The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast

Epizode

• 
  Intel Chat: AI patches fail, LiteLLM supply chain, Claude eval incidents & DPRK npm [345] 14.08.2026 34min

  Intel Chat with Matt Bromiley and Chris Luft.
• 
  Proving the value of security operations with Christopher Crowley [344] 13.08.2026 42min

  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.
• 
  Intel Chat: Shai-Hulud is back, model pinning & the token spend problem [343] 08.08.2026 35min

  Intel Chat with Matt Bromiley and Chris Luft — recorded in person at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas, day two.
• 
  Intel Chat: Hugging Face AI-agent breach, WP2Shell, Suno & Paidwork leaks, AWS Bahrain strike [342] 30.07.2026 30min

  Intel Chat with Matt Bromiley and Chris Luft.
• 
  Building trustworthy AI with Rob van der Veer [341] 29.07.2026 35min

  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.
• 
  AI Chat: The Hugging Face / OpenAI breach — the attacker was the model [340] 23.07.2026 35min

  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.
• 
  AI Chat: Grok CLI data exfiltration, AI vs. patching, distillation wars & shadow AI [339] 14.07.2026 23min

  • 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.
• 
  Intel Chat: Dialogflow Rogue Agent, ghost phishing, CISA KEV deadline & HalluSquatting [338] 09.07.2026 34min

  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.
• 
  Ransomware in the age of agentic AI with Behnaz Karimi [337] 08.07.2026 33min

  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.
• 
  Intel Chat: Hijacked AI backends, billboard hacks, Cursor DuneSlide & Claude export controls [336] 03.07.2026 33min

  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. • 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. • 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. • 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.
• 
  Intel Chat: Cisco CUCM exploited, ransomware profiles, Gamaredon & AI agent phishing [335] 01.07.2026 30min

  Matt and Chris break down four stories from the week in threat intel: • Cisco CUCM (CVE-2026-20230) — a web-dialer SSRF that chains to root-level RCE, exploited in the wild less than 24 hours after the PoC and full exploit chain were published. • The latest Ransomware Tool Matrix (RTM) / Ransomware Vulnerability Matrix (RVM) update, profiling three active groups — The Gentlemen, DragonForce and Warlock — and the BYOVD and legit-admin-tool tradecraft they increasingly share. • Gamaredon's upgraded toolkit against Ukraine (per ESET): new PowerShell downloaders like PteroPaste, Cloudflare tunneling and Workers for C2, and exfiltration to trusted cloud storage such as Amazon S3 and Dropbox. • Varonis Threat Labs phishing an AI email agent ("Pinchy") — why agents spot technical phishing better than humans yet hand over credentials to a convincing social request, and why you should treat them as privileged junior employees.
• 
  The evolving fraud landscape in the age of AI with Tamas Kadar [#334] 30.06.2026 42min

  Today we're speaking with Tamas Kadar, CEO / Co-Founder of SEON, about building a safer digital world for businesses. We touch on fraud, how it's evolved in the age of AI, and what we can do to protect ourselves against it.
• 
  Anthropic restriction, ServiceNow incident, Fortinet credential harvesting & Ukraine accesses EU cyber reserve / Intel Chat [#333] 28.06.2026 34min

  In this episode of The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast, we discuss some intel being shared in the LimaCharlie community.
• 
  Last call for Defenders - How we're actually using AI in the SOC with Eric Capuano / Defender Fridays [#332] 20.06.2026 37min

  Join us for the final episode of Defender Fridays as Eric Capuano, creator of Defender Fridays and co-founder of Digital Defense Institute, closes out the series with a candid conversation on how he's actually building and running agentic workflows in the SOC today.
• 
  FFmpeg's 21 zero-days, Ruby cooldown feature, Microsoft disrupted by Shai-Hulud worm & Meta AI tool compromise / Intel Chat [#331] 15.06.2026 28min

  In this episode of The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast, we discuss some intel being shared in the LimaCharlie community.
• 
  AI-assisted SOC training with Carlo Anez / Defender Fridays [#330] 12.06.2026 32min

  This week's Defender Fridays as Carlo Anez, Founder and Lead Instructor at IgniteCyber Academy and DEFCON Training Instructor, breaks down where AI fits into the picture without replacing the analyst.
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  Building practical blue team skills using AI-assisted SOC training with Bobby Ford/ Defender Fridays [#329] 05.06.2026 30min

  Join us for this week's Defender Fridays as Bobby Ford, Chief Strategy and Experience Officer at Doppel, talks about open-source labs, MITRE ATT&CK, and real-world defender workflows.
• 
  "Megalodon" Malware in GitHub, Malware-Slop steals from Claude AI, 7-Eleven breach & CISA cPanel vulnerability / Intel Chat [#328] 01.06.2026 29min

  In this episode of The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast, we discuss some intel being shared in the LimaCharlie community.
• 
  From PentestGPT to production: The state of AI-assisted offensive security with Charles Grandjean / Defender Fridays [#327] 30.05.2026 30min

  Join us for this week's Defender Fridays as Chris Sanders, Founder at Applied Network Defense and the Rural Technology Fund, breaks down how analysts actually think through investigations and what separates high performers from the rest.
• 
  GitHub repositories compromised, Webworm targets Europe, fake Outlook & cybercriminal VPN / Intel Chat [#326] 29.05.2026 24min

  In this episode of The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast, we discuss some intel being shared in the LimaCharlie community.