SN 1097: Mega Patch Tuesday Fallout - When AI Outsmarts Its Makers

0:00It's time for Security Now. Steve Gibson is here. Lots to talk about. Amazing problems that cropped up after Microsoft's patch Tuesday. Steve will run through those. We'll also talk a little bit about the AI doomers and why Steve's not at all worried. He also has his thoughts about the EU Kids Act, which I suspect you already know, but you might want to listen. Security Now is coming up next. This episode is brought to you by Trusted Tech. Trusted Tech has reviewed more than $800 million in Microsoft 365 licensing spend and returned over $100 million to client budgets. On average, that's about 12% of every Microsoft 365 dollar going to waste. Licensing waste doesn't stay small either.

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2:39Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Security Now with Steve Gibson. Episode 1097, recorded Tuesday, September 22, 2026. Mega Patch Tuesday fallout. It's time for Security Now. Yay! Tuesday is here, and so is Mr. Steve Tiberius Gibson. Do you think when you're 95, Steve, you'll be doing heavy metal concerts like William Shatner is doing now?

3:15He is amazing. He's wild. He is. I just think it's great. And I love that when someone said, what is your secret to longevity? Like, what can you tell us? And he said, don't die. Yeah, that's the best advice ever. Steve, what are we covering on today's mega episode? So, yes. For Security Now 1097, this second to this, this is the penultimate September episode.

3:51He just likes to use that word, kid. So now I know what it means. I want to spend some time talking about the consequences of Microsoft's mega patch Tuesday. We touched on last week, oh, well, they broke copy and paste for Excel, which you didn't think was a big deal. Of course, all the people whose work day is Excel spreadsheets, they were quite discomfited by that.

4:22Turns out that wasn't even the tip of the iceberg of what happened. So it's interesting that on, you know, the good news is that nearly a thousand big problems, there were what, 119 or 117 critical problems solved a couple of weeks ago. Those are gone from Windows. Turns out, though, that there was some fallout from all of that, which we're going to talk about. But first, I wanted to pull in some expert opinion about all of this AI doomsdaying.

4:59Andrew Ng weighed in just a couple of days ago. Of course, he's somebody who knows something about AI. I want to share his thoughts about that. Also, he he referred to an individual who actually knows something about the bio risks of AI. So we're going to hear from somebody who who's actually been there, who is actually both an AI expert and somebody who's made viruses.

5:30So is able to to cross over as one would have to. Also, you and I were talking about this before, but it's very interesting that that all of these breakouts had a single locus that nobody else. I haven't seen anybody else in the industry talk about this. I mentioned it on Sunday, I'm proud to say. Good, because we're going to talk about what I call the wisdom of outsourcing AI security testing.

6:02I bet everyone's going to stop that in the future. Also, we've got the EU trying to push their kids act. And boy, this one is even messier than the things they've tried before. Nightmare Eclipse has finally unmasked himself. We know the backstory behind that, which we'll take a look at. Also, a white hat firm, a security firm, used Claude to successfully attack open AI.

6:37There's some very interesting lessons there we're going to get to. And then Cisco is clearly on the AI trade now because they they just pushed out a what is for them a massive 77 CVE update. And oh, my God, they're all 10.0s and 9.8s. I mean, it is I hope everybody who's using any Cisco equipment anywhere is patching this because, of course, the bad guys are going to jump on that.

7:08Can you believe Cisco? Well, well, they're another Microsoft, right? They had all these problems and they seemed unable to fix them. But what they do have is what Microsoft has, which is cash. And so if you can purchase fixes for your legacy software blunders, which is what Microsoft has done with AI and what Cisco is now doing, they're just buying that. They're buying the fixes by paying AI to do it. That's good news that they're doing it because they're you know, they're going to end up with, you know, safer systems than they've had before.

7:44And then we're going to look at the fallout from this patch Tuesday, which was quite significant. So I think lots of interesting stuff for our listeners. And of course, we got a picture of the week that if you haven't seen it, Leo, several people sent it to me. It may have made the rounds, not sure, but it is kind of wonderful. So we're going to have, I think, a great podcast. I will I will let you know when I look at it, because, as you know, when I get the show notes, I I avert my eyes. You endeavor to I don't want to see page two.

8:18So, yes, the picture of the week coming up as well as a as usual stellar episode of Security Now. So glad you're here, Steve. So glad you're all here. Our show, this portion of our show brought to you by Hawkshunt. When we were at the Threat Locker Conference, one of the things we talked about, one of the things your presentation was about, you called it the what was the danger is coming? The call is coming from inside the house. The call is coming from inside the house. And the issue, of course, is nowadays you don't need sophisticated malware.

8:52You need sophisticated social engineering to break into companies. That seems to be the number one pathway. And that's why, you know, your security awareness training program is so important. In fact, you probably have one. I hope you have one. And it may be running exactly as planned. You look at the, you know, the dashboard campaigns are going out. Employees are completing the training. Reports are reaching leadership. But I'm going to ask you a tough question. Are your results still improving?

9:25Very typically with a security awareness training program, the initial results are great. But they plateau. For many programs, the results just don't improve after a while. The reporting rates level off. You get the same employees. They are the ones who click.

9:43You know, they just never seem to learn. And then, of course, the smart employees go, oh, I've seen this familiar simulation. I know that. Your program is active, but the risk reduction is just completely stalled. And when employees can spot the same recycled test from a mile away, security awareness starts to look more like a compliance exercise. Compliance theater, really, instead of a real risk reduction strategy. But I've got a solution for you that's fantastic. Hawks Hunt. It's built to break that plateau.

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12:24We thank them so much for their support of security now. I saw them at the booth at, I think it was, was it Black Hat? I think it was. Black Hat, yeah. And they had delicious Finnish chocolate. So I was very happy to share that with them. Now let's share the picture of the week. So I gave this the caption. It really doesn't need one. But I said, the more experience one has with coding and people, the more this price list makes sense. Ah, price list. And this is on one of those boards that you put outside your office, right?

12:57Go ahead, Steve. Tell us what this says. So it's real too, by the way. I can see the photographer's reflection in it. It's so great. Yeah. So this is a price list for someone offering coding services or coding assistance or something. So we have a series of prices. The lowest price is I code manually. So I code manually for $500.

13:29If this person codes and the client watches, then that'll be $800. If the client advises, then we're going to double the price. It'll be $500 for manual coding. But with advice coming in from the client, that'll be $1,000. If he codes and the client helps, whoa, now we're at $1,500.

13:56Then he says, or if you think you can do it yourself, he says, so you vibe code and I help, that'll be $2,000. You vibe code and I advise because you're getting yourself into trouble here. That'll be $3,500. You vibe code and I am forced to watch you. Then I'm going to charge you $5,000 for that. And if you need me to review the crap that you've created from all of this vibe coding, that'll be $8,000.

14:27Oh, Lord. So, yes. The reality of coding today. It's true. So, I've shared the thoughts of Andrew Ng a couple of times in the past. And I want to again, since he's weighed in on the whole AI apocalypse hysteria that has recently gripped the U.S. and, of course, also much of the rest of the world. Now, just to remind everyone who Andrew is, where he came from, he obtained his bachelor's

14:58with a triple major in computer science, statistics, and economics from Carnegie Mellon, then got his master's degree from MIT and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He also co-founded and headed Google's Google Brain AI development, later to become the head of AI at the search engine Baidu. He's an adjunct professor at Stanford, where he was formerly an associate professor and the director of some place I spent some time in my youth, the Stanford's AI lab, SAIL.

15:34So, Andrew's credentials regarding AI, I would argue, are unimpeachable. So, and he doesn't have a big stake in the current race. So, that's interesting, too. His take on the AI is going to kill us all concerns, I think, are worth hearing. Last Friday, he wrote, Dear Friends, which is the way he always starts his missives. He said, The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the

16:06past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it, propelled by what appears to be a well-orchestrated PR campaign, has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field. He says, I've written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI's capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it's rational to worry

16:39when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work ahead rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance, which is a good thing. But technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so. First, I don't see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few

17:15months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities, a topic which we should take seriously, but this too will not lead to the end of the world. The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an open AI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face.

17:48Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, and in computing, many processes run at the same time.

18:20So this shouldn't be seen as some magical capability. Additionally, OpenAI's buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be an appropriate fix, not pausing AI. There are many well-known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless.

18:54They will tirelessly try many tactics and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together. That previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders, because they have more information with which to identify bugs which they can fix. But the cyber threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability.

19:26AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works. And taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it's now easy to obtain versions of leading open-weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened so that they will not refuse to try to execute cyberattacks, the world has not ended. I'm also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents

20:10are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it's not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else's system, the responsibility lies with me, not with the agent. Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible.

20:45For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use. Today's agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won't be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled AI doom is companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products.

21:17Yes, I didn't do it. My out-of-control agent did. He says there's a balance to be struck. Yes, exactly. And we talked about that last week, Leo, who's responsible when the agent goes berserk. He says there's a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the toolmaker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let's hold the people building and or using the hammer responsible rather than the hammer.

21:49He says, by the way, if you're worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this too is overhyped. He said briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing, and we're going to get back to David in a minute. It was a long series of postings in X that I've pulled together for the podcast. Anyway, Andrew continues writing, pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit.

22:21First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires, I love this, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, I don't hear anybody suggest 10 years, but whoa, okay. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration.

