses on that national security piece of it. They want to be able to do those large-scale
investigations and disrupt these operations. So I think it's a really good move for them.
Yeah, I mean, I think previously they did maybe kind of fall into the trap. And it's not really a trap.
I mean, it's an organization that was optimized to measure success through prosecutions, right?
And it's not, it didn't work.
You know, so I sort of feel like this is maybe an acknowledgement that that approach didn't work,
and now we're moving on to trying something new.
Yeah, I mean, it's difficult, right?
Because not all cyber actors who have done bad things against the U.S.
or other places and our allies travel.
So you're trying to get them out of these hostile countries.
You're trying to get them to travel to beautiful places that you can pick them up and arrest them.
that doesn't always happen all that frequently. And then you've got to have a lot of substantial
information and evidence to be able to prosecute them that can become extremely difficult,
especially when after you arrest them potentially becomes unsealed. And so you have to
reveal all this information that you've known about them and probably gotten it from classified
means. So it can be complicated. So like I think this is an alternative approach that FBI is really
trying to go big on. And I do think it's going to really help because the balance of both is really
really really where we need to be. Yeah. Now, look, starting with the U.S. government and there's
apparently going to be a massive reorg at NSA, which is they're creating five mission centers.
There's going to be a cyber mission center and an AI mission center. I think there's a
mission center devoted to just China stuff as well. I mean, is this new guy, Joshua Rudd,
just trying to, you know, something needs to be done. This is something. So he's doing it.
Like, what's your take on whether or not this is necessary? You worked at a senior level at
NSA. You've got to have an opinion here. Yeah. I mean,
so grateful that this story came up right before I got to come talk to you about it.
So it's great.
No.
Look, I mean, when you think about NSA and you think about the priority, so General Rudd's
been in the position now for about six months, he's been confirmed, right?
Traditionally, when you look at a military commander, they take 30, 60, 90 days.
They assess an organization.
They determine where there's potential things that they need to change to cause disruption
or do things the way that they want.
And then six months, they typically go for a restructuring or a modernization.
They realign things against the top priorities.
The world has changed in the last couple years.
Resources are potentially a little bit more scarce.
And so there has to be a discussion against like ruthless prioritization.
And so China, AI, cyber, military operations, like all big things that NSA does, being
able to say effectively like, we're going to essentially create epicenters around that.
and we're going to put all of our capacity and resources against it, especially when there's a time they have to deprioritize other things.
I think this makes sense, right? I think that one of the most difficult things that they're going to have to do, which I went through quite a few restructurings at NSA, is the cultural breakdown.
Like, you've got to change behaviors that have inherently been there for years and decades, and that can be extremely difficult.
And in the government, one of the most other things that's very difficult to do is actually stop doing certain things.
And that can cause a lot of friction and, like, tensions internal to organizations of, hey,
we're no longer going to be able to do that.
It can be hard.
But I do think this is the right move, right?
Like you're putting the right resources against China, number one threat.
You're focusing on AI.
Obviously, there does need to be an investment there.
It's not going to end the world, as you said, Patrick, but there are good opportunities from it.
So I think there's these the right focus areas.
And for General Road to do this at the six-month mark makes complete sense because he's had
enough time to assess the organization. Yeah, it's amazing just from a non-American perspective,
just trying to comprehend the scale, right, of NSA. When you compare it to like, you know,
ASD here where people who have worked there tell me that, you know, ASD is really good at doing
the top three things on its list, right? It's a smaller organization. It's like compared to NSA,
it's very agile and whatever. But if you want to do something at just like incredible, like, planet
scale, NSA will eventually get there. It'll take time. But then they're going to just have this
sort of mega industrialized process for doing something that is borderline impossible for anyone
else to do. So yeah, I mean, just how, you know, my tiny little brain can barely comprehend
what it would be like to run such a massive organization and get it to still actually do
valuable things, right? Like, it's big. Yeah. And quite honestly, one of the hardest parts
in any restructuring, not just in the government, is quite honestly, is having a conversation,
like not everything we do is a priority. And not every.
