The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast

Hosted by LimaCharlie

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Episodes

346

Latest episode

Aug 2026

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EN-US

About the show

An accessible but technical podcast about cybersecurity and the people who keep the internet safe. The podcast is built as a series of segments: we will be looking back at the last couple of weeks in cybersecurity news, talking to different people in the industry about areas of their expertise, we're going to break apart some of the TTPs being used by adversaries, and we will even cover a little bit of hacker history.

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60 recent

August 14, 2026Episode 34534 min

Intel Chat: AI patches fail, LiteLLM supply chain, Claude eval incidents & DPRK npm [345]

Intel Chat with Matt Bromiley and Chris Luft. • AI-generated patches fix vulnerabilities about half the time. 1Password's Off-By-1 team tested ChatGPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 against six vulnerabilities: across 6,080 generated patches only 46% fixed the underlying flaw, and some that did were narrow enough to be bypassed. Separate Veracode research found a 56% security pass rate across 100+ models, with 44% of AI-generated code carrying detectable OWASP Top 10 issues. Matt's pushback: what is the HUMAN success rate for comparison, and why is nobody publishing that number? • LiteLLM supply chain attack. CloudSEK reports 2,500+ organizations and 434,000 CI/CD pipelines potentially exposed. LiteLLM was not the initial target: the compromise came in through Aqua Security's Trivy scanner and spread when LiteLLM's CI automatically installed it, ending with malicious versions 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI. They were live for roughly 40 minutes, which automated dependency resolution and cached layers were more than enough to propagate. • Anthropic's models reached real systems during evaluations. Reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs, Anthropic found three incidents where Claude models gained unauthorized access to real organizations during capture-the-flag exercises, after a misunderstanding with an evaluation partner left the environments internet-connected. One model published a malicious package to the real PyPI, where it ran on 15 real systems. Matt argues this is a lab test rather than a threat report, and asks what defenders are supposed to do with it. • North Korea behind the npm compromises. Amazon Threat Intelligence links the typo-crypto, debug, chalk and axios incidents to the same DPRK actor tracked as SAPPHIRE SLEET, STARDUST CHOLLIMA and BlueNoroff. Wiz found roughly one in ten cloud environments touched by the debug and chalk incident within two hours. The technique has shifted: malicious functionality is now split across several innocuous-looking packages that only do anything once combined, plus slopsquatting and prompt injection aimed at AI code scanners. Stories covered: • https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/ai-generated-patches-fail-half-time • https://www.securityweek.com/over-2500-organizations-impacted-by-litellm-supply-chain-attack/ • https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cybersecurity-evals • https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/amazon-identifies-north-korean-hacker-group-behind-open-source-supply-chain-attacks/ Chapters: 0:00 Back from Black Hat 3:31 AI-generated patches fix vulnerabilities about half the time 6:23 What is the human success rate? 10:53 LiteLLM supply chain attack 13:03 Pin your dependencies 15:59 Anthropic models reached real systems during evals 22:12 This is a lab test, not a threat report 27:06 North Korea behind the debug, chalk and axios compromises 30:59 Malware assembled from harmless-looking parts 33:27 Clever people on the other side of the fence The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast — a podcast about cybersecurity and the people that keep the internet safe. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen: • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ep00zeY3S8ffZ4o0UeSps • Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cybersecurity-defenders-podcast/id1649981740 • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@limacharlieio Learn more about LimaCharlie: https://limacharlie.io #cybersecurity #infosec #AIsecurity #supplychainsecurity #threatintel

August 13, 2026Episode 34442 min

Proving the value of security operations with Christopher Crowley [344]

Today we're speaking with Christopher Crowley, cybersecurity consultant through Montance and Senior Instructor with the SANS Institute, about the value of cybersecurity operations — how to measure it, how to express it to the business, and how AI is changing the work of the SOC. Christopher is a cybersecurity practitioner and educator focused on security operations, incident response, threat hunting, and building and maturing security operations centers. He is the author of the annual SANS SOC Survey, a security operations class called SOC-Class, and a new book entitled The Value of Cybersecurity Operations. He is a Senior Instructor with the SANS Institute, a faculty member at IANS, and a consultant through Montance. His background also includes network operations, software development, mobile security assessment, and security policy. Learn more at https://montance.com and get the book at https://shop.montance.com Support our show by sharing your favorite episodes with a friend, subscribe, give us a rating or leave a comment on your podcast platform. This podcast is brought to you by LimaCharlie, maker of the SecOps Cloud Platform, infrastructure for SecOps where everything is built API first. Scale with confidence as your business grows. Start today for free at https://limacharlie.io/ Subscribe to The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ep00zeY3S8ffZ4o0UeSps