22:51Anyway, I like the idea like, well, you got to have a problem in order to discover it and then fix it. So let's stay at this and just fix it. And again, this guy knows what he's talking about. He finishes writing, of course, the incentive to stoke fears for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one's technology seem more powerful remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks, however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear

23:31that's been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building. So anyway, I thought it was interesting that Andrew brought up the issue of responsibility the way he did. As I said, Leo, we touched on it toward the end of last week's podcast, and I hope it's something that continues to receive some focus. It's been noted that if OpenAI's agents had attacked Chinese resources,

24:07or if a Chinese AI had attacked and penetrated Hugging Face, we would be in the midst of an international crisis. I mean, that would be a whole different story. So, you know, why is it okay for OpenAI's agents to have attacked Hugging Face? There's a disconnect here somewhere. I also loved that Andrew wrote, OpenAI's buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident.

24:42Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. So, although he's focused upon OpenAI, we know that Anthropic, Meta, and now, even recently, Google's Gemini have all escaped their containment environments. That is a truly ridiculous state of affairs, and it is correctable. Here's the way I think this will likely shake out.

25:13I believe that the AI industry really has just received a wake-up call. Back at the end of August, Anthropic did the right thing by publicly pausing their work to focus upon containment and monitoring. But that was two weeks, which to me seems like the right amount. I mean, if they can get the work done in that period of time, fine. They hardened their sandboxes, added real-time monitoring, monitoring, and, you know, shuffled around about 150 employees to focus upon security, reliability, and privacy.

25:49Many outside observers reacted to this with, what do you mean you're hardening your sandboxes? Why weren't they already hardened? And that, I think, is the key to this entire fiasco. It, you know, it is really true that the capability leap of their own agentic AI caught the entire frontier AI industry by surprise. You know, as users, we have felt it, you know, using the product that we have had access to.

26:25I mean, it's been an astonishing year. This, so all of this has just happened, and they weren't expecting it, you know, they weren't prepared for it, and everyone is in a hurry. I mean, you know, this is a race, you know. So all of that meant that nobody was expending any effort, really, on anything that was not obviously necessary. Well, it wasn't obviously necessary before, it certainly is now.

27:00Now, everyone knows exactly what's necessary. Andrew insightfully wrote, Engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. You know, we may wish that that was not the way it is, but it is. The best example is traditional software bugs, right? Today, we had, I'm sorry, until we had AI to find our latent bugs in software, it was only by waiting for a bug to manifest that it would be revealed, and then we'd be able to fix it.

27:38The world just witnessed the entire AI industry give itself a big black eye over a huge bug in their AI development practice, which is insufficient containment. Establishing true, proper containment and monitoring is not at all difficult. We know how to do that. It just hadn't received sufficient attention until now. So my takeaway from all of this is that this is going to get immediately fixed.

28:12We watched the OpenAI hugging face incident damage OpenAI significantly. What may have started out as maybe that's going to be a PR opportunity quickly became a backpedaling disaster for them. So, there's another aspect of all this that I think deserves a bit of attention, but Leo, let's take a break. And then we're going to look at what I call the wisdom of outsourcing, which is to say, no, don't do it.

28:44Because something that you also observed on Sunday, you said, I did too. And that's our next topic. There's something in common with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google's escapes. So we'll talk about that. Even meta. Even meta. Yeah. That's very interesting. I like, though, your interpretation, which I think is very kind and charitable, that it just snuck up on these guys. That they didn't expect this kind of capability and they just weren't prepared for it. And I think that that's probably true.

29:17We're not prepared. We have not. We've been shocked. It's shocking sometimes. Sometimes they'll say things and I'll go, what? How did you know that? Yes. And I think that the fact that they're in a hurry matters, too. I mean, they are putting as much fire. They're stoking this to their maximum capability. They're racing. And when you are in a hurry and you're racing and you tell some other firm, okay, we're in a hurry. You test this for us. Tell us what you find.

29:47You know, because they just didn't have, despite all the gazillions of dollars they have, it's like, well, we're busy making it better. So, for all of their, you know, protestations about slowing down, I noticed that Anthropics come out with Opus 5.5 today. Yesterday, Grok 4.7 shipped. Same day, OpenAI shipped GPT-6, Astra, Sol, and Luna. I mean, they're not sitting back. And the Chinese companies aren't either, by the way.

30:18When 4 was announced, I just got MIMO 2.6. I mean, nobody's sitting back. Nobody's slowing down. No. I mean, and, you know, I don't like the person Donald Trump. So, that colors a lot of my opinions. He's not my kind of person. But I'm happy that he's, you know, pushing back on this slowdown. It does produce strange bedfellows, because I am also, I'm not so crazy about him saying we're not, all the government documents from now on are not going to say artificial intelligence.

30:51They're going to say superintelligence. Did that happen? He announced it at the UN. Oh, my God.

30:59It's like. That's not the, see, this is the funny thing is the problem people have with the phrase AI, artificial intelligence, is not the artificial part. We all agree it's artificial. It's the intelligence part that we're not so sure about. He focused on the wrong half of the equation. It's not artificial. No, it is, Mr. President. It really is. It's coming out of a machine. It's not real intelligence. He really does like to rename things. Yeah, that's right. I'm just, you know what? We can be glad to call it Trump intelligence, because it could have happened.

31:30Or America intelligence.

31:33It could have happened. I'm sorry. Yes, we don't need to get political about this. This is, we are in interesting and challenging times, and we all need to pitch in and try to solve this, because this is going to be our future. I'm telling you, I mean, I know there are a lot of people who are like, I've heard from people who are saying, I'm so sick and tired of, you know, talk about AI. And my feeling is, well, first of all, it is having a massive impact on cybersecurity.

32:06There's no two ways about that. But you'd like it or not. I mean, there was an interesting article, I think it was in Barron's this morning, talking about all the non-language model work that is going on. Oh, there's some really interesting stuff. Microsoft is training a physical materials model to understand about material science. I mean, there's all these other, now that we, language models led the pack.

32:40But now we learned what, you know, what the mechanism is. And so other non-language models are now being trained. Right. This is, I mean, the world is never going to be the same. Yeah. It's an interesting world, too. I will say, I am glad I'm 71 and not in, like, in the job market and trying to be a coder. I agree. I think the people who are most alarmed by this are young people. We old people go, well, that's cool.

33:11That's great. The young people are saying, yeah, but what about me? What about my job? And anybody who doesn't want to hear about AI, it's probably because their lives are not directly impacted by it. That's right. Like, I'm telling you, it is going to change everything. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's, you know, and certainly security is the topic of the show. And it's, that's absolutely a big part of it. So we'll continue to talk about that in just a little bit. I want to tell you about that. I can't, I'm, I'm hoping, I think they said they were going to send me some and I cannot wait to get these.

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36:00That's r-a-y-n-e-o dot com. And all I can say is I can't wait to get a pair. Rayneo dot com. We thank you for their support. My favorite feature is the idea that you're having a conversation with somebody and they say a word and you don't know what the hell they're talking about. You don't have to say that again. It just shows you the answer. Oh, yeah, okay. I know everything now. I love that. Never be ignorant again. Anyway, continuing on, Mr. Gibson.

36:32Okay, so there's another aspect to all this that I think deserves a bit of attention. And that's the question of the wisdom of outsourcing the testing of the cyber intrusion capabilities of frontier-scale AI. I want to share the Guardian's reporting from last Friday to flesh this out. The Guardian's Friday headline was Google says its Gemini AI model hacked three other companies.

37:02And they tease with disclosure comes after open AI and anthropic hacks amid fears that tech firms unable to control powerful AI models. This isn't very long. They write, In a first for Google, the company confirmed that its AI model, Gemini, breached the security of three other companies in May. The hacks occurred during a cybersecurity evaluation by AI security firm Irregular.

37:32Irregular, an Israeli-based startup that scrutinizes the security of advanced AI systems, was also at the center of some of the recent open AI and anthropic hacks of third-party entities, including open AI's breach of AI software company Hugging Face. The circumstances that enabled the models to hack other companies in some of these cases are similar. According to the Wall Street Journal, Irregular was testing the models in a closed testing environment with fake companies.

38:07The testing environment was not supposed to be internet-enabled, but internet access was made available unintentionally. Once connected to the internet, the models unexpectedly hacked into real firms. Irregular disclosed the hacks to Google at the end of July after discovering open AI hacked into Hugging Face. Google confirmed to the Guardian that the hacks occurred, but that the company did not feel it required public disclosure because the models did not damage the companies.

38:42The Wall Street Journal first reported on the breaches and revealed for the first time that they occurred. Heather Adkins, vice president of security engineering at Google, said in a statement, In a standard evaluation, the model found public information online and guest credentials to access websites it thought were part of the test. In all three of these instances, the model stopped. Irregular told the Wall Street Journal that in one of the security breaches,

39:13Irregular was testing Gemini's cyber security capabilities by prompting the AI model to obtain information from a fake company's software. The fake company had the same name as a real company. When the model unintentionally gained access to the internet, it correctly guessed the password of and reached... That's not much of a hack. It guessed the password. Yes. Okay. Guess the password of and breached a real company's service.

39:46It's not exactly a zero day. No. Although you could slap the company for having a password that AI could guess apparently pretty easily. Who's at fault for that? Yeah. Google said once it figured out it had hacked a real company and not a simulated one, it stopped. So, okay. That's good. Gemini was well properly aligned, as we say these days. In two other tests, the model searched the web for and found public repositories containing credentials to two other companies.

40:18The model used those credentials to access real companies. When it figured out they were real companies, it stopped, according to Google. Again, nicely aligned. Anthropic and OpenAI chose to voluntarily disclose the hacks, but Google did not. However, the company said it ensured the three companies that were hacked were made aware. Adkins, the Google spokesperson, said these events highlight the importance of training powerful AI models to act responsibly.

