S0:E71: A Hardcoded Password Let Anyone Into Wyndham's Customer Database

Fireworks AI, the inference infrastructure provider behind several of Notion's AI features, disclosed in October that attackers accessed its environment through a compromised third-party cloud provider. Cybersecurity news on this one escalated fast: what started as "test data only" reassurances turned into confirmed exposure of billing information, model weights, datasets, and API tokens, and Notion has now confirmed its own customers were affected. That makes Notion a third party to its customers, Fireworks a fourth party, and the still-unnamed cloud provider a fifth, a textbook case of how deep AI vendor dependencies actually run. Jess and Jake break down what "zero data retention" really means in practice, why product features can create contractual carve-outs even inside a ZDR agreement, and why most vendor risk programs only assess their direct vendors, missing the fourth and fifth parties that may already hold their data.Sources: Notion Security Advisory: https://www.notion.com/security/advisories/security-incident-involving-a-third-party-ai-vendor Fireworks AI Security Bulletin (October 2026): https://fireworks.ai/security/bulletins/october-2026-security-incident Fireworks AI Security Bulletin Update: https://fireworks.ai/security/bulletins/october-2026-security-incident-update Discord: https://discord.gg/wYJnTpczV

Google just told school IT departments: disable Gemini, lose Search entirely. Districts running Chromebooks under Google Workspace for Education now have no AI-free search option. Jess and Jake break down Google's move to bundle Gemini into core Search, so any school disabling the AI assistant loses search functionality outright, not just the AI summaries. Jess argues schools need the ability to opt students out while they're still building fundamental research skills, especially younger or neurodivergent kids who already lean on AI to skip the work entirely. Jake pushes back: this is less a technology problem than a governance one. No vendor is shipping a no-AI tool anymore, so the real question for IT leaders isn't whether to allow AI, it's how to govern acceptable use once it's already everywhere in your stack. They also cover eMudra revoking 8 more certificate authorities (2 for code signing) and dig into the Delve audit-fraud story: why "don't fake your audits" is more than a punchline. Chapters: Intro / Google Bundles Gemini Into School Search / The Overreliance Argument / A Governance Reframe / eMudra Revokes More CAs / Don't Fake Your Audits / Outro https://discord.gg/wYJnTpczV

Big news first: Richy is officially joining Breach Please as a permanent co-host, not just filling in. Welcome to the team. On the story side, Jake, Jess, and Richy dig into Wyndham's hardcoded database credential — a password baked into the Android app that handed anyone access to a Salesforce-hosted customer database, JWTs included. We talk through why storing session tokens at all is a red flag, whether outsourcing your build pipeline gets you off the hook (it doesn't), and how a mealy-mouthed PR response can cost you more than the breach itself. Sources: TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/09/hotel-giant-wyndham-exposed-customer-data-after-app-security-lapse/ This Week in Security (Zack Whittaker's newsletter): https://this.weekinsecurity.com/ join our discord! https://discord.gg/wYJnTpczV

On this episode of Breach Please, Jake, Jess, and Richy dig into OT and building-management systems exposed directly to the internet, following up on last month's refrigeration attacks on French blood banks and EU supermarkets, plus a federal CISA/FBI/HHS/USDA/DoT warning to lock down cold-chain systems. Then: N-able took its hosted N-central platform offline after a researcher published 30+ alleged zero-days to GitHub, saying the company had ignored his earlier reports. And a debate on where AppSec ends and product security begins. No fear mongering, no vendor scripts, no synergized threat posture. Just the stories that matter. Sources: N-able Status Page: https://uptime.n-able.com/ N-able Vulnerability Disclosure Program: https://www.n-able.com/security-and-privacy/vulnerability-disclosure-program Cyber Security News: https://cybersecuritynews.com/n-able-n-central-rce/ Security Boulevard (Tenable): https://securityboulevard.com/2026/11/u-s-urges-critical-infrastructure-orgs-to-secure-refrigeration-systems-asap-after-eu-supermarket-and-blood-bank-attacks/ https://discord.gg/wYJnTpczV