Everything has to have resources and funding against it.
So that's a difficult conversation to have, especially when you think about governments, they plan on like three, five-year budget cycles.
Okay, well, we have five years of money to do X.
Well, two years down the line, especially think about the way technology is advancing.
That doesn't matter anymore.
So like now we have to go through an entire, very lengthy process to reallocate that funding to other things, retrain people.
It can be created a lot.
So my brain hurts thinking about what this is going to have to go through.
make this work. But if it improves the way that we're doing things from a national security
perspective, I'm all game. Happy days. Meanwhile, Treasury has, well, there's a couple of lawmakers,
a couple senators and whatnot have called on Treasury to sanction. Some of these Indian
hacker-for-hire firms and their founders, so that is Beltrox, Cyber Route, and Sun-Kissed Organic
Farms, which used to, which was formerly known as Appen. You know, these were the,
people, the people behind Appen were the ones who managed to get that Reuters article taken down.
It's now back up.
But, you know, this is just the latest development in that saga, which has been running for years now.
Let's move on to some bread and butter sort of threat-threat-threat stuff.
At the moment, James, we've got Cicissar warning about a watchguard RCE floor now being exploited in ransomware.
We've got the Dutch NCSC warning that a critical in Checkpoints VPN software is going to get exploited.
We've got a GitLab bug burning the internet down as well.
We've got Cisco warning about an O'Day in its email gateway.
It's real funny when I see people on like Infosec alt heads on like Twitter and whatnot saying,
oh, you know, this vulnerability apocalypse thing is all hype.
It's like, no, it's not.
I mean, there's so much stuff going on right now.
So many shells being popped, so much bad stuff happening that he's clearly AI enabled.
We've got this other one here too, which is interesting,
where four different groups with a China Nexus are using the same Chrome and Windows exploit chain.
And it looks like the reason they're able to do that is because it was an upstream chromium patch,
which hadn't been actually put in the, you know, the Google version yet.
but people were able to use AI to rapidly reverse the patch or reverse the commit to develop
an exploit for this bug.
I mean, it's just, it just really feels pretty dicey out there at the moment.
It's a bad time to be on the edge of a network with a piece of hardware that lacks
all the things that make otherwise modern operating systems like MacOS, iOS and even Windows
much safer, right?
When I look at these bugs, what frustrates me, and I know I haven't been in this industry long enough
to be black-pilled enough, as you say. But I look at these and I see things like, you know,
this is the watchguard one, right? It's an RCE off of a out-of-bounds right. And out-of-bounds right
shouldn't get you straight to RCE, right? There should be so many other layers in between.
But what's amazing here is that AI is not just shaking loose bugs, but it's shaking loose
bugs in platforms where not all bugs are equal, right? These things that are on the edge,
You know, it's just, it comes back to what I've been saying a lot recently, which is that, you know, when we have these talk of all of these bugs coming out with the bug poikolips, the number of bugs is not the issue.
The issue is what can you do with those bugs on the platform, right?
Well, what can you do with a bug that's out of bounds right in windows?
Probably not a lot, unless it's really luckily just in the right spot at the right time.
But these things that are on the edge of the network that don't have all those modern operating system controls and architectures and engineering features around them.
We built our security platform on Linux on Mips, you know?
Yeah, exactly.
ASL, what?
No, we don't need it.
You know, those are the things that are getting popped.
And yes, they're now happening at scale because I can just turn these.
You can find these bugs real quick and they don't take a lot of work to be turned into owning these boxes on the edge.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot to what you say in that, you know, a lot of the low-hanging fruit, I hate using that expression.
But now you can just throw tokens at that, right?
and you can get shells.
Yeah, you can get load bearing, low hanging fruit.
Oh, man, is there a way to actually vocalize an M-Dash?
Because then we would have the trifecta right there.
But yeah, I guess I'm just saying it's getting sporty out there.