40:53Anthropic and OpenAI's disclosures prompted the independent senator, Bernie Sanders, to demand the company's paused development of their technology, saying it signaled the company was no longer able to control their models. OpenAI paused development of their models for two weeks, while Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodi, has called for a collective slowdown of AI development to ensure that its most advanced models are being built with enough safeguards. Okay, so it strikes me as somewhat odd that this Israeli startup with the wonderfully apropos name Irregular has somehow escaped all scrutiny and responsibility.

41:41They, irregular, are the common thread running through all of these incidents. Is it Anthropics or OpenAI's or Meta's or Google's fault when their models escape the poorly designed containment system of a single common testing lab? Given how high the stakes have shown themselves to be, I don't think that any of these frontier labs can afford to outsource their AI's cyber intrusion testing.

42:17It's just too important. And the wrong people get the blame when a breakout occurs. Let's hope that all of the AI labs have noticed this too, and that they will be moving future testing in-house where it probably belongs. Because, again, my sense is, you know, we know that the trend that we were seeing like last year or the year before when all of this AI has taken over was little startups were outsourcing all of their various business purposes to third parties.

42:55And then those third parties were being hacked into, and the companies that had outsourced basically given away all the responsibility for big chunks of their business because they were all in a hurry to build something and then, you know, get purchased by a bigger fish. They all got the blame because they had outsourced. Well, same thing happened here. Clearly, the AI companies couldn't, at this point, previously, couldn't be bothered to do their own cybersecurity testing, so they just hired Irregular, an Israeli startup, to do it.

43:34Again, I hope that Israeli has seen their business drop, or the Irregular guys have seen their business drop off because this should all be taken in-house. Well, I'm not against the idea of an independent third party doing the testing because then they don't have a dog in that hunt. That's a good point. Maybe Irregular is not the one to choose. They clearly had a methodology that it looks like to me pressed the agents harder and harder and harder, what we're learning, and almost really forced the agents to find these loopholes.

44:12I mean, which makes sense if you're doing cybersecurity testing, but they didn't really contain them very well. Right, right. So if you want that, then create a fake internet outside of your lab environment. Air gap it. So when they – well, a fake internet. So when they break out, they break out into an outer shell, not into the public internet. Right, right. So, again, this – and Andrew knows this. This is not hard.

44:43This is not like – this is not difficult to actually create a sandbox that is air-gapped that cannot be breached. That's – we have – God knows, those companies have so much money that they're raising. They just didn't care. I think they were – they just said, oh, fine, Irregular, that's their business. Well, that's all they do. They're probably really good at it. And look at their website, Leo. It looks fantastic. And actually, I wonder what it costs them to get that name.

45:14It is Irregular.com. It's a good name. Yeah. That's their domain. So, again, a big mistake was made. My belief is this is all going to calm down now. You know, again, we know the public's attention is, what, a few days. And so a couple of weeks are going to go by. All of this, you know, Bernie Sanders will run around, you know, screaming that we need to stop all this. You know, the Trump administration wants to – you know, is looking at China saying, well, we don't want to fall behind them, do we?

45:46And so, great. We're not going to. And it's all going to calm down. What is not going to calm down is, unfortunately, the true deserved anxiety from the fact that AI is going to change everything. And change is always frightening for the world. But, you know, with change comes opportunity. So, okay. So, what about the actual true risk of some sort of AI-enabled bioweaponry?

46:19I just saw that Anthropic was creating specific biology guardrails. So, whether they believe it's true or not, they did note that some people had been trying to use Claude for some of that engineering. So, they're responding to that. But, first, also, as we know, I used the example of biological risk as my stalking horse for last week's podcast.

46:49You know, I chose it because it has become the boogeyman that's often used as an example of what could possibly go wrong with AI. Now, to give a sense for what's happening out in the world, just last Saturday, a few days ago, Fast Company's headline read, Someone used Claude to build a potential bioweapon. The real threat is much deeper. Okay, first of all, the headline itself is a bald-faced lie.

47:23No one used Claude to build anything. But the narrative is important, right? Fast Company's article just begins with, Today's frontier AI models know everything. How to safely thaw a frozen chicken breast, re-shingle your roof, and treat your dog's ragweed allergies. If my recent chat history is any indication, wrote this author, Apparently, they also know how to create fiendishly deadly bioweapons.

47:54That's according to a recent announcement by Anthropic. Eh, it's not what Anthropic said, but okay. According to the company, anonymous scientists attempted to use Anthropic's flagship Claude model to conduct research that could have turned deadly. Anthropic blocked their efforts this time, and there's no evidence that the scientists were actually trying to cause harm. Oh, but as frontier models get more powerful and better at science, the threat of an LLM imagining a truly lethal new virus or bacteria will only increase.

48:33Okay, well, that's enough of that nonsense, because, I mean, wow. Since the content of the article doesn't even align with the hysteria invoking someone used Claude to build a potential bioweapon, we need to chalk the headline up to clickbait. But the narrative persists. Also last Saturday, a few days ago, Vox's headline was, The AI threat keeping scientists up at night, with the subhead taking the form of an AI prompt,

49:03Claude, design a doomsday bioweapon, make no mistakes. So, I don't know, Vox's article begins, AI will be the death of me, and you, and everyone we know. At least, this is what a growing number of technologists and policymakers fear. Okay, now, this brings us to Andrew Ng's comment in his terrific note. By the way, if you're worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped.

49:37Okay, so, let's see what someone who knows something about the actual risks at the crossroads of AI and biology think. David Bellamy starts out writing, I must be among an extremely small group of people. And he says, parens in parens, n equals one, meaning like, is there one person? He says, that have both, one, trained a frontier LLM,

50:07and, two, designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab with my own two hands. And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is totally bogus. Okay, so, I'm going to interrupt to note that David does not appear to be exaggerating his experience. He was previously with a company called Lila AI,

50:38which is an AI-driven physical biochemistry laboratory. For example, Lila's posting a few weeks ago wrote, an AI that learns from its own experiments. Lila's scientists have been training a frontier-scale scientific reasoning AI on not just published literature, but on a proprietary data set of 950,000 RNA sequences

51:08that have been physically synthesized, tested in cells in Lila's AI science factories, which they call AISFs, AI science factories, and fed back into the model. That data set is the foundation of what makes Lila's AI model different from a general-purpose language model. It learns the rules from RNA biology and explores hypotheses using real experimental outcomes,

51:42not from text describing them. So, okay, what this example shows is that anyone who imagines that AI will be used in some future lab is already behind the times. These guys, and doubtless many others, are already hard at work doing exactly that. So that's where David was previously employed, providing the AI knowledge for that work, which is actual robotic biology driven by AI.

52:13Today, he's at the Institute of Foundation Models, which a couple of weeks ago announced. They said the Institute of Foundation Models, IFM, today introduced K2 Horizon, a new fleet of six AI foundation models ranging from 0.9 billion to 375 billion parameters. The new models are fully open, including open model weights, code, their training data, and methodologies,

52:47allowing researchers and developers to inspect, reproduce, and adapt the models for their own work. David's GitHub bio says, I'm currently at Institute of Foundation Models, IFM.ai, building the reinforcement learning infrastructure for agentic training of a frontier scale model that the team pre-trained and mid-trained in-house. My work spans the entire agentic RL training stack,

53:18per rollout sandbox runtimes, the agent layer, the Rust inference request router, the inference engines, the trainer, the reward computation pool, and the orchestration control plane. Prominent themes of my recent work include cross-image NCCL weight transport between trainer and rollout engines, disaggregated pre-fills and decode reliability on multi-rail HGX fabrics, tokenizer consistent training on rollouts,

53:49and implementing rollout routing replay for large mixture of ethics of experts RL training. So anyway, it's pretty clear that this guy knows how AI operates all the way down to building them himself from scratch. Now that we have some idea who he is, let's see what he has to say about the problem of AI helping to engineer a world-ending super virus. He says,

54:19could an LLM propose a viral genome to synthesize? Sure. Could it be synthesizable? Sure. Could it be infectious? Sure. It could just be a replica or a slight modification of a viral genome we already know. This really isn't the bottleneck to creating dangerous viruses. The bottleneck is in the physical process of synthesizing a virus and the equipment and goods needed to do so.

54:52Designing a virus that can evade all forms of pandemic counter-defense is not something that a genius in a data center can do. This is something that requires contact with the physical world and iteration. Let me steel man the fear-mongering as much as I can. He said, imagine a fully automated viral synthesis laboratory. I'm talking automated freezers, an automated cell culture room,

55:24the whole nine yards. This would be an extremely expensive lab, much greater than $100 million. And there's no such thing as one lab that can synthesize all conceivable viruses. But let's put practical constraints aside. Let's suppose this hypothetical lab is built to synthesize the most dangerous types of viruses known. Now, let's imagine that this lab is fully API-driven, that this much greater than $100 million lab

55:57built specifically to synthesize a dangerous family of viruses is able to be operated autonomously. Everyone should be asking themselves at this point, why the hell would this ever exist in the first place? And yet, even in this case, every lab requires physical supplies. Would this lab order pre-assembled DNA sequences? In other words, viral genomes? Well, DNA synthesis companies have safeguards

56:28on the sequences they build. So I guess this superintelligence is able to design a novel enough dangerous viral genome that it can evade these safeguards. Or maybe we'll assume that this hypothetical lab can synthesize its own viral genomes in-house using DNA synthesis machines. The thing is, already this lab cannot exist today. This would be the single most advanced lab facility

56:59in the world from an automation and API integration standpoint. I know because I literally worked on building a fully automated AI-driven lab previously. Second of all, the science of creating an infectious virus is not airtight the way this fear-mongering assumes. It is largely unsolved. And advancing this requires real-world iterations that are bound by the laws of physics.

