Bacteria, Spartans, AI gone wild, Cisco, WordPress, Settra, Plugin4Shell, Josh Marpet - SWN #617

Bacteria, Spartans Invade Athens, Agentic AI gone wild, Cisco, WordPress, Settra, Plugin4Shell, Josh Marpet, and More on this episode of the Security Weekly News. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-617

In the security news this week: UK government rolls out passkeys to 20 million users Phishing-resistant authentication and replay resistance Passkey adoption, device security, and user acceptance EU Cyber Resilience Act guidance, scope, and compliance CRA vulnerability disclosure and reporting requirements The real cost of cyberattacks and cybersecurity spending Cyber insurance and improving organizational security Nightmare Eclipse and the release of Windows zero-days Check Point VPN vulnerabilities and perimeter security GitLab security updates and shadow IT Discovering unmanaged GitLab instances Cyberattacks against oil tankers and insider threats VPN patching and implied rules Zero-downtime GitLab updates and version management Running Windows ARM on Apple Silicon with VMware and Parallels Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw-944

The overwhelming majority of people, across the full span of their professional lives, operate without formal authority over the domains in which they work (i.e., leadership). Yet followership has almost no sustained literature, no targeted development, and no rigorous framework of its own. If you're not a leader, what does a follower look like? Kenyada Meadows, CEO & Founder at The Executive Parent Company, joins Business Security Weekly to discuss his book, The PASSENGER Seat, which outlines a framework for followership. Kenyada will outline the nine disciplines of the framework across three dimensions, including: (P) Principled Anchoring — Holds values explicitly and specifically enough to guide behavior under pressure; knows the limit line before reaching it. (A) Accountability — Communicates upward honestly, documents concerns before decisions are made, and owns errors without deflection. (S) Self-Mastery — Invests deliberately in work, home, and inner domains, so identity — and ethical agency — isn't hostage to institutional threat. (S) Systems Thinking — Reads the institution analytically — what produces the patterns observed, and where honest information is being filtered. (E) Emerging Risk Management — Functions as an early-warning system for risks that formal frameworks haven't yet named. (N) Negotiation — Translates insight and values into institutional impact through credibility, framing, coalition, and timing. -(G) Guardianship — Protects what the institution stands for over time, especially when no one is watching. (E) Enablement — Ensures influence strengthens collective capacity rather than merely advancing individual position. (R) Results-Driven Influence — Binds the other eight disciplines toward outcomes that are genuinely better — not merely visible. In the leadership and communications segment, Stop playing with the CISO role. Fix cybersecurity leadership, What CIO-CISO alignment looks like when it's working, Why judgment is emerging as cybersecurity’s defining skill, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/bsw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/bsw-465

RoboGators, HBOMAX, Microsoft, DAS, Horsebot 3000, Aaran Leyland does AI, and More on the Security Weekly News. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-616

While agents and LLMs haven't fundamentally changed core mobile vulnerability types, they have supercharged speed, scale, and accessibility—democratizing threats like automated phishing, synthetic identity fraud, and easier identification of hard-coded secrets. Ryan Lloyd and Jason Cortlund break down how threat actors leverage LLMs as a force multiplier to accelerate mobile app attacks. Then we discuss actionable defense strategies, from viewing agents as an active adversary to leveraging server-side threat telemetry, attestation, and layered defense strategies combined with polymorphic code releases. This segment is sponsored by Guardsquare. Visit https://securityweekly.com/guardsquare to learn more about them! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-400

Interview with Snehal Antani Snehal Antani, CEO and co-founder of Horizon3 joins us to talk about how automated validation can help with exposure management. As vulnerability counts spike, security teams are looking for a way to prioritize. Automated penetration testing offers a way to quickly separate exploitable vulnerabilities from the rest. This segment is sponsored by Horizon3. Visit https://securityweekly.com/horizon3 to learn more about them! Topic Segment - SmartTVs and Privacy For this week's topic segment, we explore privacy and TVs. LG has been in the news for allegedly collecting data from its customers, but the facts are unclear. We share our recent experiences and dive into some of the primary concerns and theories about what's going on here. If you want to opt out of some of your TV's data collection, Consumer Reports has a collection of instructions for a variety of TV platforms. Weekly Enterprise News Finally, in the enterprise security news, We check the vibes We check finding and acquisitions Nightmare Eclipse or Good Night of Sleep Eclipse? Update on Anthropic’s Glasswing project How long would it take for a mobile phone worm to spread? Don’t expose SSH to the public Internet Massive amounts of cryptocurrency continue to get stolen Did you actually read your third party’s SOC 2? Your boss may be reading your AI chat history All that and more, on this episode of Enterprise Security Weekly. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/esw-476