August 8, 2026Episode 34335 min

Intel Chat: Shai-Hulud is back, model pinning & the token spend problem [343]

Intel Chat with Matt Bromiley and Chris Luft — recorded in person at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas, day two. No prep doc, no script: just what Matt and Chris were actually hearing on the floor. • Shai-Hulud is back. The self-replicating npm worm returned on August 4, trojanizing the keyv / cacheable family and spreading to 400+ packages within hours. Chris reads through Datadog Security Labs' analysis of the Shai-Hulud 2.0 wave: 796 packages and 1,092 versions, 20M+ weekly downloads, credential harvesting with TruffleHog, GitHub repositories used for both exfiltration and command and control, and a worm that reads its own code to propagate without a C2 server. • The LLM that downloaded the malicious package by itself. A researcher asked a frontier model about a compromised package, and the model decided the best way to help was to go fetch a copy — tripping the SOC's alert and bypassing the company's centralized package clearing house on the way. • Non-human identity as the new perimeter. Every agent you introduce is another identity: who created it, what can it reach, how long should it live? • "Computer says no." Matt's colleague hit a refusal from Opus 5, and the session automatically downgraded to 4.8 and completed the task. Which raises the real question of the episode: do security teams now need model pinning, the way we once needed certificate pinning? And if defenders pin to older models to keep working while adversaries use the newest ones, have we rebuilt the same gap all over again? • AI governance and change control — which models are approved for which tasks, and what happens when a vendor ships a new version or deprecates an old one. • Token spend as a CISO budget line item. Enterprises buying tokens at a scale their vendors can't match and pulling those vendors onto their plan, token burn as an insider-threat vector, and why $100,000 of tokens is not $100,000 of productivity. • Defender takeaways: pin your npm packages, get security off its island and talk to your developers, build approved paths before detections, least privilege and key rotation, and network-gated pushes as a deliberate chokepoint. Stories covered: • https://www.elastic.co/security-labs/shai-hulud-chaindrop-npm-supply-chain • https://research.jfrog.com/post/shai-hulud-is-back-august/ • https://securitylabs.datadoghq.com/articles/shai-hulud-2.0-npm-worm/ • https://securitylabs.datadoghq.com/articles/npm-worm-compromises-popular-npm-packages/ • https://unit42.paloaltonetworks.com/npm-supply-chain-attack/ Chapters: 0:00 Live from Black Hat, in person for once 0:48 How Black Hat has changed 4:31 No prep — let's talk about what's actually happening here 4:57 Shai-Hulud is back: supply chain compromise 6:23 The LLM that downloaded the malicious package 7:19 Inside Shai-Hulud 2.0 10:34 When attackers and defenders use the same tools 11:39 Non-human identity is the new perimeter 12:13 Opus 5 said no, so the session downgraded itself 15:23 Do security teams need model pinning? 18:20 Three companies, very nebulous rules 18:35 AI governance: which model for which task 21:19 Token spend hits the security budget 22:58 Is token spend a productivity metric? 25:46 Pin your packages 26:25 Get security off the island 29:17 Least privilege, key rotation, chokepoints 32:55 Why it's called Shai-Hulud 33:25 Wrapping up at Black Hat The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast — a podcast about cybersecurity and the people that keep the internet safe. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen: • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ep00zeY3S8ffZ4o0UeSps • Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cybersecurity-defenders-podcast/id1649981740 • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@limacharlieio Learn more about LimaCharlie: https://limacharlie.io #cybersecurity #infosec #threatintel #AIsecurity #supplychainsecurity

July 30, 2026Episode 34230 min

Intel Chat: Hugging Face AI-agent breach, WP2Shell, Suno & Paidwork leaks, AWS Bahrain strike [342]