57:30An experiment in this hypothetical lab cannot experiment on human subjects. At best, it will use cell cultures and maybe some other model system like mice. AI, AGI, ASI, RSI cannot expedite the time it takes for a cell culture or a mouse to develop, or the time it takes for a virus to incubate in a cell or a mouse. It takes several days on average

58:01to do a basic virology lab synthesis plus experiment. For some viruses, it takes over a week. So the idea that recursive self-improvement, i.e. the accelerating hill climbing on a fully verifiable digital-only benchmarks, predominantly programming and math, can somehow transform the entire wet lab virology field and its industry is utterly delusional.

58:32Simply procuring the machines needed to build this hypothetical lab would take the better part of a year and $100 million to start. Operating this lab autonomously would require a level of API integration that the industry has been working toward for decades. Most of the equipment needed for this lab doesn't even come with an API, and the malevolent builders would need to reverse-engineer firmware in order to integrate.

59:04And at the end of the day, even if a fully automated API-driven lethal virus synthesis lab existed and an AI wields it month over month, year over year, to perform cell and mouse experiments to create a lethal virus, that lethality is being measured in model organisms, not in humans. This is the same problem as in drug discovery, where most drugs that show promise in mice

59:36don't make it through human trials. In sum, when you actually know something about building a laboratory, laboratory automation, and what goes into synthesizing a virus and testing its properties, it becomes clear that AI does not impact this very much. At best, it provides bad actors with a quicker way than the internet to learn about the stuff I describe,

1:00:08which machines, which lab protocols, et cetera. But it does nothing to impact procurement timelines, existing industry standards, and regulations on procurement for lab facilities, the $100 million cost, plus operating expenses, the physical limits on experimentation velocity, or the fundamental knowledge gaps in virology that cannot be solved merely by a smarter AI without iteration in the physical world.

1:00:42So, although Andrew thought this was worth sharing, and I agree, you know, it is easy to say, as I did last week, that the most obvious way for an AI to eradicate pesky humans from the scene would be to engineer and assemble a super virus. But, as someone has said, who actually knows what this takes, that remains just as much a fiction in a world with AI

1:01:15as it does in the same world that we've all been living in so far without AI. So, hopefully, as I've said, once the frontier AI guys give their internal AI capability testing the attention we all now know it desperately needs, and they also stop imagining that they can safely farm out that work to some probably well-meaning, but clearly incapable Israeli startup,

1:01:46the world will calm down, the AI scaremongering naysayers will lose some of their ammunition, and we can all return to being stunned by how quickly AI capability is increasing. You know, meanwhile, the so-called Frontier Act, which is the legislation that the AI has been trying, that the Congress has been trying to assemble, it is stalled in the U.S. Congress. The legislation falls under the dominion

1:02:16of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, whose chairman, Brett Guthrie, said last Wednesday that he would not pledge to any specific timeline for a committee vote on what is a major bipartisan AI safety bill, but it would be by a lame-duck Congress and suggested that there likely won't be one this year. Assuming that nothing else happens to alarm the world, I hope and expect things to calm down and to eventually fall off the radar.

1:02:47That said, assuming that the U.S. House of Representatives does come under the control of Democrats after the midterm elections, they do appear to be quite interested in passing such legislation, but the Senate would also need to concur and our president would need to sign any such new legislation into law. And, you know, that really seems unlikely to happen. So I think we're probably going to be okay, Leo. That's a relief. I don't think we're going to get any big,

1:03:19you know, bioweapon engineered by AI. Obviously, it is not nearly as easy to do it as it is to say it. And I do think that once it has to be that our big AI companies have figured out, whoops, we made a mistake in turning this over to an Israeli startup. We're just going to do this ourselves in-house. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the other thing that we should do in-house? Oh, more ads? For sure.

1:03:49That's the one thing you can count on me for. It's time to take a little break in our action. We'll get back to security now in a moment. But first, I have a special message for you app developers out there from GuardSquare, our sponsor for this segment of Security Now. I mean, there's no doubt about it. Mobile apps today are an inescapable part of our lives. I mean, think about how many, I don't know, I have more than 300 apps on my phone, ranging from financial services to healthcare,

1:04:20retail, entertainment. And here's the thing, users trust mobile apps. I trust mobile apps with my most sensitive personal data. That means I'm trusting you, mobile app developer, to take care of my personal data. But a recent survey showed 72% of organizations experienced a mobile application security incident last year. 92% of respondents reported rising threat levels over the last two years. You don't need a survey to tell you that, right? And it's amazing how ingenious these attackers are.

1:04:53You know what the most recent method is? Attackers who want your user's personal data, they're always finding new ways. One of the ways is they take your app, your beautiful app, your perfect, perfect baby, and they reverse engineer it, which turns out now with LLMs and Ghidra and everything to be pretty easy. They take that reverse engineered app, repackage it with a little malware added on top, a little sprinkle of malware, then distribute your app.

1:05:25It looks exactly like your app. It's indistinguishable from your app. They do it via phishing campaigns or sideloading third-party app stores. They send emails to your customers saying, hey, we just released version 2.0 and it's so good, you can download it here, that kind of thing. And remember, when users get hacked, they don't blame the bad guy. They blame you. By taking a proactive approach to mobile app security, you can stay one step ahead of this attack and all the others they're coming up with.

1:05:57And more importantly, maintain the trust of your users. That's where GuardSquare comes in. So GuardSquare does a bunch of things you need. They deliver mobile app security without compromise. They have advanced protections for both iOS and Android apps combined with automated mobile application security testing, which helps find vulnerabilities. You'll appreciate that. Real-time threat monitoring, so you get an idea of what kinds of attacks are coming your way, like the one I just described.

1:06:29You're going to love GuardSquare. You need GuardSquare. Your users are going to be really glad you use GuardSquare. To cover more about how GuardSquare provides industry-leading security for your mobile apps, you can find out more at GuardSquare.com. GuardSquare.com. Thank you so much for supporting Steve and the work he does here at Security Now. Okay, so legislators within the European Union

1:07:00are at it again, and this time with their plans to legislate how social media platforms must act. And, of course, we're seeing more of this everywhere. The Record reported the following last Thursday, and some of these details here are really puzzling. They wrote, the European Commission on Thursday laid out a detailed roadmap for a proposal to bar children younger than 13

1:07:32from accessing social media and mandate that platforms improve their design to better protect minors. You know, mandates. The social media companies love the mandates. The announcement comes as countries worldwide, including Australia, Spain, France, China, Turkey, and the UK, have either implemented similar bans or have indicated they plan to amid growing concerns about how the technology affects kids. The new proposal, known as the EU Kids Act,

1:08:04would block social media platforms from offering accounts to children younger than 13 and established a block-wide minimum age of 15 for account creation. Children between 13 and 15 will only be able to access social media platforms if their guardians create, this is so weird, if their guardians create mini-accounts their kids can access through their parents' accounts, according to a European Commission press release.

1:08:37So I guess they're just making this up out of whole cloth. We're going to have mini-accounts. Like, what? What? What? Okay. You get right on that, will you? Get back to it. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. The mini-accounts will be regulated strictly, because, you know, they say so, the press release said, and services will be required to limit social contacts and caps, get this, Leo, cap screen time to an hour a day.

1:09:08Right. Children under 13 will be entirely blocked. So that's if under 15, you get an hour a day from your parents' mini-account. Children under 13 will be entirely blocked from social media outside of parent-controlled tools designed to limit the use of the adult's device device to child-friendly video sharing services. So that sounds like the parent's device will be constrained,

1:09:40and they can give their device to their under 13-year-old child. Right? Children under 13 will be entirely blocked from social media outside of parent-controlled tools designed to limit the use of the adult's device to child-friendly video sharing services. The onus will be on providers to create the tool and ensure it is simple to use.

1:10:12Right? Because, oh, you do it. First, you got to make it, and you got to make it easy. Yeah. You got to do that. The press release said. Because, again, we're telling you that we're mandating this. Wow. The proposal, they wrote, will not become law, hopefully ever, but until EC officials, European Commission officials, win support from the European Parliament and its member states. European countries have been broadly supportive of social media bans for young teens,

1:10:43giving the proposal a significant chance of being enacted. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said late Wednesday in a speech previewing the proposal, quote, Today, our children are engaging with the most sophisticated technologies ever created. Yikes. Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, no. Technology that was, so are our adults, and that's not going well either. Technology that was never created with their well-being in mind.

1:11:15The report continues, service providers, you know, all of those social media companies, will generally be directed to prove that their offerings are safe by design and appropriate for children, the press release said. The Kids Act proposal includes several restrictions for children under 18 using social media, online games, video sharing services, and AI chatbots and companions.