And we've got an issue at the moment, too, where Windows patches keep breaking stuff, right?
So I've just included a few in this week's show notes, but they broke they broke remote desktop services with one patch.
and I think they've pushed out another patch
to uncluster that one.
Then there's an Excel update
that broke copy-paste,
we've got broken audio on some stuff.
And I'm thinking, look, this is because of the velocity of patches
coming out of Microsoft.
But one thing that I am concerned about
is that CSOs are going to start getting pressure on them
to delay patches, right?
Which is the last thing we need at the moment.
Because if, you know, patches keep breaking stuff,
they are going to get lent on.
I mean, what do you think, Morgan, because you work now, PWC, you're dealing with a lot of executives.
Is this actually something that has hit the radar yet, or is it going to?
What are your thoughts here?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, first of all, like, the vulnerable, like the vulnerable apocalypse is a constant conversation.
I think a lot of CISOs right now are struggling, like, with a patch management program.
How do I prioritize?
You know, I think what did it, Microsoft went from like 15 patches to like 600 within a six month span.
Their most recent patch Tuesday was a thousand bugs, a thousand.
Yeah.
It's a lot. And they don't know how to manage that. And to your point, they want to push all of these
patches, but they don't know what the interdependencies are. Things are breaking. They're getting a lot of
pressure from the business side saying, please stop dealing with this. Like, we have a lot of significant
issues. Like, please slow down. And to your point, like, people are trying to push out as many
patches as possible, specifically if in fact they've been somehow tied to a mythos discovery. We won't know that
necessarily, but are being actively exploited. It's not creating a great scenario. I would,
you know, use the word dicey. It's like terrifying a little bit right now because you've got
vulnerabilities. You've got maybe a little bit of this screwy patch management that's coming
through. And then the other part of the conversation that I'm having with CSOs, so James'
is like, the other concern is like, there's not a patch for every vulnerability and there's not going
to be. And so CSOs are like, oh, by the way, you also have to know where your vulnerability,
but don't necessarily expect a patch. And then what's your plan to assess? And then what's your
plan to assess that risk. And that takes investment in time, and effort and cycles. And our poor
CSO cybersecurity community is just, they're just freaking exhausted. And so it's really hard for him right
now. We did see a FBI exec come out too at some event this week and talk about how the basics are,
you know, really important and whatever. I mean, I just cut it because it's generic, good advice. But
it is true, right? Like when you look at like, what are you going to do to mitigate, you know,
bugs, you know, mitigate bugs in things that can't really be patched quickly or, you know,
facing huge exposure windows. And, you know, I think access control is a big part of that. Like,
we just need some real fundamental things. And, you know, honestly, modernising. Like, we've got this
story, you know, it was one of the bugs I mentioned was in some ancient Cisco email gateway. Like,
come on. I mean, there's much better choices these days for handling your mail. I mean, you might even
want to do something completely radical, like put that in the cloud. Get yourself an M365 subscription
so you don't have to rely on a crusty old Cisco appliance to parse all of your mail with unsafe
parsers. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, Patrick, like this, what I find like a little bit
exhausting is that we had the same conversation when we were talking about Chinese cyber actors
in US critical infrastructure. I'm not trying to set you down like another tangent, but, you know,
with living off the land type techniques, like people are like, how do I sum?
of this. What's the special silver bullet that's going to take away this threat that I don't have
to worry about? It's like literally the top 10 things that we told you to do 10 years ago.
Like this is going to help you find your way through this. And so I feel like we're almost in the
same type of conversation with getting back to fundamentals and basics of like you just got to
prioritize some of the things we talked about. You've got to think through it and you've got to
invest in it and you got to move faster than you were moving before. Like that's basically where
we are. 100%. 100%. Now the last two stories that I wanted to talk about this week, they're kind of
interrelated, right? So there's a bit of a write-up on just the current state of click-fix attacks,
which are turning out to be way more successful than I think anyone really anticipated. They
are affecting both PCs and Macs. And I've seen some interesting write-ups. Like, people are often
saying, oh my God, how can users fall for this? Like, they must be so dumb. But then you've got to
think from a normal person's perspective, when they're just trying to access a website, and all of a
sudden, they're being asked to identify the pedestrian crossings and click on little squares. And
Like, it seems like a really weird hoop to jump through just when you're trying to access a website.