Jess is back from vacation, and Jake catches her up on two stories. First: the Alpine Linux "SSHole" flaw (the same bug family behind last episode's "Starshole" story) is now actually being exploited in a public honeypot. Jake and Jess break down why a researcher spotting exploitation nine hours after the CVE went live is less alarming than the headline makes it sound, why it still takes four separate misconfigurations lining up before it's exploitable, and why so much of the reporting skips the one part that actually matters: what happens after someone gets in. Then: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has admitted, in a letter to NVIDIA staff, to an affair with a woman U.S. officials suspect was a Chinese intelligence asset. NVIDIA's board has opened an independent investigation, and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs has asked for a closed-door briefing. Jake makes the case that, whatever anyone thinks of the affair, Huang was very likely the target of a professional intelligence operation, not the architect of one. They also get into reporting on Chinese shell companies allegedly buying banned NVIDIA chips through front offices with no employees. Plus: the AI bubble conversation continues — circular GPU-purchasing deals, pre-IPO share sales at Anthropic and OpenAI, and a viral Reddit post on what a year of "everything goes through AI agents now" does to a codebase's defect rate. Sources: The Hacker News (OpenSSH "SSHole" Alpine Linux flaw exploited in the wild): https://thehackernews.com/2026/11/hackers-exploited-openssh-sshole-flaw.html?m=1 Axios (NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang admits affair, board to launch investigation): https://www.axios.com/2026/11/08/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-admits-affair-board-to-launch-investigation NPR (NVIDIA launches investigation into CEO's alleged relationship with Chinese spy): https://www.npr.org/2026/11/08/nx-s1-6034036/nvidia-launches-investigation-into-ceos-alleged-relationship-with-chinese-spy Bluesky (Patricia Aas): https://bsky.app/profile/patigallardo.bsky.social/post/3mzsirwehws25 Join the conversation on Discord: https://discord.gg/wYJnTpczV

Jake is on the beach in Miami and Richy's filling in for Jess again - and they're digging into two vulnerabilities that actually matter this week. First: OpenSSH's emergency patch for an SSH authentication bypass in Alpine Linux's sshd, nicknamed "Starshole." It takes four separate misconfigurations lining up before it's exploitable - Jake and Richy break down why that makes it more of a fire-drill-worthy test of your container resilience than a five-alarm fire, and why embedded/OpenWRT-based appliances are the bigger worry than enterprise containers. Then: a 9.8-severity flaw in Ruby on Rails + ImageMagick that lets a malicious SVG file upload turn into remote code execution - because an SVG isn't really an image, it's a set of drawing instructions (and ImageMagick's MSL scripting language can be hijacked). They talk through why allow-listing file types, not block-listing, should have caught this from the start. Plus: budgeting-season war stories (bronze/silver/gold package tricks), and why Jake thinks "vulnerability prioritization" needs to become "vulnerability operations." Sources: The Hacker News (OpenSSH "Starshole" Alpine sshd bypass): https://thehackernews.com/2026/11/openssh-issues-emergency-fix-for-flaw.html?m=1 The Hacker News (Rails + ImageMagick SVG upload RCE): https://thehackernews.com/2026/11/critical-rails-flaw-lets-attackers.html Join the conversation on Discord: https://discord.gg/wYJnTpczV #cybersecurity #vulnerabilitymanagement #infosec #openssh #rubyonrails