1:11:46Safe by design requirements include a ban on what the commission calls, quote, addictive features and profiling-based recommender feeds dragging minors into rabbit holes of harmful content, unquote. It actually says rabbit holes in the official statement. The proposal would ban online services from using infinite scroll without stopping points,

1:12:17reward tricks, and push notifications during sleeping hours, as well as unsolicited contact from strangers. It also mandates that AI companions and chatbots be turned off by default and requires them to create protocols to keep their products from simulating relationships, quote, in ways that create emotional dependency,

1:12:47unquote. Wow. You can see what they're scared of. I mean, it kind of tells you what they're worried about. It very much telegraphs where they see the problems. Threat, yes. They said, miners' profiles will need to be kept private by default, the release said, with geolocation, microphone, and camera access blocked. Providers will be required to give teens a simple method for blocking and muting users as well as safe recommender systems

1:13:17that minors can reset or otherwise control. The European Commission says the Kids Act will ensure children's privacy is protected by requiring online services and app stores to deploy an EU, oh boy, an EU age verification app that was unveiled in April. We'll get to more of that in a minute. The app does not store identity documents or biometric data, nor work, but that's beside the point,

1:13:48and meets the highest privacy preserving safeguards, the release said. Because we say so. Because, exactly, that is exactly why. Because we said it does. Wait till you hear about that. Anyway, as I said, we'll get there. In addition, providers of social media services and video sharing platforms will be required to deploy age verification tools when a user opens a new account and estimate ages for existing accounts based on account creation date,

1:14:20credit card information, and similar methods. The Kids Act will require very large, they have that in, you know, whatever, very large providers to submit a compliance plan to the EC and a third-party auditor charged with reviewing the company's programs for protecting kids online. The European Commission will review auditor reports and ask providers to address deficits when audits reveal lapses,

1:14:52the press release said. The European Commission emphasized that enforcement will be made easier, right, what? Enforcement will be made easier because the Continence Digital Services Act and the Artificial Intelligence Act have already mandated restrictions that give a foundation to build from. In cases where companies are suspected to be in violation of the Kids Act, the Commission said it will accelerate investigations

1:15:22and ensure they end within 90 days. Online providers who are found to be in violation of the Kids Act could be fined as much as 6% of their global annual sales, the EC said. Providers also will be required to bankroll regulators, I love this, providers, right, the social media companies, providers, will also be required to bankroll regulators' oversight by paying a fee.

1:15:52so they will pay to be reviewed and regulated. Enforcement of social media bans has proven difficult. Yeah, no kidding. With research, you know, look what you're asking for. With researchers retained by the Australian government, get this, finding that the country's ban has not stopped 61% of Australian children between the ages of 12 and 15

1:16:22from accessing accounts on major platforms. 61%? More than half. 61% just cut right through all of these bans. On September 7th, Australia's parliament passed a law that doubles maximum fines for tech platforms that don't comply to 99 million, which is 68 million U.S., and beefs up investigative,

1:16:53oh, sorry, Australian, you know, AU 99 million, 68 million USD, and beefs up investigative authorities for the Australian regulator, which is the e-safety commissioner in Australia. Joe Jones, director of research and insights, from the IAPP, which does not take a formal position on the ban, said via email to the record, the technological state-of-the-art, including with VPNs

1:17:25and age assurance technologies and the extent to which privacy issues are engaged due to the collection of data will pose complications for lawmakers and eventually those implementing, overseeing, and enforcing the law. So that's a comment on, you know, that on the EC's hope for this EU regulation. They wrote, tech lobbyists and privacy and digital freedoms advocates

1:17:55were quick to denounce the plan, according to Michael, or sorry, Mitchell Rutledge, CCIA, Europe's technology and security policy manager, quote, the proposal does not set the technical security or accreditation standards for Kids Act implementation. In other words, it's just sort of like a wish list. So how do you implement a wish list? He said, the commission is kicking those critical decisions down the road to future implementing and delegated acts.

1:18:26Europeans are essentially being asked to trust a system before anyone knows how it's actually going to be built. Right. Digital freedoms advocates said the proposal is dangerous and imperils the privacy of all Europeans. Simone D. Brouwer, policy advisor at European Digital Rights, you know, EDI, or EDI, we've talked about them before, Europe's largest network of digital rights organizations

1:18:57said, quote, if the EU really wants to protect children, it should make platforms prove that they're safe, not make children and everyone else prove that they're old enough to exercise their fundamental rights online. Because the Kids Act mandates all users' ages be verified, when they create social media accounts, adults will also have to submit ID documents. Mobile devices are required to use the EU age verification app and

1:19:28European ID wallets. De Brouwer said the requirement will be particularly harmful for marginalized people who don't have IDs and will strip kids of their rights. And finally, the European Commission included poll numbers showing strong support for more aggressive kids online safety laws in its press release, saying that the social euro barometer on the digital decade 2026 survey found that 92%

1:19:59of Europeans consider better kids online safety protections a top policy priority. Yes, we would like you to help protect our kids, but please do it in a sane fashion, not this mess, which is, you know, destined to go wrong. So that reporting by the record mentioned the European Commission's official open source age verification app, which was released earlier

1:20:29this year in April. Sadly, it was deeply flawed from the start. It was readily bypassed, get this, Leo, by editing local config files. The PIN was not cryptographically tied to the credential store, so PIN entries could be deleted, a new PIN could be set, and the original profile's credentials could then be reused by other people. So, I mean, there was like no

1:21:01protection. Believe it or not, the brute force retry prevention counter was stored as an editable value, which could be reset. So you reset the brute force retry counter whenever you want to. And the requirement for biometric agreement could also be turned off, because it was a simple true false setting in the config file. It wasn't safe against token replay.

1:21:32So, one researcher created a Chrome extension that captured and replayed the same I'm over 18 token over and over to any websites that asked for it. And even if all of that was already enough of a disaster, the architecture of the entire system is such that the token issuer serves as a gatekeeper that's able to log when and where every credential they issue is

1:22:03used. So, I mean, it's a disaster in every form and fashion. You know, and of course, a solution is right in front of us, but no one appears to be stepping up because everyone has their own agendas. For the past several years, we've been watching Apple with iOS and Google with Android reluctantly providing their own devices, local age assurance systems, as they've been necessitated by

1:22:33app store access laws that have been passed in Utah, Texas, Louisiana, as well as Brazil, Australia, and elsewhere. So, those systems are in place now, right? I mean, Apple has this. Apple calls theirs, their declared age range API, which we've talked about extensively before, and Google's is the play age signals API. So, any and all native social media applications

1:23:04running on either Apple or Android platforms are already able, right now, today, to determine their users declared ages and alter their operation accordingly to whatever degree they choose. What's missing is the link to websites. Any web browser running on either of those platforms can also determine the age of their user from either platform's native API.

1:23:34That's in place. But there's no existing mechanism for offering that declared age to a website. since September of last year, so here we are in September of 2026, in September 2025, Safari and the various Chromium-based browsers have been able to request a W3C-style digital credential, which would have been stored in the device's wallet. But for anonymity and privacy,

1:24:05only the user's age range should be provided, yet there's no provision for that. This means that we have right now everything we need to allow a user device to assert the privacy-enforced age range of its user, not only to local apps, which we already have, and the app stores, but to websites.

1:24:35But, unfortunately, the necessary parties have not agreed to get that done. And it certainly appears that the European Commission is still a long way from having anything that is even barely acceptable as a privacy enforcing solution. I just, you know, I guess they passed this legislation, Leo, because 92% of their citizens said in a poll that we would like something. So they just gave them a

1:25:06stew of, you know, a wish list of nothing that doesn't provide anything that is rigid enough that anyone could implement something to. And so nothing is going to happen. Yet, here they are, you know, trying yet again.

1:25:26Okay.

1:25:29The prolific pain in Microsoft's butt, hacker, who uses the handle nightmare eclipse and sometimes goes by chaotic eclipse whom we've talked about, well, pretty much nearly every month for most of 2026 because of all of the zero days that were released on the patch Tuesday, right? All of those voluntarily outed him self last week.

1:26:00Yep. via a posting on X in a thread titled Storytime, his given name is Abdel Hamid Nasiri. And the last name Nasiri rings a bell for me. I mean, I think we saw some things from a Nasiri at Microsoft like sometime last year. The name really connects for me and I don't know why otherwise it would. He is a former Microsoft security researcher

1:26:30based in Germany. An X poster who posts under International Cyber Digest says that they've known this person for some time and so confirmed what was said. In their own posting on X, this International Cyber Digest wrote, Nightmare Eclipse, the person who's been dropping Windows zero days has finally decided to

1:27:01share his story. He's an ex-Microsoft employee. We had dinner together and I've known him, writes this person, and his story for some time. His real name is Abdelhamid Nasiri. He's a very talented and intelligent individual and he came across as someone who'd be a real professional to work with. Quoting Nasiri, quote, if only I didn't pour my soul into that job with countless

1:27:31of stupid non-sleep nights, I would have gotten over it. Dot, dot, dot, unquote. Okay. International Cyber Digest writes, he loved Microsoft. I wouldn't say that what he did, releasing all those zero days, was normal, but he felt he had no other option because of the injustice Microsoft did to him. They fired him and you can read the vague

1:28:02reason they gave in the emails sent to him by the Vice President of Engineering at MSRC. According to Abdel's account, VP Tom Gallagher met with him after the firing to tell him they were blacklisting him from Microsoft and writing him a bad reference so he'd never be able to get a job again. Normally, you'd think, well, big deal, just find another job, right? But Abdel doesn't have a European passport and

1:28:32he was only a couple of months away from getting permanent EU residence. So instead of granting him those couple of months, Microsoft fired him for a reason that as far as we can tell was never made clear, then fought him in court and offered him 55,000 euros plus a year's pay to drop the case, which Abdel brought against Microsoft, by the way, all while Abdel was releasing zero days.

1:29:03Abdel continued suing Microsoft for unfair termination in Germany, a fight that has cost him over $200,000. He says Microsoft refused to reveal any details about the security breach and went another direction. If you are reading this and you can offer him a legal, all caps, job, this is his email, msnightmare at proton.me.