Twenty-five years since 9/11, and we open by marking it properly — the people who didn't come home, and the survivors and responders still carrying it, physically and mentally, a quarter of a century on. Then we get to work. Shift-left didn't fail. The starting line moved. AI coding agents now read the issue, write the code, pick the dependencies and open the pull request — so the earliest trust boundary isn't your first commit any more, it's the moment an agent gets context and authority. Most of us haven't moved our controls with it. Unit 42 pull the lid off a pay-per-install operation running out of eleven gaming YouTube channels, with over ten thousand loader samples underneath it. Every layer built to look too boring to escalate. When your analyst closes that alert as adware, they may have just closed three separate compromises. Google's threat tracker: a credential-harvesting campaign built and run in under six hours, with Markdown files as attacker playbooks. And malware carrying prompt-injection text designed to make your LLM scanner refuse to look at it — because a refusal that reads as "clean" is a free pass. A CVSS 10 in Gemini CLI that never touched the model. No prompt, no injection, no tool call. The attacker just turned up before the sandbox did. The first ever Take It Down Act sentencing — handled carefully, with what you actually do if someone tells you something, and a proper shout-out to Dale, the Cyber Safety Guy, whose work every parent with a teenager online should have bookmarked. Two hundred and sixty-three million dollars walks out of a Bitcoin sidechain and then walks back in. Nobody stole the keys. They just convinced the system to sign a lie. Anthropic's 154-page threat report. And an alignment lead who puts extinction odds above ten percent. All that, plus Josh Marpet's take, on Security Weekly News #615. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-615

In the security news this week: Microsoft patches all the things Commissary freezers enter cyberwar Fake AV, real Defender nap Rowhammer comes for the GPU BIOS updates are no longer optional CVSS is not a crystal ball Kworker, but make it malware FortiGate gets a post-exploitation RAT CERN goes Debian underground UEFI shells strike again Australia loses the plot, and phones Cisco routers become covert gateways MikroTik patches the takeover chain WeWorm wriggles through mobile The year of Linux television Browsers become backdoors Fake IT calls, real data theft CVE attribution gets weird Boston Scientific keeps talking Security tools misconfigure themselves AI circuit breakers for rogue agents Passkeys meet the real world Vibe coding, vibe vulnerabilities AI loss of control keeps climbing AI agents report themselves to Schneier Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw-943

AI is all the hype, but we're currently stuck at the bottom of the 'J' curve. Wild enthusiasm has given way to the reality of costs, benefits, and risks. What's next for AI and companies looking to capitalize on the AI trends? John Willis, author, researcher, and technology industry veteran, joins Business Security Weekly to discuss AI's impact on fundraising. John explores what the history of AI can teach us about the current moment, including how to separate genuine technological transformation from hype and better understand where AI may take us next. Next, it’s time for Security Money. The Index is exploding upwards as the markets continue to climb. Both the Index and the NASDAQ, hit all time highs. The Business Security Weekly crew breaks down funding, acquisitions, and performance of both the public and private markets. The Security Weekly 24 Index is made up of the following pure play public security companies: SAIL Sailpoint Inc PANW Palo Alto Networks Inc CHKP Check Point Software Technologies Ltd RBRK Rubrik Inc GEN Gen Digital Inc FTNT Fortinet Inc AKAM Akamai Technologies Inc FFIV F5 Inc ZS Zscaler Inc OSPN Onespan Inc LDOS Leidos Holdings Inc QLYS Qualys Inc NTSK Netskope Inc TENB Tenable Holdings Inc OKTA Okta Inc S SentinelOne Inc NET Cloudflare Inc CRWD Crowdstrike Holdings Inc NTCT NetScout Systems Inc VRNS Varonis Systems Inc RPD Rapid7 Inc FSLY Fastly Inc RDWR Radware Ltd ATEN A10 Networks Inc Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/bsw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/bsw-464

Cybercabs, Robohobos, BigBear, Nightmare Eclipse, weChat, Flock, ASCII, Aaran Leyland, and More on the Security Weekly News. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-614