Security Now (Audio)

Hosted by TWiT

TechnologyInterviews guestsExplicit

Website RSS feed

Episodes

Latest episode

Oct 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

Cybersecurity guru Steve Gibson joins Leo Laporte every Tuesday. Steve and Leo break down the latest cybercrime and hacking stories, offering a deep understanding of what's happening and how to protect yourself and your business. Security Now is a must listen for security professionals every week. You can join Club TWiT for $10 per month and get ad-free audio and video feeds for all our shows plus everything else the club offers...or get just this podcast ad-free for $5 per month. New episodes every Tuesday.

Listen to episodes

20 recent

October 28, 20262 hr 54 min

SN 1102: A Strategic Plug Pull - Lessons From a Global Patch-and-Panic Fire Drill

A newly uncovered PHP vulnerability put nearly 70% of the internet at risk, sending governments and enterprises into a frenzy as AI-powered attackers raced to exploit a flaw that had lurked unnoticed for 14 years. Hear why this could be just the start of an unrelenting wave of security crises. We take a detailed look at the many facets and aspects of last week's wild PHP ride: What happened. How it happened. Why it happened. How it could have been prevented. How it impacted many of our listeners. We consider the implications of what is said to be coming next and the idea of temporary "strategic disconnection" from the Internet Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1102-Notes.pdf Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Steve Gibson Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now . You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page . For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com , also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6 . Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: threatlocker.com/twit doppel.com hoxhunt.com/securitynow originhq.com/securitynow material.security

October 21, 20262 hr 31 min

SN 1101: ECDSA's Curves Origins - When AI Becomes the Attacker

An unreleased AI solved a 26-year-old cryptographic secret in less than half an hour, exposing the origins of a widely used standard. Discover what this jaw-dropping breakthrough means for the future of trust and transparency in cybersecurity. Another record smashing Patch Tuesday. But again, all those updates were not without consequences. Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 reports on an agentic attack. A mass-compromised hardware cryptocurrency wallet attack. How to create your own known-safe crypto wallet. Feedback about AI, coding and SpinRite from a listener. What the reverse-engineering of the ECDSA curves means for security Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1101-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Mikah Sargent Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now . You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page . For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com , also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6 . Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit joindeleteme.com/twit-biz threatlocker.com/twit canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT guardsquare.com

October 14, 20262 hr 49 min

SN 1100: Booby Trapping LLMs - AI Frenzy in Cybercrime

Think your open-source AI model is safe? This episode uncovers how LLMs can be secretly booby-trapped with undetectable backdoors, raising the stakes for anyone deploying AI in serious environments. Anthropic cuts live Internet access during testing. Will LLM technology turn out to be an uncontrollable dead end? What alternative AI technologies are underway? Anthropic offers free AI vulnerability scanning for open source. South Korean banks hit by Claude-driven cyberattacks. Japan declares a state of cyber-emergency due to attacks. For one listener, agentic coding has taken the joy out of coding. A listener is having way too much fun with AI and Halloween. Some listeners believe I'm downplaying the dangers of AI. We carefully examine the consequences of maliciously trained AI Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1100-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now . You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page . For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com , also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6 . Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: threatlocker.com/twit hoxhunt.com/securitynow originhq.com/securitynow trustedtech.team/twit

October 7, 20263 hr 3 min

SN 1099: An Alien Mind - From RSA Weakness to Agentic Attacks

As AI becomes startlingly capable, top minds at OpenAI admit they can't always control what their own creations do—or even fully understand how they think. This episode dives into the real-world tension between rapid progress and the growing challenge of keeping AI truly aligned. GLM-5.3 can be and has been abliterated. What does that mean? Firefox 157 repairs a large number of high-impact vulnerabilities. A surprising reduction in RSA crypto strength has been discovered. Powerful agentic AI is being used to attack merchants. A new and potent Spectre-style processor attack has been designed. A neighbor falls victim to a Bitcoin scam. What can be done? A new and surprising use was found for GRC's DNS Benchmark. An examination of the growing alignment challenges created by more intelligent AI Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1099-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now . You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page . For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com , also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6 . Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: guardsquare.com bitwarden.com/twit threatlocker.com/twit doppel.com material.security

September 30, 20262 hr 42 min

SN 1098: How worried should we be? - Unpredictable Agents

With millions racing to embrace AI assistants and cybercriminals pivoting to new, high-stakes tactics, the episode tackles the dizzying pace of change and asks: just how worried should we be? The discussion pulls back the curtain on AI's unpredictable power, the escalation of digital extortion, and why the next breach may hit closer to home than you think. Muse has a bad 0-day The regularity of "Irregular" More rogue OpenAI breaches The Seven Deadly Sins (TSDS) hacker group Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) cargo ship hacked The FBI offended ShinyHunters's delicate sensibilities Canonical switches to an every–2-weeks release cadence Axios' AI 101: AI Explainer for normal people How worried should we be? Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1098-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now . You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page . For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com , also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6 . Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: originhq.com/securitynow threatlocker.com/twit doppel.com