1:29:34Okay. To which I would reply, if you have read that and you do offer this criminal a legal job, you will deserve what you will likely get. I wouldn't get near this guy with a 10-foot pole. I well understand the bond of friendship that the person posting as International Cyber Digest might feel toward his friend, Abdel Hamid, whom he says he's known for some time,

1:30:04but characterizing Abdel Hamid's punitive release of a series of highly damaging zero-day exploits, all of which primarily inflicted damage upon the users of Microsoft's products, you know, as not normal behavior by someone involved in an ongoing employment dispute with a former employer, would cause me to question this poster's judgment in addition

1:30:35to Abdel Hamid's. Abdel Hamid, who we know as Nightmare Eclipse, is clearly a talented hacker, but he appears to lack any moral or ethical compass. He did something, no one is saying what exactly, that caused Microsoft to decide, as any responsible company would, to put as much distance between him and themselves as they could. And after that, all of his

1:31:06subsequent malicious actions through month after month of zero-day exploit releases on each Patch Tuesday, which were deliberately timed to inflict maximum damage upon Microsoft's customers, would have only served to confirm to Microsoft that they did the right thing by cutting this individual loose. You know, being an extremely talented hacker, who has demonstrated his willingness to deliberately attack and

1:31:36damage others, will likely bring him to the attention of other needy criminal gangs. And now they have his email address. But I'd be surprised if any legitimate company would feel differently toward him than Microsoft did. It is a shame to see such talent used to hurt others, and it's a shame that such a talented hacker, you know, has decided to abuse his own talents this way. But, you know, now we know the story.

1:32:08We do have a snippet of the email that this VP Tom Gallagher sent, and it's interesting, Tom referred to him by his last name, saying, Hi, Nasiri, thank you again for meeting with me yesterday. I appreciate that you wanted to better understand the company's concerns. What I can share with you is that the company identified a potential security breach.

1:32:38Our security team raised concerns that you put the company and customers at risk by sharing vulnerability information with external parties. This credible escalation has caused me to lose trust in you and why we spoke earlier about a mutual separation. As explained, Christina from HR has sent you a proposal of a termination agreement. Please review it carefully and let me

1:33:09know within one week if you will accept it or not. So, reading between the lines, and there's been a lot of coverage of this in the tech press, it looks like what happened is that Nightmare Eclipse disclosed something to some third party. That is, he was talking out of school, as they say, about Microsoft software, and it got back to Microsoft. And I was like, sorry, you can't stay here. You can't have access

1:33:39to our source code tree any longer. You need to go. And he brought a suit against them and refused to settle after multiple attempts by Microsoft, I mean, giving him 55,000 euro plus a year's pay to drop his suit. And he said no. In other reporting I saw, he now regards his suing Microsoft as having been a mistake,

1:34:09but that was the decision he made at the time. Anyway, it's a sad situation, but these things happen. He's no longer at Microsoft. I imagine, again, I will be surprised if any credible company would hire this person. You just can't. How could you? I mean, I would argue a company would put themselves at risk if knowing what they know of him, they were to hire him. And now especially.

1:34:41I mean, he's kind of doubled down on the whole thing, unfortunately. I sue somebody who terminates me and it's like, no, sorry, there are plenty of people who are available for hire right now. So he's not going to be at the top of the list.

1:35:01These things happen. I am reminded of our friend Randall Schwartz, who's a legendary Pearl programmer and great guy, used to host our Floss Weekly show, who got in trouble at Intel because he found a security flaw. And he said he was pen testing, but it was in a different department and he used the security flaw to break in. And not only did Intel get him in trouble, he got arrested for it. And I think he did it with the best intention. But, you know, sometimes we

1:35:31geeks don't really read the room very well. Doesn't he have a felony conviction now? I believe so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, I don't believe he was being malicious or attempting to hack Intel in any way. He thought he was helping them discover vulnerability, but it didn't, you know, the company didn't take well to it. And, and I understand how we. And we talked about this on the podcast about how can a

1:36:02hacker who does discover a vulnerability responsibly from a backlash by the company because certainly years ago when we were talking about this, companies were suing the people who were, who had hacked them, but then said, oh, well, yes, I hacked you, but you need to fix this. You know, CEOs, you know, told their attorneys, go sue this kid. Right. Right. It's, it's a sad

1:36:33story all around, I guess. And you're right, we don't Randall. There's no way that Randall was malicious. No, he said he's a sweetheart. But he, you know, he, I think a lot of us are a little on the spectrum and I think he just didn't read the room. I remember when we went on a geek cruise, he came up to me and whispered in my ear, he said, your email password is I said, what? And he said, well, you're sending it in the clear on the, on the Wi-Fi network. And he

1:37:04was right to tell me the execution lacked a little bit and I could see how some people might take umbrance and not react well to that. And it's the same, it was the same kind of thing. It's just kind of a tone deafness that was not ill founded. I mean, I was glad he told me, you know, he said, you're sending, you know, this is Wi-Fi and you're sending it in the clear. This was before HTTPS, I guess. Right. And, and you should know about that. I think he probably did this to everybody on the geek cruise.

1:37:34Which is really not the best way to announce it is I'm just, is what I'm saying. That's all. We love him very much. Yeah. What would have been, what would have been better would have been to make a, well, I don't know. I was going to say, make a broad announcement to everyone. Exactly. a generic announcement. Protect yourself. Everybody should know that, you know, we have an unsecured Wi-Fi. So email, if you're just using standard SMTP to send

1:38:04your, you know, to log in and transact, that's not being protected. You're on the ship's network. Yeah. By the way, Briggs tells me that according to Wikipedia, Randall's conviction was expunged in 2007. So he is in the clear now. Oh, good. Good news. Good, good, good. And I'm not revealing any secrets he talks about. It's in his Wikipedia article and he talks about it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's take a break because we've got two more big topics to talk about and then we will get to our main topic. All right.

1:38:35You're watching Security Now with the one and only Steve Gibson who has, to my knowledge, never hacked any of our servers. Not that he couldn't, but he doesn't. I just have no interest. That's really more of it. I have other things to do. I think when you were a teenager, you probably maybe got. I had the grandmaster key to the every door in the district of San Mateo Union High School district. So yeah, they could have taken that the wrong way.

1:39:07I think it's pretty much the case that every single person of our vintage was hacking in the early days in some form or fashion, right? I used to go through the hex code on games to delete, to eliminate the copy protection so I could make copies of the game floppy things. I've removed my share of protection from things that I bought and then like the company went out of business and I couldn't use it anymore. Yeah. It's like, sorry. And by the way, that's how I, and I bet you too, learned hex.

1:39:38Learned how to read hex. as well as plain English. I showed a name brought to you by Threat Locker. Threat actors these days, they're not like me and Steve. They are bad guys. They are using AI to automate vulnerability discovery, to modify scripts during an attack. It's so fast that you can actually adjust the attack as you're in the middle of it. They're using AI to generate new

1:40:09malware variants, to coordinate activity across multiple systems. It gives them the chance to attack many hundreds of systems at the same time. And it does it all at lightning speed, which means that tasks that once took an individual hours or days to achieve can now happen in seconds. And that is scary for us. You know, the people who have to defend these systems. And sometimes, as Steve said, the cult's coming from inside the house, organizations are adding AI assistants and

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1:44:46They really are the best. ThreatLocker.com slash twit. Steve Arino, on we go.

1:44:54Nope, you're muted. It's not me. Did I mute you? No. You muted you. Sorry, I did. So apropos of our last conversation, where we were just talking about people hacking in other companies, we've covered many instances where, because it's been what's happening, where agentic AI got loose, broke out of its containment, and was later discovered to have behaved badly, or we would now say to have behaved in a

1:45:25misaligned fashion. That's right. But what about a security firm using AI to proactively, deliberately, and successfully attack another firm's security? Not a mistake, but, you know, deliberate. When an exploitable vulnerability is found not using AI, in other words, the old-fashioned way, you know, we award those industrious hackers with a bounty.

1:45:57And this makes the Hacker News headline from last Saturday all the more intriguing. Their headline was, Claude Opus 5 helped researchers take over open AI staff accounts via chained flaws. And there's a lot of meat in this. There's a lot for us to talk about here. So here's what the Hacker News reported. They said three researchers at the security firm Hacktron, you gotta love that, so it's,

1:46:28you know, sort of suggests maybe automated hacking, and that's exactly what it is, from the security firm Hacktron used Anthropics Claude Opus 5 to chain two flaws and take over the ChatGPT and Codex accounts of several OpenAI employees, then reach an internal OpenAI code repository. In other words, a total breach of OpenAI security,

1:46:58leading to full access to OpenAI's proprietary internal code repository. Yikes. The Hacker News continues, writing, the chain began with a bug in the software that runs OpenAI's public help forum and moved through a weakness in OpenAI's own login system. But this was security research, not a real world attack. The team reported the flaws to OpenAI,

1:47:29proved their access with a deliberately harmless pull request, then stopped. From the first look, obtained, that full internal access took under 72 hours. OpenAI confirmed a fix about 14 hours after the report, according to Hacktron, and on September 1st, paid the team a $6,500

1:47:59bounty. OpenAI said the award, recognizes the OpenAI side-finding, not the actions against discourse, which is the open-source software that runs the forum. Testing the forum itself... The ones we used, by the way. I know. Yeah. Testing the forum itself was outside... It turns out it was an image display bug, but we'll get there in a second. Testing the forum itself was outside its bug bounty program,

1:48:30right, because that's, you know, OpenAI is only talking about their side of it. They said, OpenAI has not publicly described the login flaw, and it confirmed the finding through that fix and payment, rather than by detailing the account takeovers. Hacktron, which describes itself as an AI assisted security research firm, was careful about what it did and did not do. When one employee's codex link to OpenAI's code

1:49:01on GitHub was opened, it triggered a single pull request in the internal repository. It did not read any source code, merge, ship anything, or touch customer data.