Richy fills in for Jess (on vacation) as Jake and Richy dig into a wave of refrigeration-system attacks in France that have moved from spoiling supermarket food to spoiling blood bank supplies -- and ask why critical cold-chain systems are still sitting exposed on the internet. From there: whether the CHIPS Act did enough to hedge a Taiwan-invasion scenario, whether we're in an AI bubble (and why cheap tokens might push companies back on-prem), the case for cybersecurity's "player coach" role, why politics and cybersecurity can't actually be separated, and a round of real AI-hallucination near-misses that could have gone very wrong without a human expert checking the work. Topics discussed: - French refrigeration/blood-bank cyberattacks and cold-chain security - The CHIPS Act and the Taiwan chip-supply risk - The AI bubble and the economics of running local LLMs - Cybersecurity's "player coach" staffing model- Why technology -- and cybersecurity -- is inherently political - Real-world AI hallucination near-misses in IT and security work Breach Please is a production of and copyright of JWGH Media, all rights reserved. The opinions of our hosts are their own and don't represent their employers, clients, or official positions. None of this is legal, financial, or security advice. Sources: Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/several-french-blood-banks-hit-by-cyberattack-nov-2-health-ministry-says-2026-11-04/ https://discord.gg/wYJnTpczV

A gang reportedly used a fake North Korean-style job interview to plant malicious software on two Binance engineers' computers — and walked away with enough that the exchange had to reimburse 90% of the stolen wallets out of its own reserve fund. Jess is out this week (and for a few more), so Richy's back in the chair with Jake to dig into the New York Times' Binance postmortem: how threat attribution actually works when everyone's pointing at North Korea, why Binance's own SAFU fund raises more questions than it answers, and whether an AI tool was the privilege-escalation step that got attackers onto a developer's machine. Then: North Korea's classic fake-job-interview malware playbook, why 'if it sounds too good to be true, it is' still works on smart people, and why almost nobody is seriously testing their AI agents for prompt injection yet. Did we make you smarter? Tell a friend. Did we make you mad? Tell your CISO. Sources: Binance hack postmortem (New York Times): https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/03/technology/binance-hack-report.html join our discord: https://discord.gg/wYJnTpczV

A ransomware gang hit the only level-one trauma center in New Mexico — then tried to buy goodwill by offering victims $2,500 each out of pocket. Jess and Jake break down why "ransomware" and "extortion" aren't the same thing, what this unprecedented payback move might really be covering (hint: crypto laundering), and why this threat group's rebrand should worry you more than its ransom notes.Then: Logan Diomedi — penetration tester, red teamer, and creator of the NTLM relay auditing tool RelayKing — joins the show straight from Wild West Hackin' Fest. Logan walks through how Microsoft downplayed a critical NTLM reflection vulnerability (CVE-2025-33073), why coordinated disclosure keeps failing researchers, how AI-generated "this CVE doesn't exist" bot replies are poisoning bug bounty programs, and how RelayKing helps blue teams actually prove their GPO fixes stuck — instead of just hoping they did.Did we make you smarter? Tell a friend. Did we make you mad? Tell the ransomware gang that gave refunds.https://discord.gg/wYJnTpczVDRAFT HASHTAGS#CyberSecurity #InfoSec #Ransomware #NTLM #ActiveDirectory #RedTeam #BlueTeam #BugBounty #Podcast #BreachPlease

Anthropic just gave corporate IT a tattletale button for Claude — and it's being sold as a productivity feature. Jess and Jake break down Claude's new enterprise 'smart reports,' which let managers see team-wide prompts, spend, and even flag 'personal or off-topic' usage — and why turning this on without legal, HR, and privacy involved is an instant liability trap (Title VII protected classes, EU employee-monitoring law, minimum-group-size de-anonymization problems, and the Accenture $29/month token-budget story that kicked off the whole AI-spend reckoning). Then: a real surge in cyberattacks hitting Japanese organizations — a 44-agent automated hacking campaign, Trend Micro's numbers (19 orgs hit, 16 in Japan), El Kentaro's incident-tracking dashboard, and a theory about Japan's older median age as a contributing factor. Did we make you smarter? Tell a friend. Did we make you mad? Tell Anthropic. Sources: El Kentaro Incident Dashboard: https://elkentaro.github.io/jp_incidents/Japan Cyber Attack (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/27/japan-internet-giant-gmo-says-hackers-posted-stolen-customer-data/ Anthropic Smart Reports: https://claude.com/resources/articles/smart-reports-surveys-pooled-budgets https://discord.gg/wYJnTpczV