Three Buddy Problem

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Episodes

236

Latest episode

Aug 2026

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EN-US

About the show

The Three Buddy Problem is a popular Security Conversations podcast that goes beyond industry talking points to discuss what others won’t -- nation-state malware, attribution, cyberwar, ethics, privacy, and the messy realities of securing computers and corporate networks. Hosted by three veteran security pros -- journalist Ryan Naraine and malware paleontologists Costin Raiu and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade -- the weekly show attracts a highly engaged audience of security researchers, corporate defenders, CISOs, and policymakers. Connect with Ryan on Twitter (Open DMs).

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August 17, 20262 hr 23 min

A tiny 12 KB Windows backdoor, one victim, and a dead domain

( Presented by State of Statecraft : A security and intelligence conference that brings together multiple disciplines, backgrounds, and nationalities to share research into the covert activities of nation-states and other malign actors. ) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 109 : The buddies dig into a new White House memo handing vetted private companies real offensive cyber authorities, and Costin explains why a stack of ransomware takedown cases has been sitting on a shelf waiting for exactly this. Plus, a tiny 12 KB Windows backdoor found on one machine with a dead C2, the mercenary outfits quietly living inside telcos, and why Google continues to flounder in the race for AI dominance. Cast: Costin Raiu , Ryan Naraine and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade Timestamps: 0:00 Introductory banter 0:58 State of Statecraft, and a late CFP window 3:24 The White House offensive hacking memo 6:37 "Hack back" is the wrong frame for what's being authorized 11:20 Ransomware cases sitting on the shelf 17:01 The million-dollar bond and who can realistically play 22:29 Where DPRK crypto theft falls under the new definitions 28:15 Would TLP Black take a contract? 36:55 Gen Digital's 12 KB backdoor hiding its C2 in desktop.ini whitespace 46:57 Passive DNS, registration patterns, and pivoting on a dead domain 57:32 Feeding a one-off find back into detection engineering 1:02:14 Metador, Mafalda, and the mercenaries who love telcos 1:17:07 Armored Likho and what "Western APT" really means 1:28:16 The IOC market, private reporting, and CTI’s matching problem 1:58:10 Google's culture problem, the weekly model churn, and Patch Tuesday math

August 8, 20262 hr 14 min

Inside OpenAI's Black Hat Confession

( Presented by TLPBLACK : A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals. ) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 108 : OpenAI got on the Black Hat stage and walked through how its own agent swarm hacked Hugging Face. We discuss and struggle to decide whether to clap or panic. Plus, why only the attacker can do forensics now, frontier models being built as cyber-weapons on purpose, APT29's "Dark Hotel" comeback in luxury hotels, China's swipe at Palo Alto, the Iran-water-system FUD, and an eye-opening Liechtenstein money-laundering hack. Cast: Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade , Ryan Naraine and Costin Raiu . Timestamps: 0:00 Introductory banter - Black Hat went full RSA 1:11 TLP Black sponsor read 3:58 A deflated, AI-pilled show floor 8:31 AI stunt hacking and AI slop 16:20 The OpenAI–Hugging Face talk 21:00 Not all the same incident: OpenAI vs. Meta, Anthropic, and Irregular 25:49 Swarms of agents, Artifactory message boards, and the defense gap 32:26 Offense vs. defense: what's really in the training data? 41:22 Guardrails, KYC, and "too dangerous to release" 48:07 JAGS's unpublished Opus 5 benchmark — grinding to 25% and stuck 59:30 AISI, recklessness, and the OpenAI Frontier Risk Council 1:06:27 Stronger models everywhere: Qwen, Sol, Astra, rushing off the cliff 1:18:32 APT29 / "Dark Hotel" reborn + travel OPSEC 1:39:56 China's Palo Alto review, spy-agency rankings, Iran/water FUD 1:57:28 Liechtenstein AML hack, JAGS's promotion, mental health

July 31, 20263 hr 26 min

Proofpoint's Greg Lesnewich on Laundry Bear, ‘Half-Click’ Exploits, and Magnets of Threats