1:49:15What the chain could have reached, they wrote, was far larger. Because staff connects other services to ChatGPT and Codex, the team said the same access could, in theory, have extended to tools such as GitHub, Slack, and email. That wider reach was possible, but not used. The reason a bug in a public forum could reach staff accounts

1:49:47lies in OpenAI's login system, not in the software forum. In other words, not in discourse. They said, OpenAI's forum offers a sign-in with OpenAI option, the same single sign-on that staff uses elsewhere. Thus, a collision in single sign-on overlap. The article said, once the researchers took control of the forum server, the shared login let

1:50:18them take over the ChatGPT and Codex accounts of foreign members who worked at OpenAI. The victims did not have to do anything. Again, it was just a credential overlap. Hacktron said this was an OpenAI identity problem, not a flaw in the forum software. Any first or third party service using the same sign-on could have granted the same access. The way in was an image bug.

1:50:49The forum runs on discourse and discourse passes uploaded H-E-I-C and H-E-I-F often verbalized as H-E-I-F images to a tool called ImageMagic, very popular image rendering tool, which uses the live H-E-F library to read them. A flaw in live H-E-F let a specially

1:51:19crafted image corrupt the forum server's memory. Now, here's where it gets cool, Leo. Discourse's advisory rates the result as remote code execution scores at 8.8 out of 10 and tracks it as CVE, no 2026, 32, 882. So, this score should be updated, everybody, in order to get rid of this live H-E-F exploit, which is now known publicly.

1:51:49The public record for the flaw itself is narrower. In live H-E-F's own advisory and in national vulnerability databases, that's CVE, ending in 32.882, is an out-of-bounds read that can crash the software or leak nearby memory, not a direct code execution bug. Here we go. That leaked memory helps defeat a common protection called address space layout randomization.

1:52:21The researchers say they combined live H-E-F's memory bugs with the AI's help to turn the crash into working code execution on the forum server. Upstream, the flaw was fixed in live H-E-F 1.22.0 in May of 2026. So, everyone will want to make sure that they're running an instance of image magic that incorporates live H-E-F

1:52:52with 1.22.0 which would have been sometime in May.

1:53:00That fix existed, which is interesting, months before the test. But the forum's server image built on the Debian 12 Linux distribution still shipped the old unpatched live H-E-F version 1.19.7 when the researchers looked in July. The fix and its CVE were already public, but Debian had not yet

1:53:31included them in the packaged version the forum used. If you run your own discourse server, this part affects you directly, they wrote. Rebuild on the latest image to get the patched live H-E-F because a web interface update alone may not replace the old library. Sites hosted by discourse were already patched, and the fixed self-hosted releases are 2026.7.0,

1:54:026.1, 5.2, and 1.6. So, how did the researchers use AI? They used AI to do the hard part. They first, get this Leo, they first tried Claude Opus 4.8, which struggled over several sessions to build a working exploit once ASLR was enabled. I'll have a lot to say

1:54:32about this in a minute. Anthropic released its next model, Claude Opus 5, on the evening of July 24th. And in a fresh session, it produced a working code exploit within hours. Wow. So, here we have Opus 4.8, can't do it no matter how many times they try. Anthropic updates Claude to Opus 5, bang, cuts through it like butter.

1:55:04They said Opus 5 shipped with safeguards, here comes more, Opus 5 shipped with safeguards, meant to stop it from writing exploit code for real targets, which it did. The researchers got around them by pointing the model at their own test server, disguised as a capture-the-flag practice target, then letting it run in an automated loop. Even so, they say,

1:55:34the work was not hands-off. Skilled human direction still mattered, and this was not automated hacking with no one at the controls. The case fits what researchers and AI companies have described this year. Capable AI models are sharply cutting the time and skill that serious offensive work used to require. Anthropic has reported that criminal and state-backed groups are already using its Claude models to run

1:56:05real intrusions, not just to ask questions, or rather, ask and answer questions. Open AI was one target in a wider project Hacktron calls Heaf Heist. Over about two months, the team says, it found the same class of image decoding flaws in software used by other large companies, right, because everyone's using this, at a total cost of under

1:56:35$3,000 in their AI usage. It links the campaign to reported bugs in Slack, Meta's products, GitHub Enterprise, and web frameworks such as Next.js. Those broader claims are backed unevenly. The Next.js flaw is confirmed in Vercel's own advisory, and LiveHeaf's maintainers confirmed a working code execution exploit for the bug tied to Meta.

1:57:06The wider claim of code execution across many applications has not been independently confirmed, a limit the Hacker News noted when it first covered the Next.js flaw in August. The wider campaign used a different model, OpenAI's own GPT 5.6 Sol, for cases where the team knew nothing about the target in advance. Only one company, Shopify, appears to have noticed the activity, the researchers say, even though its

1:57:36image processors crashed repeatedly under thousands of test uploads. In other words, many companies don't notice that somebody is hacking their systems. Only Shopify said, hey, what the hell's going on here? Most companies were completely oblivious to it. Again, that's a problem. The Hacker News has contacted Hacktron with questions about how the forum code execution was achieved and about the scope of the account access.

1:58:06So what should users do? The bigger lessons go beyond discourse. If your service accepts user images and reads HEIC, HEIF, or AVIF files through LiveHeaf, an old build could be exposed. And if a public lower trust service shares your single sign-on with internal tools, which was the mistake OpenAI had, a break-in on that service can become a

1:58:37break-in everywhere, which the same login reaches. Update LiveHeaf to the latest security release, 1.23.4, as of early September 2026, or to your distribution's patched build. Where you do not need it, turn off decoding of untrusted HEIF and AVIF images, or run image processing inside a lockdown sandbox. Limit which services your single sign-on

1:59:08trusts, and require a fresh identity check before sensitive actions rather than trusting an existing session. Again, it's that common session reuse problem is where this bit OpenAI. they finish. There's no sign the OpenAI flaw was used against anyone in the real world. As of mid-September 2026, it was not on the U.S. government's list of vulnerabilities known to be exploited, you know, CISA's KIV,

1:59:39although that list is not proof either way. What the available reports do not settle is whether an organization that has already patched should still check for earlier access. On that point, all sources are silent. Okay, so we learned a number of very interesting things from this reporting. It was, I think, really interesting, as I said, that whereas Claude Opus 4.8 worked and worked, but was unable to develop an exploit, simply

2:00:10upgrading to Claude Opus 5 handed the would-be attackers a working exploit within hours. This pretty clearly demonstrates the rapidly evolving effective strength of available AI. The next chilling aspect revealed by this report is the successful ease with which the attackers were able to trick both Claude Opus 4.8 and 5 into

2:00:41bypassing their own guardrails to develop a working exploit for them. They used essentially the, oh, Claude, it's okay, we're a cybersecurity firm, and we're just wishing to determine whether the trouble we've identified in the widely used Leibheaf library could be weaponized in the presence of ASLR. So we just need you to try to do that for us on our own

2:01:11internal test server. Would you do that for us, pretty please?

2:01:17As I've said from the start, today's AI technology has always felt very slippery and extremely difficult to control. And finally, the most worrisome evidence we obtain from this is that the work that Claude Opus 5 performed for these researchers was truly significant. Just to remind everyone, address space layout randomization, ASLR,

2:01:47was added to systems as a mean of thwarting attackers who managed to obtain execution inside a protected code space, such as an operating system kernel. Before address space layout randomization was added, a system would always load its many various modules, essentially stacking them in the same order inside the operating system's RAM

2:02:18memory. This meant that an attacker could count on what was located where when they wished to use, for example, return-oriented programming, ROP, to knit together the privileged changes they needed to make by using the operating system's own existing code at the ends of existing subroutines. They would jump near the end of a known subroutine that would do a little something that they needed

2:02:49before it returned. And when it returned, it returned to them, being a subroutine. So ASLR was added to make doing this far, far more difficult. As the name says, address space layout randomization deliberately does not load all of the system's modules the same way each time. In fact, it goes to extreme lengths to scramble

2:03:19up the loading so that no code an attacker might manage to get running inside an operating system kernel will have any idea where anything else is located. ASLR, consequently, has proven to be an extremely effective and essentially critical attack success mitigation technique. The technique is so difficult to bypass that Claude Opus 4.8 was

2:03:51unable to succeed. It stopped at cold. But then along comes Claude Opus 5, which reportedly cut right through ASLR. Understand how bad that is. ASLR bypasses have been known in the past because it is at best a mitigation, a strong mitigation, but still just a mitigation. It is not, never has been and cannot be a

2:04:22total prevention. It makes the attacker's job far more difficult, but it is unable to make it impossible. Until now, ASLR has meant that only the upper echelon echelon of elite hackers, you know, these hacktron people couldn't, only the upper echelon of elite hackers could find their way past it. Claude Opus 5 just changed that.

2:04:53Now, all any script kitty needs to do is ask for passage. No elite hacking skill required. So I'm very glad that there are now white hat hacking firms like hacktron, which have decided to leverage the power of AI to find and report remotely exploitable vulnerabilities and collect bounties. That's great. You know, we need more groups like them.

