Between Two Nerds: Why PHP2Shell fizzled

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about the French government attributing freezer hacks to cyber units within the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp. This surprises Tom, because the hacks were entirely consistent with Russian sabotage operations across Europe. They also discuss how China’s cyber operators are turning the dial up to 11. Faster, noisier, and stealthier all at the same time, depending upon which particular threat actor you look at. This episode is also available on YouTube Show notes

France blames Iran for supermarket freezer hacks, the White House nominates Palantir’s CISO as CISA director, another Russian cloud provider gets hacked, and N-able takes down its SaaS platform after a researcher discloses 33 vulnerabilities in it. Show notes Risky Bulletin: France blames Iran for the October supermarket fridge hacks

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq talk about why PHP2Shell failed to live up to its hype. A critical bug in a very widely used web scripting language amounted to… not much. The pair dissect the reasons why. Show notes Zack Korman on PHP Marcus Hutchins on hacking as a business Brian in Pittsburgh on memory corruption

Pro-Kremlin hacktivists dox EU politicians and law enforcement personnel a Deepfake gang arrested on US charges, SonicWall patches a zero-day, and SSHole is being exploited in the wild. Show notes Risky Bulletin: Pro-Kremlin hacktivists dox EU politicians, law enforcement

In this Risky Business sponsored interview Tom Uren talks to Airlock Digital’s CTO and CSO Peter Baussmann about how the Essential Eight is evolving into ASD’s Essentials framework. The pair discuss why the change was needed and how Essentials is a broader framework that is less prescriptive and requires more judgement. Show notes From the Essential Eight to ASD's Essentials

An OpenSSH authentication bypass bug hits Alpine Linux and OpenWRT, hackers attempt to raise fridge temperatures at French blood banks, a French bank gets hacked for $133 million, and the Thai opposition has been targeted with spyware. Show notes Risky Bulletin: Some OpenSSH instances take any password longer than 256 characters

Tom Uren and Amberleigh Jack talk about North Korea’s hack of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. Binance’s founder CZ says it is a wake up call for real banks, but he’s wrong. Even though they are probably just as hackable as crypto exchanges, real banks cooperate to reverse fraudulent transactions and it is far harder to get away with billions. They also discuss the pressure being felt in tech firms everywhere to speed up software development using AI. From a security perspective, results will be mixed. This episode is also available on YouTube. Show notes

Hackers brick Chinese EVs in Russia, a second wave of hacks defrost European supermarket freezers, the US boots Acronis from government networks and the major distros patch a Linux kernel RCE. Show notes Risky Bulletin: Hackers lock out and extort Li Auto EV owners in Russia

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss CISO’s expectations and priorities regarding budgets and what they will spend their money on. AI features heavily in 2027 priorities, but what will it deliver? This episode is also available on YouTube. Show notes The New Security Agenda

The FBI links the Binance hack to North Korea, game developers are being extorted with game-cloning threats, the Belarusian CyberPartisans hack Russia’s statistics service and Apple sends new mercenary spyware notifications. Show notes Risky Bulletin: Game devs are being extorted with AI game-cloning threats