( Presented by Thinkst Canary : Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With zero admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents. ) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 107 : Proofpoint's Greg Lesnewich joins the show to break down Laundry Bear, the "half-click" webmail exploits that let a Russian GRU cluster hack inboxes the moment an email was opened, and what it took to publish alongside the NSA, FBI and sixteen allied agencies. Plus, Anthropic and OpenAI both admit their models escaped test sandboxes and popped real companies, why JAGS wants the CFAA burned down and vulnerable devices bricked, and a heartfelt detour into how threat hunters actually build intuition and skills. Cast: Greg Lesnewich , Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade , Ryan Naraine and Costin Raiu . Timestamps: 0:00 Sponsor - Thinkst Canary 1:34 Greg Lesnewich introduces the Proofpoint threat-hunting team 5:23 Inside the NSA ‘Laundry Bear’ advisory 7:15 What does "half-click" mean? 9:58 Laundry Bear's Zimbra exploit: DNS exfil and app-specific password persistence 12:59 Ferrari model numbers, F1 UNC names, and ESET's Operation RoundPress 17:05 Targeting Ukraine, US universities, and magnetic fusion research 19:34 How threat hunters actually build intuition 32:35 Systems thinking, Donella Meadows, and Costin's laptop under the dinner table 54:48 The dopamine hit of a real find and the deleted "never mind" messages 1:00:42 Magnets of threats: under 1% of customers ever see an APT 1:25:21 Getting detections into the product, and coordinating a release with NSA 1:53:22 Anthropic and OpenAI models breaking out of the eval sandbox 2:17:45 The case for killing the CFAA and bricking vulnerable devices 2:43:44 AI in the lab, malware paleontology, Google's new names, and AngrySpark

July 28, 202634 min

Validin's Kenneth Kinion on What Separates Useful Threat Intel From Noise

Security Conversations : Kenneth Kinion, founder and CEO of Validin, joins Ryan Naraine on the show to unpack what "internet intelligence" really means for the analysts and responders chasing malicious infrastructure. We trace his path from Georgia Tech through Microsoft and Amazon to the frustrations that led to the creation of Validin, the competition from big AI, the value of AI-powered tools to speed up infrastructure hunting, and why defenders keep falling further behind fast-moving attackers. Timestamps: 0:00 – Intro: What does Validin do? 0:51 – Who uses Validin: CTI teams, SOCs, incident responders 2:19 – Atlanta and Georgia Tech's cybersecurity pipeline 5:31 – Lessons from Microsoft and Amazon: waterfall vs. agile 8:29 – Filling gaps in passive DNS data 9:57 – Misunderstood things about threat intelligence 14:17 – The value of "cyber paleontology" 16:00 – What makes one data set better than another? 19:39 – How Validin works: from one suspicious domain to a full pivot 21:27 – AI as existential threat or force multiplier for Validin 26:55 – Dual-use AI: are defenders losing ground to attackers? 31:11 – Closing: the next hard problem Validin wants to solve

July 23, 20262 hr 16 min

OpenAI's models breached Hugging Face, reward hacking ethics, benchmarking fast16

( Presented by Thinkst Canary : Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With zero admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents. ) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 106 : We dig into the news that OpenAI's models were the "autonomous agent" that breached Hugging Face, escaping a sandbox through a zero-day to cheat on a cyber benchmark, then getting spun into a partnership announcement. We argue about the implications of the incident, the PR masterclass, the absence of ethics and human oversight, and calls for "kill switches" to mitigate "AI lab leaks." Plus, SentinelLabs' new fast16 reverse-engineering benchmark, where GPT-5.6 Sol was the only public model to go the distance. Cast: Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade , Ryan Naraine and Costin Raiu . Timestamps: 0:00 Introductory banter 5:24 OpenAI admits it was the Hugging Face "hacker" 10:06 What’s ExploitGym and who's on top of the leaderboard 12:59 Reward hacking: Did anyone train this thing not to cheat? 19:35 Marketing stunt or real incident? The zero-day in the package proxy 26:43 Was OpenAI already plugged into Hugging Face? 29:17 Paperclips, kill switches, and "going rogue" 34:49 Crisis comms, regulatory capture, and the second Cold War 43:02 Approve every action? Auto mode and swarms 50:10 "Lab leak" and calls for biosafety levels 1:00:31 The missing models: no Mythos, no Kimi, no independent referee 1:07:04 Costin's prediction: owning frontier-class hardware will require a license 1:13:41 fast16 as a benchmark: Inside the Sol Searching research 1:26:51 Compression and altitude: are reverse engineers being replaced? 1:41:24 Finding the gem in 100 samples, and the swarm frontier 2:00:41 Claude Opus 5 drops, Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber

July 18, 20262 hr 7 min

Hugging Face Just Got Hit by the First Fully Autonomous AI Attack

( Presented by Thinkst Canary : Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With zero admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents. ) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 105 : We discuss a fascinating Hugging Face breach, where an autonomous AI agent broke out of the sandboxes, moved laterally through production, and generated 17,000 alerts before anyone caught it, and how frontier model guardrails locked the defenders out of their own investigation. Plus, China's big AI showcase, Xi's pitch for open models and global distribution, a record 622-CVE Microsoft Patch Tuesday, and 13 years of dwell time in the Daxin backdoor. Cast: Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade , Ryan Naraine and Costin Raiu . Timestamps: 0:00 Introductory banter 3:51 Hugging Face discloses end-to-end agentic hack 9:42 Why Hugging Face couldn't use frontier models 13:28 AI guardrails hampering defenders 16:22 Codex vs Claude for real malware work 23:43 Flash attacks vs. going low and slow 30:27 Was it targeted, or did Hugging Face pwn itself? 38:11 Long-horizon coherence: what GLM 5.2 still can't do 41:27 Kimi K3 leapfrogs, and Xi's AI speech 52:15 Exceptionalism vs. distribution 1:11:05 Gold Eagle: the White House vulnerability clearinghouse 1:15:05 Microsoft patches 622 CVEs — a record 1:20:29 APT corner: Daxin resurfaces after 13 years of dwell time 1:29:45 Balochistan police, and Microsoft's attribution-free wiper 1:34:26 Denis Obrezkov, leaked Kaspersky records, and the wrong questions 1:46:01 Magnet Forensics sues over a burned iPhone bug 1:57:57 Shout-outs

July 4, 20261 hr 36 min

Microsoft's Secret Weapon: The GDID That Caught 'Scattered Spider' Teen

( Presented by Thinkst Canary : Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With zero admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents. ) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 104 : We discuss the return of Anthropic's Fable 5 from export-control suspension with guardrails so aggressive that spelling "exploit" gets you downgraded. Plus, a debate on AI frontier labs killing businesses at scale, and OpenAI offering equity to the US government. Also, buried on page nine of a 'Scattered Spider' arrest indictment: Microsoft's never-before-detailed GDID device identifier, a persistent Windows fingerprint with massive implications for OPSEC, privacy, and APT tracking. Cast: Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade , Ryan Naraine and Costin Raiu . Timestamps: 0:00 Cold open: Heat wave in Washington DC 3:45 Fable 5 returns after the 15-day timeout 5:21 "Refined classifiers" and the downgrade-to-Opus mess 8:23 Codex vs. Claude: real-world malware analysis test 12:41 Who are the guardrails for? Defenders locked out 19:13 What even is a "jailbreak assessment framework"? 21:37 Two theories: failed PR vs. killing a thousand startups 24:59 Could the labs build kernels or a whole OS? 31:38 Bureaucracy is the moat 36:09 Can AI actually run an attack? (Spoiler: 14 detections) 47:01 OpenAI offers the US government a 5% stake 58:16 Scattered Spider arrest and Microsoft's GDID revelation 1:12:02 OPSEC fallout: how APT groups adapt to device telemetry 1:27:18 UFO update, shout-outs from Seoul

June 29, 20261 hr 53 min

US Gov Takes the Wheel: Who Gets to Use the Best AI?