September 23, 20262 hr 50 min

SN 1097: Mega Patch Tuesday Fallout - When AI Outsmarts Its Makers

After Microsoft's historic Mega Patch Tuesday, enterprise IT teams worldwide are scrambling as a wave of updates triggers system meltdowns, broken domains, and silent Excel failures. Find out how AI-driven speed collided with real-world chaos. Andrew Ng weighs-in on AI Doomsaying. The wisdom of outsourcing AI security testing. The true risk of an AI-created bioweapon. The EU KIDS Act -- this one is even messier. "Nightmare Eclipse" finally unmasks himself. A whitehat firm used Claude to attack OpenAI. Cisco's own massive 77 CVE update. What was the fallout from Sept's Patch Tuesday Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1097-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now . You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page . For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com , also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6 . Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/twit hoxhunt.com/securitynow rayneo.com guardsquare.com threatlocker.com/twit outsystems.com/twit

September 16, 20262 hr 50 min

SN 1096: Are we the Krell? - 153 Million Driver's Licenses Leaked

Are we charging toward a Krell-style catastrophe with AI, arming ourselves with incomprehensible power while missing the real risks lurking beneath the code? The full report on last week's nearly 1,000 Microsoft security fixes. Five months after its start, what's the status of Project Glasswing? Anthropic's rogue agent escape count reaches four incidents. Not to be outdone, OpenAI's count passes 10 and maybe as many as 23! Revisiting California's DROP compulsory data broker data deletion. Russian criminals get their hands on more than 153 million drivers license scans. "Skynet" is the wrong model for the end of the world. The right model is The Krell Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1096-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now . You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page . For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com , also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6 . Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/twit joindeleteme.com/twit-biz bitwarden.com/twit material.security canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT threatlocker.com/twit

September 9, 20263 hr 6 min

SN 1095: AI-Driven Expertise Loss - Gemini, Hugging Face, and the AI Arms Race

OpenAI's latest advances have the rumor mill buzzing about "hidden thoughts" and unsupervisable models, but are AI safety experts panicking over the wrong threat? Get the clear-headed take behind the headlines. We start out with a classic old school hack against Dropbox. Next Patch Tuesday will be enabling "Memory Integrity" for many. Firefox moved to 155 and obtained a dumb Smart Window. CISA is terminating 6 most valuable cybersecurity services. OpenAI advanced to topof the heap with GPT-6 Astra. But... is it now hiding some of its thinking from monitoring? Nvidia is acquiring Hugging Face. Who's that good for? Google releases Gemini 3.8 Flash and Cyber. Is it good? Chinese cyberespionage is using AI to become more slippery. Matthew Green proposes a fascinating take on AI bug drought. A lifelong safety engineer contemplates AI-driven loss of expertise. Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1095-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now . You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page . For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com , also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6 . Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: doppel.com hoxhunt.com/securitynow guardsquare.com threatlocker.com/twit

September 2, 20262 hr 51 min

SN 1094: AI Patching Shortcomings - Should You Trust AI-Generated Code?

AI-generated code is flooding the industry, but researchers reveal that almost half of it contains critical vulnerabilities. This week, we unpack what happens when the race for automation outpaces security best practices. A possible means for preventing prompt injection abuse. Clear evidence of Chinese-made router malicious intent. A cool before and after SpinRite graph of SSD performance. How about adding unpredictable hashes to role tags? What did Claude make of last week's podcast? Could much better harnesses prevent prompt injection? A listener wants us to stop saying AI "thinks". AI designers ignore well-understood security concepts. Can we explain LLM AI using conventional computer terms? A listener strongly dislikes the term "rotating credentials". The land of AI is being filled with "meat proxies". Researchers exhaustively test frontier model vulnerability remediation. (hint: It does not go well.) Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1094-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now . You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page . For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com , also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6 . Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: bitwarden.com/twit outsystems.com/twit threatlocker.com/twit doppel.com

August 26, 20262 hr 48 min

SN 1093: Tokens in the Stream - Why LLMs are inherently insecure and prompt injection will persist

Turns out, every chatbot conversation runs on a messy hack at the heart of language models, making prompt injection an unsolved—and possibly unsolvable—security threat. Steve and Leo unravel the research that explains why "roles" in AI aren't what you think they are. Understanding the controversy surrounding "AI Model Distillation" Anthropic moves to make their most powerful Mythos 5 model more widely available. Bitwarden's "Secrets Manager" offering prevents agentic and prompt injection abuse. The astounding and disturbing truth about the way conversation AI actually works Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1093-Notes.pdf Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now . You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page . For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com , also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6 . Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: threatlocker.com/twit box.com/AI hoxhunt.com/securitynow guardsquare.com material.security