Intel Chat with Matt Bromiley and Chris Luft. Matt and Chris break down four stories from the week in threat intel: • Hugging Face's security incident disclosure: an intrusion conducted end-to-end by an autonomous AI agent system — a malicious dataset exploiting two code-execution paths, thousands of actions across short-lived sandboxes, self-migrating C2 — and why the forensics had to run on the open-weight GLM 5.2 model after hosted frontier models refused to analyze real attack artifacts. • WP2Shell: attackers chaining CVE-2026-60137 (WordPress Core SQL injection) with CVE-2026-63030 (Batch REST API logic flaw) for unauthenticated remote code execution on default WordPress installs — found by Searchlight Cyber using GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra in about ten hours, with tens of thousands of exploitation attempts following disclosure. • Data breaches at AI music generator Suno (55.3M unique email addresses, plus partial Stripe payment records) and gig-work platform Paidwork (23.3M addresses, password hashes and banking data), per Have I Been Pwned. • Iranian state media claims the IRGC destroyed AWS's Bahrain data center (ME-SOUTH-1) with cruise missiles — and what data centers becoming military targets means for cloud resilience. Plus: Google Threat Intelligence Group retires APT/FIN nomenclature for new threat-actor names, and where to find Chris and Matt at Black Hat. Stories covered: • https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026 • https://www.darkreading.com/cyberattacks-data-breaches/wp2shell-millions-wordpress-sites-remote-takeover • https://www.securityweek.com/suno-paidwork-data-breaches-affect-tens-of-millions-of-accounts/ • https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/amazon-data-center-in-bahrain-struck-and-destroyed-by-iranian-cruise-missiles-state-media-claims-attacks-launched-against-aws-site-in-response-to-alleged-us-strikes-on-an-under-construction-nuclear-plant Chapters: 0:00 Intro & Black Hat plans 2:07 Hugging Face's AI-agent breach disclosure 12:39 WP2Shell: WordPress exploit chain 20:59 Suno & Paidwork data breaches 24:17 IRGC strikes on AWS Bahrain 28:27 Google Threat Intel's new actor names 29:29 Black Hat swag hunt & wrap-up The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast — a podcast about cybersecurity and the people that keep the internet safe. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen: • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ep00zeY3S8ffZ4o0UeSps • Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cybersecurity-defenders-podcast/id1649981740 • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@limacharlieio Learn more about LimaCharlie: https://limacharlie.io #cybersecurity #infosec #threatintel #AIsecurity #databreach

July 29, 2026Episode 34135 min

Building trustworthy AI with Rob van der Veer [341]

Today we're speaking with Rob van der Veer, Chief AI Officer at Software Improvement Group, about how organizations can build trustworthy AI in an era of rapidly evolving technology and regulation — AI security, threat modeling, international standards, and the new challenges posed by agentic AI. Rob is a global leader in AI security, software engineering, and international AI standards, with more than 30 years of experience in artificial intelligence. He has played a leading role in developing industry standards and serves as co-editor of the forthcoming European AI security standard supporting the EU AI Act. He is the founder of the OWASP AI Exchange, co-founder of OpenCRE, and has helped bring together standards organizations, industry, and the open-source community to advance practical approaches to secure AI. Learn more at https://www.softwareimprovementgroup.com and https://owaspai.org Support our show by sharing your favorite episodes with a friend, subscribe, give us a rating or leave a comment on your podcast platform. This podcast is brought to you by LimaCharlie, maker of the SecOps Cloud Platform, infrastructure for SecOps where everything is built API first. Scale with confidence as your business grows. Start today for free at https://limacharlie.io/ Subscribe to The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ep00zeY3S8ffZ4o0UeSps

July 23, 2026Episode 34035 min

AI Chat: The Hugging Face / OpenAI breach — the attacker was the model [340]

AI Chat with Maxime Lamothe-Brassard and Chris Luft — a special episode. One story, pulled apart start to finish. In mid-July 2026, Hugging Face disclosed a breach of its production infrastructure carried out end-to-end by an autonomous AI agent. Five days later, OpenAI revealed the attacker was its own models — GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased model — which broke out of an internal cyber-capability evaluation called ExploitGym and reached into Hugging Face's production systems to steal the benchmark's answer key. In this episode: • The timeline: Hugging Face's July 16 disclosure, OpenAI's July 21 attribution — and the five days in between when even the victim didn't know an AI did it. • The attack chain: a malicious dataset abusing two code-execution paths in the dataset-processing pipeline, node-level escalation, credential harvesting and lateral movement — thousands of actions across short-lived sandboxes with self-migrating command-and-control. • The escape: a zero-day in the eval sandbox's package-registry cache proxy, the single egress control — per OpenAI's own account. • Motive: the models got "hyperfocused" on winning the benchmark, not stealing data — and whether "no malicious intent" is a fair description or a comforting one. • What was and wasn't exposed, what to do about your Hugging Face tokens, and why this is not the 2024 Spaces incident or the 2023 OpenAI forum hack. • Max's hot take: the beginning of the phase where we lock developers out of writing code — and a new fear unlocked: models backdooring other models. Stories covered: • https://huggingface.co/blog/security-... • https://openai.com/index/hugging-face... Chapters: 0:00 Cold open — the attacker was the model 2:20 The whole story in one breath 6:41 The timeline: two disclosures, five days apart 11:37 Attack chain, part 1: getting in through a malicious dataset 15:53 Attack chain, part 2: escaping the eval sandbox 22:10 Motive, attribution & intent: cheating on the benchmark 25:31 What was (and wasn't) exposed 28:08 The bigger picture: the fire drill started the fire 31:39 Lessons for labs, platforms, and solo developers 33:15 New fear unlocked: models backdooring models The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast — a podcast about cybersecurity and the people that keep the internet safe. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen: • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ep00ze... • Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... • YouTube: / @limacharlieio Learn more about LimaCharlie: https://limacharlie.io #cybersecurity #AIsecurity #OpenAI #HuggingFace #infosec