So the idea of like pressing the start button on your keyboard and pasting some text in, like, it is no stranger to a normal person than being asked to identify which of these images contain cars.
You know, like it's just, oh, I'm being asked to do something weird by the computer to prove that I'm human.
So these things are going absolutely nuts.
And another one that's going around at the moment is our pass key themed.
fishing attacks. Now, I think it's like the scattered spider, you know, shiny hunter, like that
whole kind of crew are using like pass key enrollment as a lure. And, you know, so what we got here
is like two situations where security controls being, or security challenges being fiddly and
weird is sort of driving people to do really risky things because they don't understand the
purpose of these things. I mean, James, it's like you read these two stories together, you sort of
throw your hands up in despair, don't you? Yeah, because like you say, we've normalized the friction
that gives rise to these being possible. And ClickFix in particular just astounds me because
I don't think there's another attack style out there in the wild at the moment, or even in recent
history, where I simultaneously look at this and go, why does anyone fall for this? And then move to
another browser tab. And I literally go and copy and paste a shell command and run it because it's
something I'm trying to install. It's like I'm doing, I'm click fixing myself six times a day, which is
The weirdest, weirdest sort of mode to be in because it is just so normalized.
But I'm not doing it like they, those idiots are, right?
Yeah, I do the smart click fixing.
I know what I'm doing for now.
But the past key themed one really gets me because, you know,
when I was going through the 2FA for the masses at Apple,
one of the things we were so worried about at that time is that when you do try to move people
from one security paradigm to another, the end spot you're trying to get them to is
undoubtedly better, right? When we get to the point of having 80, 90% of all iCloud users enrolled in
2FA, that's a good state. But the journey to get there is where all the danger is. You know,
all of the ways that attackers can do that 2FA enrollment before the user can, how can they
subvert that process? All these account takeover methods that were possible when you don't have
2FA enabled that they can go through and then get 2FA enabled and then shut the door on people.
That was the problem then, and it's the same problem now with pass keys, which is yes,
everybody using pass keys, I think you'd be hard pressed mounting a challenge against that
being an overall net good outcome. But how we get there is really tough because we'd have normalize
this friction. We have normalized that it might be weird. We have normalized there might be steps
you've got to do that feel uncomfortable. And so along come these attack classes,
these attack classes that people are unfortunately falling for. Morgan, you've obviously
got feelings here. I can tell from your face. Yeah. Well, you know, I think, you know,
it's interesting, right? Because for me, tying this into the world of like,
influence operations from a military perspective on like normalizing and take advantage of the people
that have been programmed to think and trust certain media applications or things that are out
in the news in a certain way and then being able to exploit that to take advantage of the fact like,
hey, I'm going to influence your decision here and make you think something is true when it's
really not. Like that is kind of the basis of old school influenced information operations and it kind
of is playing out here with that nexus and cyber and that we now live in this new world order and
We've programmed people to operate and do things in a certain way and feel uncomfortable to
James's point.
But we're going to exploit the crap out of it to take advantage from an adversarial perspective.
Like, it's kind of the evolution of what we've done in the past with now this technical
cyber background of it.
Now, I've got to ask you, too, just because you brought it up, right?
I think we saw one of the most amazingly consequential deepfakes, actually, over the last
couple of weeks in Yemen.
Did you catch that news where the Houthis actually deepfaked a commander for,
from the other side instructing troops to pull back.
And they did.
This was one of the reasons they were able to rush down to the coast.
Had you caught that?
I don't think I caught that one in particular, but like that is traditional.
Like I know it's deep fake.
