2025 Ransomware Update with Ryan Estes

This week on the podcast, Corey Nachreiner and guest host, Ryan Estes, from WatchGuard’s malware analysis team, explore WatchGuard’s recently released Q1 Internet Security Report (ISR). As always with the ISR, we highlight the top malware, network attacks, and malicious domains that our products see, but with our guest host, the author of the Endpoint section, we dive much deeper into all the threats arriving a our customers’ endpoint. Listen in for the latest threat landscape trends and some practical tips to stay safe from the most recent threats.

First, we look back at Microsoft’s major shift to remove endpoint protection from the Windows kernel. When we first covered it, it was a proposed change—now it's happening, and the implications are big. Next, we revisit a segment on GPT-4o and how generative AI is fueling the next wave of social engineering attacks. It's smarter, faster, and more convincing than ever. And finally, a refresher on the arrest of a Scattered Spider leader. While that made headlines, the group's activity hasn’t slowed down, they're still very much on the radar, as we discussed just last week.

This week, we discuss a phishing technique that uses a powerful and risky Microsoft 365 configuration setting. After that, we round up everything we know about the Marks & Spencer breach from April and the lessons that all MSPs can learn from it. After that, we quickly cover a new series of vulnerabilities in a popular Bluetooth chipset that could let attackers gain full control over your headphones.

This week on the podcast, we cover a recent blog post from Google's Threat Intelligence Group on a financially motiviated threat actor's latest techniques for stealing data. After that, we dive into the Model Context Protocol (MPC) that organizations have been rapidly adopting to add functionality to their AI deployments and all of the security risks that it introduces.

This week on the podcast, recent guest Adam Winston hops back on to continue our discussion on Artificial Intelligence in cybersecurity. This week, we focus on how attackers are using AI, what to worry about and what not to lose sleep over, and guidance for evaluating AI for use within your own organization.

This week on the podcast, we cover Coinbase's recent filing with the SEC that described an insider threat event that lead to a ransomware extortion. After that, we discuss dive in to Signal and other secure messaging apps, how they protect communications, and how other apps can undermine those protections.

This week on the podcast, we bring on Ryan Estes from the WatchGuard Threat Lab to discuss the latest trends in ransomware operations. Ryan is an expert in ransomware analysis and currently owns the data behind WatchGuard's public Ransomware Tracker on the WatchGuard Security Center.

This week on the podcast, we bring in Adam Winston, former CSO of ActZero and current Field CTO for Managed Services at WatchGuard to discuss automating the SOC with AI. We cover the history of AI in SecOps, the good and bad applications of AI and Machine Learning, what the future looks like, and how compliance might impact our ability to get there.

This week on the podcast, we discuss how the CVE program was granted an 11th hour temporary reprieve after the program's steward, MITRE, originally announced their contract had not been renewed. After that, we cover the recent cyberattack against 4chan that took it offline and resulted in leaked moderator information and source code. We end with a quick discussion on a post-exploitation technique being used in the wild against Fortinet FortiGate devices.

This week on the podcast, we discuss a recent White House executive order that revoked the security clearances of former CISA chief Christopher Krebs as well as all other employees at SentinelOne and the implications that brings to our industry. Before that, we give a quick update on the Oracle Cloud breach from a few weeks back that Oracle has finally confirmed. We end with our thoughts on a few Microsoft Windows AI features that just launched in early preview and how they might impact data privacy and security.