July 14, 2026Episode 33923 min

AI Chat: Grok CLI data exfiltration, AI vs. patching, distillation wars & shadow AI [339]

AI Chat with Maxime Lamothe-Brassard and Chris Luft. A new segment on the podcast: AI news in cybersecurity that is less than 24 hours old, discussed while it is still hot. Joining Chris for these conversations is LimaCharlie founder and CEO Maxime Lamothe-Brassard. In this episode: • Nipun Gupta (founder of Optimus Labs) reports that xAI's Grok Build CLI packaged and uploaded an entire local Git repository — commit history, branches and .env files with API keys — to a Google Cloud bucket; wire-level analysis via mitmproxy, a quiet server-side fix, and why you should rotate keys if you used the tool. • Fortinet's take (via Mexico Business News) on AI accelerating vulnerability discovery and exploitation: 24–48 hours from disclosure to active exploitation vs. 16 days to patch — and whether "virtual patching" is a real mitigation or a feat of marketing. • The AI distillation debate: after years of arguing fair use for scraping the internet, frontier labs now object to competitors training on their model outputs — Business Insider's look at the irony, shared by Pascal Hetzscholdt (Wiley). • Neon Cyber's survey on shadow AI rising with seniority: 14% of individual contributors use unapproved AI tools vs. 63.7% of managers and 70% of VPs and above — and why enforcement, not awareness, is the real challenge. Stories covered: • / guptanipun_my-spare-laptop-ran-completely-... • https://mexicobusiness.news/cybersecu... • / pascal-hetzscholdt_quote-heres-some-delici... • https://neoncyber.com/blog/shadow-ai-... Chapters: 0:00 Intro — welcome to AI Chat 0:45 Grok Build CLI uploading entire repos (Nipun Gupta / Optimus Labs) 4:57 AI is outpacing patch management — is virtual patching the answer? 12:32 The AI distillation debate: scraping irony at the frontier labs 16:29 Shadow AI use rises with seniority (Neon Cyber) 22:51 Wrap-up The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast — a podcast about cybersecurity and the people that keep the internet safe. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen: • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ep00ze... • Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... • YouTube: / @limacharlieio

July 9, 2026Episode 33834 min

Intel Chat: Dialogflow Rogue Agent, ghost phishing, CISA KEV deadline & HalluSquatting [338]

Intel Chat with Matt Bromiley and Chris Luft. Matt and Chris break down four stories from the week in threat intel: • Varonis Threat Labs' "Rogue Agent" — a permission boundary flaw in Google Dialogflow CX's Code Blocks feature that could let an attacker with a single permission (dialogflow.playbooks.update) inject persistent malicious code into a chatbot's execution pipeline and silently exfiltrate conversations; Google has fully patched it, no customer action required. • The EvilTokens campaign and "ghost phishing" — AES-GCM-encrypted phishing pages that look harmless to URL scanners and only reveal themselves after decrypting in the victim's browser, driving Microsoft device code phishing against Microsoft 365 accounts. • CISA adds four actively exploited flaws to the KEV catalog with a July 10 patch deadline under BOD 26-04: Adobe ColdFusion (CVE-2026-48282, CVSS 10.0), Langflow (CVE-2026-55255, chained with CVE-2026-33017), and Joomla's SP Page Builder (CVE-2026-48908) and Page Builder CK (CVE-2026-56290) extensions. • HalluSquatting — Tel Aviv University researchers show attackers can register the repository names AI coding assistants predictably hallucinate, then ride prompt injection to code execution on developer machines — with success rates up to 85% for repos and 100% for skill installs across Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot, Cline, Gemini CLI and more. Stories covered: • https://www.darkreading.com/application-security/dialogflow-cx-rogue-agent-flaw-enabled-ai-chatbot-data-theft • https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/new-ghost-phishing-wave-is-breaking.html • https://www.securityweek.com/cisa-urges-immediate-patching-of-exploited-coldfusion-langflow-joomla-flaws/ • https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/new-hallusquatting-attack-could-trick.html Chapters: 0:00 Intro & catching up 4:31 Google Dialogflow CX "Rogue Agent" flaw 11:03 EvilTokens & "ghost phishing" 17:37 CISA KEV: ColdFusion, Langflow & Joomla — patch by July 10 24:56 HalluSquatting: weaponizing AI hallucinations 33:16 Wrap-up The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast — a podcast about cybersecurity and the people that keep the internet safe. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen: • Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ep00zeY3S8ffZ4o0UeSps • Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cybersecurity-defenders-podcast/id1649981740 • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@limacharlieio Learn more about LimaCharlie: https://limacharlie.io #cybersecurity #infosec #threatintel #AIsecurity #phishing