It's new technology.
It's a different way of displaying information,
but it is information and influence operations like 101.
Yeah.
So the former executive director of Cyber Command is sitting here going,
eh, old hat, basically.
I don't want to, I don't want to doubt play it.
I'm sure it was fantastic.
but I mean, this is just, you know, there's always going to be a part of me that's like,
oh, that's cool, but like that's an evolution of like an old school military tactic.
Like, this is fantastic.
But, you know, it's the same world of leveraging AI.
I mean, I just think it's interesting when you've got, when you've got, you know,
organizations like the Houthis doing this with like, you know, like free tier chat GPT or something
or, you know, or 11 labs or however they did it, you know, it's just, it just seems a bit crazy to me.
But look, we're going to wrap it up there.
Morgan Adamski, thank you so much.
for coming along and chatting about the week's news with us this week. And James, thank you as always,
mate, and I'll chat to both of you soon. Always a pleasure. Thanks, Pat. Another amazing week.
That was Morgan Adamski and James Wilson there with a check of this week's news. Big thanks to them
for that. It is time for this week's sponsor interview now, and we are chatting with David Cottingham
and Daniel Shell of Aerlock Digital. Airlock, of course, makes an allow listing platform that's really,
good. You would have heard me sing its praises on the show over many, many years. They are commonly
deployed alongside CrowdStrike, though. And when I spoke to the guys, when we did this
interview, David was actually over at the CrowdStrike Falcon conference. So CrowdStrike stuff
was top of mind for him. So we talked about a couple things in this interview. One of them is
that CrowdStrike has this thing called Foundry now, which is a really interesting idea. It
lets people essentially kind of like vibe code their products into the CrowdStrike console, right?
So it's a much more seamless user experience. And Airlock has actually done that. And
this go-round on that integration, it only took them a couple of weeks. And now their users
who are also CrowdStrike customers can like manage their product from inside CrowdStrike.
So that's actually a really interesting twist on, you know, a security platform embracing AI.
The other thing we talk about in this interview is the fact that customers who felt deeply uncomfortable with the idea of allowing AI to have any role in maintaining an allow list a year ago are now starting to ask for that, right?
So there's this increasing market acceptance that Gen AI is going to take the reins of things like that.
But here I'll drop you in here with David Cottingham from Airlock Digital.
Enjoy.
What they really want to do is build the ability for other vendors to build
context inside their actual platform.
So what they've almost built is like a sandbox environment that you can build your own
application in, put it inside the actual crowds right user interface and then safely sort of link
out to different functionalities and enrich events and drive functionality from inside the product.
So what we basically did was re-implemented all of our user interface inside of that platform
so that customers can actually come and do application control from inside without
leaving the actual product.
And, you know, a lot of the platform has enabled that with user roles and they're
expanding that capability out all the time, you know, and leveraging sort of SOAR and, you know,
other automation workflows that crash rate build on.
Yeah.
It works by allowing us to like, you know, define our database model, upload that or arrest APIs
and such like that.
And then, yeah, you'd be able to hook into different parts of the UI to do enrichment, add
buttons, you know, not just display data, but get involved within like, you know,
crash direct detections and different parts of the UI.
And, and, but the main thing they're targeting is customers building their own stuff
inside there, I feel. So you can get certified as a vendor or you can just build your own
and upload it to your own tenant and then just start running your own apps inside of it.
I mean, this is, this is an interesting strategy, right? Because I reckon there's going to be
some customers who come up with some really good, like, stuff. Yeah. But there's also going to be
customers who come up with some absolutely awful stuff, right? Like, like, how does you, you know,
how long has this been happening, this Foundry thing? It's, it's really only been around for about
12 months, I believe, in terms of that capability. And it's still sort of, you know, early days.
They're putting a lot of weight behind it. But you're right. You know, I think that that's one way
to unlock flexibility, especially, you know, I think there's a writing on the wall with agentic.