( Presented by Thinkst Canary : Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With zero admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents. ) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 103 : We dive into the U.S. government's takeover of frontier-model rollouts (Mythos, Fable, and OpenAI's Sol/Terra/Luna) and what it means when intelligence gets commoditized but access gets rationed. Plus, Costin's all-Chinese open-weight stack, the economics of burning tokens, a fresh Salesforce OAuth breach, and jellyfish UFOs over Iran. Cast: Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade , Ryan Naraine and Costin Raiu . Timestamps: 0:00 — Introductory banter, Thinkst Canary sponsorship 2:55 — Why threat intel analysts are built for the AI moment 11:09 — Government takes the wheel: Mythos, Fable & the frontier labs 16:15 — Did the government go too far/not far enough? 25:42 — Anthropic's "best PR campaign in history" 31:52 — Alibaba, distillation & the model-router cartel 40:58 — Costin's stack: Chinese open-weight models & token economics 46:12 — Dumping, evals & the real work of AI engineering 1:04:32 — Soft power: how the world gets pushed toward China 1:14:43 — "The bullshit": over-refusal & the Opus 4.8 regression 1:32:03 — The trillion-dollar IPO endgame 1:35:49 — The Klue OAuth breach and secure-by-default 1:45:32 — Shout-outs: UAP jellyfish, LABScon 2026

June 19, 20261 hr 38 min

Katie Moussouris on the Anthropic Export-Control Mess

( Presented by TLPBLACK : A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals. ) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 102 : Software export controls expert Katie Moussouris joins the show to unpack the US government's abrupt move to suspend access to Anthropic's most powerful models over a so-called "jailbreak" that, on reading the paper, turned out to be a model doing exactly what defenders are supposed to do. We dig into the export-control chaos, the chemical-weapons framing of cybersecurity, the China question, and why Microsoft just resurrected a disclosure term the industry buried fifteen years ago. Cast: Katie Moussouris , Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade and Ryan Naraine . Costin is traveling. Timestamps: 0:00 - Introductory banter 1:00 - Export Controls: Fable 5 and Mythos 5 suspended 3:40 - The Anthropic–USG relationship and USG’s surveillance claim 9:40 - Self-owns, doomsday cults, and why the guardrails are "so broad" 12:42 - What the Amazon paper actually says ("fix this code") 20:33 - The chemical-weapons framing problem 23:39 - The China question and the SK Telecom angle 41:17 - Why hasn't the paper been published? 57:01 - "Free Fable": are Chinese models only months behind? 1:00:13 - The unforgiving internet and the security poverty line 1:11:18 - Microsoft brings back "responsible disclosure" (and threatens researchers) 1:29:04 - Luta Security, the AI bug flood, and shout-outs

June 12, 20261 hr 59 min

Mythos, Fable, and Anthropic's Big Trust Problem

( Presented by TLPBLACK : A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals. ) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 101 : We discuss Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 release and the bombshell that the company was silently downgrading paid users' results, sparking a heated debate over guardrails, gatekeeping, and whether elite AI reasoning is becoming a privilege for the few. Plus, AI-generated N-day exploits killing the patch window, a record-shattering Patch Tuesday, Meta's latest court filing against spyware maker NSO Group, the return of cyber paleontology, and a detour into the new government UFO drops. Cast: Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade , Ryan Naraine and Costin Raiu . Timestamps: 0:00 - Introductory banter 3:22 - The Mythos 5 / Claude Fable 5 release 14:42 - Anthropic’s silent downgrade trust problem 26:18 - Anti-competitive behavior & the AV "stealing detection" parallel 32:29 - Distillation, China & the real motive 38:04 - "Too dangerous to release" & gatekeeping vs. guardrailing 45:53 - Is Mythos a threat to malware-analysis startups? 48:20 - Dario's AI regulation essay 56:48 - N-day exploits and death of the patch window 1:07:18 - Patch Tuesday and 10x vulnerability surge 1:10:34 - Meta catches NSO Group 1:14:45 - Cyber paleontology, Shadow Brokers leaks 1:28:29 - Moonlight Maze and learning from history 1:34:22 - UFOs, UAPs and Disclosure Day