July 8, 2026Episode 33733 min

Ransomware in the age of agentic AI with Behnaz Karimi [337]

Today we're speaking with Behnaz Karimi, an independent researcher specializing in ransomware and agentic AI systems, Senior Cybersecurity Analyst at Accenture, and founder of Tremorina, about how ransomware is evolving to target AI systems, machine learning pipelines, and autonomous agents. With more than 20 years of experience in cybersecurity, Behnaz is also a leader within the OWASP AI Exchange, where she helps develop AI security frameworks and contributes to international AI security standards. In this conversation we cover the new generation of data-poisoning ransomware, why stolen models and datasets are becoming the ransom, what makes autonomous agents an entirely new attack surface, and how organizations can build resilience into their AI initiatives from day one. Learn more about the OWASP AI Exchange at https://owaspai.org/ Support our show by sharing your favorite episodes with a friend, subscribe, give us a rating or leave a comment on your podcast platform. This podcast is brought to you by LimaCharlie, maker of the SecOps Cloud Platform, infrastructure for SecOps where everything is built API first. Scale with confidence as your business grows. Start today for free at https://limacharlie.io/ Subscribe to The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ep00zeY3S8ffZ4o0UeSps

July 3, 2026Episode 33633 min

Intel Chat: Hijacked AI backends, billboard hacks, Cursor DuneSlide & Claude export controls [336]

Intel Chat with Matt Bromiley and Chris Luft. Matt and Chris break down four stories from the week in threat intel: • Zenity researchers observed three campaigns where attackers hijacked internet-exposed AI inference endpoints (Ollama, LiteLLM) as free model backends for offensive operations — including the Strix and HexStrike-AI pentesting frameworks and a Codex agent posing as a "security auditor" — enabled by no-auth defaults and placeholder API keys. https://www.darkreading.com/cloud-security/attackers-hijack-exposed-ai-endpoints-power-offensive-ops • A CISA advisory on Daktronics controllers behind scoreboards, digital billboards and highway signs: unauthenticated path traversal, arbitrary file upload and default admin credentials chaining to root-level control, found and responsibly disclosed by a Princeton undergrad. https://www.securityweek.com/new-controller-flaws-expose-highway-signs-and-billboards-to-remote-hacking/ • Cato's "DuneSlide" (CVE-2026-50548 / CVE-2026-50549) — two critical Cursor flaws where a single prompt injection escapes the terminal sandbox and executes arbitrary commands on a developer's machine; patched in Cursor 3.0. https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/critical-cursor-flaws-could-let-prompt.html • Anthropic restoring worldwide Claude Fable 5 access after the US Commerce Department lifted emergency export controls triggered by a jailbreak — plus what it means for AI governance, open-source model catch-up and the data center debate. https://thehackernews.com/2026/07/anthropic-restores-claude-fable-5-after.html Chapters: 0:00 Intro & catching up 1:17 Attackers hijacking exposed AI backends (Ollama & LiteLLM) 9:18 CISA advisory: billboard & highway sign controllers 13:46 Cursor "DuneSlide" prompt-injection sandbox escape 20:34 Claude Fable 5 export controls lifted 28:17 Data centers, nuclear déjà vu & the AI race 33:39 Wrap-up The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast — a podcast about cybersecurity and the people that keep the internet safe. New episodes drop weekly. Learn more about LimaCharlie: https://limacharlie.io #cybersecurity #infosec #threatintel #AIsecurity #promptinjection