Everyone can code now come up with a solution. So, you know, customer, you've got a product gap and you
need to make X work with Y, then here's a framework to do it.
It makes sense, right?
So I'm guessing what?
People are even going to be able to, is there a vibe coding component of this, right?
Which is like Foundry allows you to vibe code, you know, what you need out of your
CrowdStrike interface and how it should.
There's a full skills library to build on Foundry that you can just download and plug into
your agentic harness and go, hey, I need this to work and it will be able to figure out
that.
Connect to their, there's like a proxy thing to upload and publish the out.
up inside of your customer ID.
And it all works really well.
I mean, we built most of our integration
and dashboards in about two weeks, you know,
from start to finish.
And obviously, we're building from a really great static view
about, you know, how our APIs are shaped and everything.
But it was a pretty easy experience to do that in operation.
I think it's a sensible strategy too,
because CrowdStrike is a perfect example,
I think, of software that you cannot vibe code
a replacement to CrowdStrike, right? Like, can you imagine vibe coding something akin to their
kernel driver, right? Like, if you love blue screens, like try to vibe code your own, your own
crowd strike. But then again, where you would want to allow people to vibe code absolutely is on this
interface and integration side. That seems what they're trying to do here. So, like, being at this
crowd strike conference that you're at, I'm guessing this is the buzz, right? This is the buzz in terms of,
like, well, how do we all get on board with this and, you know, move with the times this way?
Is it enough? I don't know, but this seems to be what people are thinking now, right?
Yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, what you're going to see the demand for skills in this
space is the skills for design and, you know, architecture and different ways to solve problems.
You know, it's not about writing code. It's how you apply it. And I think we're seeing across
the board systems being architected as, you know,
structured ways to enable solutions really, really quickly, because every customer has a bespoke
use case that they feel as though they want to do it their way. And, you know, if these
platforms can enable customers to join the dots themselves, which the agented tooling does
allow them to do, they're making that easy. It's sort of almost like the promise that Saw had,
you know, in the market around 2017 or 2018, but this is...
people actually doing it now.
In some ways, an easier way to do it.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So, Daniel, I'm guessing you were responsible for overseeing, like, you know,
airlock's integration into this sort of thing.
Like, where else, though, outside of your use cases, where else do you think it's useful?
I think, like, from a vendor perspective, I would say, like, it's really useful.
Like, you know, a customer will say, hey, can you guys do this?
And as a vendor, if you can say, you know what, it's a great idea, you can build it yourself
in foundry.
And if AI makes it you look quicker, when we first looked at the Foundry integration, you know, 12 months ago, when it was sort of brand new, we weren't using all the, you know, agenti AI coding and such.
They didn't have all those skills.
And it was quite difficult.
You know, there's a lot of JSON files, a lot of definitions and stuff like that.
And we got some minimum viable integration going.
It was sort of okay.
But compared to now and what we've done in two weeks, you know, last time we were spent two weeks just connecting to it and getting it up and you're getting it, say, hello world.
And now I've got the whole UI done.
So that is a different change in the game for how quick anyone can do that.
I think people will be wanting to just do little integrations with maybe other providers
or maybe even internal data.
So maybe they've got their own indicators or their own tip platform that they want
to say a bit closer in.
And to do it actually within the UI.
So when someone clicks on this detection and goes to this sort of section of the dashboard,
we want that enrichment.
And the stuff we're doing there is stuff that we don't even do in airlock itself
where we'll say, hey, on this detection a week ago, this file was blocked by Aerock,
and actually since then, that file's been trusted.
So it's the context of what's changed since that detection is getting something that's,
we're developing new capabilities ourselves nearly in this platform.
So to me, this seems like the smart way, if I'm honest,
it seems like the smart way to get around this idea of like,
well, everybody's just going to vibe code everything.
So what's the point of making software?
I think if you can make everything somewhat vibe coda friendly,
seems a pretty sensible, seems a pretty sensible idea.
Dave, I mean, I'm guessing it's been received well.
Yeah, definitely, you know, democratize innovation in our sandbox, you know, so to speak.
And I think, yeah, that's where you get the novel masses building novel, really interesting things.
So, you know, I think that's what's exciting about the time in the industry.
Cybersecurity is fun again in so many ways.
and there's so many new players coming into the space at the moment with some really interesting
takes on solving problems in endpoint security in a different way.
Give me an example because I'm curious because you've just been on a trade floor with these people.
You know, the CrowdStrike Conference is a huge one for you because it's just an endpoint conference.
You do a lot of business with a lot of CrowdStrike customers.
What else did you see on the floor that made you go, huh?
Yeah, I think things like automated red teaming and there's a lot of
of work towards actually validating controls at scale,
making sure that we're able to detect things,
find the gaps quicker that it never could before.
Attack and breach simulation,
but like easier because of AI, right?
That's funny.
It's funny how much of the new stuff is the old stuff,
but it's just much more viable now.
Yeah, it's sort of like we always had the ideas and the concepts,
you know, much like saw,
but it's just, it's easier to join the dots
and also easier to send a task off,
and then get the results back later.
You know, there's a question about, hey, how much do we need to watch these things?
You know, which is, I think we're all trying to figure that out.
But, you know, and I think also generally the terms and level of awareness,
even compared to, you know, a month ago at Black Hat seems to be people are starting to really
understand and get their heads around.
The different types of AI, where the risks are, and how we need to move.
forward to secure this stuff.
And I think we're getting past a little bit of shock and awe and starting to get our hands
around, actually, how do we move forward?
Yeah.
And people have been even just learning the language, right?
Like three months ago at a conference, I'd be speaking to people and they'd be like confusing
models to the agents to what's a frontier model.
Like it would be hard sometimes even to have the conversation because people are still just
learning the language of this sort of new how things work. And I think that maturity, like
the last three months, has really picked up now that we can sort of start a conversation
where we're speaking the same language. Well, I mean, you guys were massive AI skeptics
initially. And I understand now that you're building out some AI features in your products
and you're out there and you're seeing this stuff. Or you want to say something there, Dave?
Yeah, look, look, I think you were right, Patrick. And that's a fair assessment. You know,
But I think also we're seeing that reflected from our customers as well.
You know, six months ago, customers were very much like, hey, you don't do anything with AI.
Don't put this stuff anywhere near, like, anything critical.
Yeah.
I'm just terrified of it.
Whereas now I've had, you know, three days of meetings here.
And everyone is now like, how are you using AI to make application control easier?
How can I automate my exception management?
How can I just drive this in a simple way?
Like, the shift has been so quick.
And also, you know, the expectation from customers of their vendors as well is like, well, you've got
authentic coding now. Like, why haven't you done this already? And, you know, my response is always,
well, there's a difference between a code and a product. But, you know, we've got to.
Well, my joke about it, you know, when doing a startup is that a, you know, a product isn't the code.
A product is a bunch of solved edge cases in a trench coat is basically my description of a software
product, right? That's true. Exactly. I'm so glad, honestly, we, we,
you know, built the foundations of airlock at a time where this didn't exist, to be honest,
because it really forced us to think about design and understand and get into the details.
But, you know, we're at a great pace to accelerate that.
But, yeah, look, the shift in just the acceptance of the AI, especially from vendors,
has just been night and day, changed now.
And we're embracing that in our upcoming product release.
All righty.
Well, Daniel Schell, Dave Cottingham.
Thank you so much for joining.
me as always to have a bit of a chat on the old risky biz. It's always a pleasure to chat to you.
Thanks, Patrick. Thanks, Patrick. That was David Cottingham and Daniel Shell from Aeroch Digital there.
Big thanks to them for that. And, you know, solid endorse on Aerlock Digital. It's a terrific product and you should all use it.
But that is it for this week's show. I do hope you enjoyed it. I'll be back soon with more security
news and analysis. But until then, I've been Patrick Gray. Thanks for listening.