2:05:24It would be terrific if they could be granted fully cyber-capable access to anthropics best models without guardrails so that they don't need to try to trick Claude to do what they would, you know, want to do in order to protect firms from themselves. You know, these are the sorts of people that we want to up-arm in what is going to be something of a little bit of a cyber war here for a while. I like that verb, up-arm. That's new to me.

2:05:55Good. I like it. Up-arm it. Up-arm it. Yeah. Up-arm it. Get prepared. Arm your ups. Also, last Thursday, the Hacker News carried the report of a maximum severity, and you never want to read this about something that Cisco is offering, a maximum severity CVSS 10.0, which we know is incredibly difficult to get. I mean, basically, if you have a vulnerability of 10.0, the device is saying,

2:06:26come on, come on in. Just, you know, come in, look around, take over my enterprise that purchased me. It is remotely exploitable to give anyone who wishes root access and full control over an affected Cisco device. Starting off the article, the Hacker News wrote, Cisco has warned of a fresh, maximum severity security flaw

2:06:57impacting identity services engine, ISE, that has come under active exploitation. So the word is out. The vulnerability tracked is CVE, you know, 2026, 76, 460, with a CVSS of 10.0, could allow, and we know now does, is, does, and will allow any unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass

2:07:27authentication. Cisco wrote, quote, this vulnerability is due to insufficient authentication control, which, yeah, no kidding, on an API endpoint. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to an affected API endpoint. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to gain unauthorized access to the

2:07:57affected device by bypassing the web-based management interface. Well, our listeners well know how much disdain I have for any and all publicly exposed web interfaces. It's almost to the point now where you deserve what you get if you expose a web interface. All of the evidence we've seen for years proves beyond any doubt that for whatever reason, we just do not seem to know how to secure a

2:08:29web interface. We just don't. We can't apparently. If these problems directly damage Cisco, they might have removed those inherently insecure interfaces long ago. But since Cisco's users want them, and since it's they who are damaged by the endless ransomware extortion campaigns they enable, nothing ever changes. even when Cisco comes under hopeful new management as we

2:09:00covered last year sometime that promises to put their customers' security ahead, even ahead of the customers' own convenience, well, that doesn't seem to change. What has changed for the better is that as I said at the top of the show, Cisco, like Microsoft, has apparently also discovered that AI can help them to finally root out these latent legacy problems.

2:09:31Last Wednesday, the day before that reporting, Cisco dropped what is for them a stunning ensemble of 77 patches for systems across their product line. I'm not going to go through it all, but I'll give you a sense for it. We've got all of CVEs are, of course, 2026. So 2176 has a CVSS of 9.9,

2:10:022211, 9.1, 2307, 9.1, all multiple vulnerabilities in that ISE that could allow an authenticated remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system of an affected device. To exploit these vulnerabilities, the attacker must have valid admin credentials. Unfortunately, if you have that,

2:10:32you can just take over the device, do whatever you want to outside of normal, you know, the normal controls. Then we have 76462 carrying a CVSS of 10.0, 76464, 425, 426, 427, 428, multiple vulnerabilities in ISE and Cisco ISE passive identity connector, known as ISE-PIC, that could allow, and we now know does,

2:11:03a remote attacker to bypass authentication to the REST API, achieve remote code execution, perform SQL injection, and conduct MXL external entity injection attacks on an infected device. CVE 20282 with a CVSS of 9.1, 283, 284, multiple vulnerabilities in ISE, blah, blah, blah, CVSS 9.1

2:11:33and 9.1, multiple vulnerabilities in ISE and ISE-PIC, and so forth, you know, remote attackers perform command injection, CVE 20322 carrying a CVSS of 9.9, 2325 of a CVSS of 9.9, CVE 20326 CVSS of 9.8, 2360, 361, 76409, multiple vulnerabilities

2:12:03in Cisco Nexus dashboard that could lead to command injection authentication or authorization bypass and information disclosure, CVE 2130 with a CVSS of 10.0, 20192, CVSS of 10.0, 2194, a CVSS of 9.1, then another 9.9 and 9.9, multiple vulnerabilities in ISE, blah, blah, blah. and it goes on

2:12:34like that for a total of 77 and they are all in the high 9s of CVSS scores. We don't have to guess where these all came from, right? We see the pattern that the employees of massive legacy enterprises,

2:12:55Microsoft and Cisco come to mind, the employees are unable to clean up their own legacy code. But as I said at the top, when those cash-rich enterprises can pay to have AI do that for them, their code gets fixed and that is nothing but really great news. So at this rate, you know, as with Microsoft,

2:13:25Cisco's platforms may at least finally become secure-able, which would be wonderful. Wouldn't that? I mean, they're everywhere, right? Oh my God, yes. Cisco was first and they've always been like the IBM, right? You can't go wrong by ordering Cisco, which has been the bane of many of their competitors who have said, you know, their stuff is not that great anymore. Look at what we

2:13:56have. But people like that dark green color, apparently. in their defense and Microsoft's defense, when you've been around forever and ever, your code base gets a little old and grungy. But this is good. We're getting this stuff fixed up now. Yes, I salute them. If you cannot hire people to fix your legacy code, and apparently Microsoft and Cisco can't, then hire AI to do it. And it is doing it. this is a

2:14:27grand slam, 77 serious external exposure vulnerabilities in Cisco. What it does mean is you got to get your gear updated because the bad guys are going to backtrack these vulnerabilities and attack you with them. So really, really, really update Cisco. If any of our listeners have any responsibility for Cisco gear on the edge, make sure that it's updated. And Leo, it's time for our last

2:14:58break, and then we're going to take a look at, speaking of a super rich company that is spending a lot on AI to fix their problems, it turns out it's not all good news. The Mega Patch Tuesday fallout is our final topic. There was a little bit, yes. Well, we'll talk about this good. More than you know. Ooh. Yeah. Really bad. Well, you know, that's why people come here. They want to hear the bad news with the good news. In fact,

2:15:29it's mostly bad news. But if you are responsible for keeping your company's systems running or protecting your security, this is the news you need to know, right? This episode of Security Now brought to you by OutSystems. I love OutSystems, the leading agentic systems platform. Let me explain what this is all about. OutSystems is helping their customers modernize operations by enabling their customers to build,

2:16:00modernize, and operate enterprise systems starting from any coding tool in a, very important, these words, listen carefully, governed, I'm underscoring that one, agentic engineering model. All right? It's time to innovate at the speed of AI. We all want to do that, but we also, I hope, do not want to compromise quality or lose control, which is why so many thousands of enterprises worldwide trust OutSystems for their mission critical apps.

2:16:32I mean, we're not, this is not theory, this is not just a good idea, we're talking about massive operational wins. Take, for example, a leading global retailer, you would know the name, that was struggling to keep up with their rapid expansion. They turned OutSystems to build AI agents that automated their invoicing and translation processes, shifting 95% of their daily store operations to a new digital app, saving thousands of hours of manual work. And I'll say this parenthetically, when you have,

2:17:03when you build an agentic workflow that is constrained, that is specific, that works with a specific kind of data set, it becomes so reliable, so useful, that you can really trust it. And that's what OutSystems specializes in. Or take a look at the major global logistics giant that was drowning in technical debt. I think any company that's more than a couple of years old is probably, their engineers were spending most of their time, weeks,

2:17:34manually firefighting by reviewing platform logs. Sound familiar? By using OutSystems, they were able to build an AI log review agent in just five days. And that one agent, just that one agent, now saves them over 1,600 engineering hours every single year. That means their team can focus on real innovation instead of, you know, reactive maintenance. Even in modern digital banking, banking's challenging, right? Because there are a lot of regulations,

2:18:05a lot of restrictions, there's a high demand for security and reliability. But yes, even in banking, companies are using OutSystems to standardize and automate complex financial workflows, delivering secure, personalized experiences at a pace their competitors can't match. Because it's OutSystems, it's reliable, it's secure, it's robust. OutSystems gives you the flexibility to deploy how you want and the governance to do it safely. So stop chasing the hype and

2:18:35start building systems that actually scale. Learn more at OutSystems.com slash twit. That's OutSystems.com slash twit. If you've only taken away one thing from today's show, let it be this, OutSystems.com slash twit. This is the solution you're looking for. We thank him so much for supporting Steve and Security Now. Mega. Okay. Mega. Last week, we noted that while it was super spiffy

2:19:06terrific that Microsoft has now leveraged AI to fix things left and right within each month, breaking all previous historic records, there was also some consequential downside in the form of the massive burden that all of these patches would have on enterprise IT staff who now needed to make sure that applying these fixes did not break anything that their enterprise might depend upon.

2:19:38And despite the need to proceed with caution, just days before the release of these patches, which was now two weeks ago or three weeks ago, Microsoft publicly warned their customers to apply these fixes without delay with the argument that AI-assisted exploit development was now shortening the time window to exploit. So, it was somewhat ironic that it was

2:20:08Microsoft, as turns out, that needed to quickly pivot into emergency mode to address the many widespread catastrophes that were created by Tuesday's updates. What happened? Well, there's the RDP hang. Within 48 hours, admins began reporting that RDS, the remote desktop services on patched

2:20:39Windows servers, would run for a few hours and then die. New systems would hang at the connecting dialog or at the please wait for the remote desktop connection screen. And at the time of the collapse, any existing sessions that were in place were unable to disconnect or log off. It was a mess because so many organizations have become quite dependent upon remote desktop,

2:21:09which, of course, Microsoft has been pushing as part of their whole virtualization move. But the trouble, turns out, was not limited to RDP. Also, when this occurred, MMC, the Microsoft Management Console, are the RDS licensing diagnoser, even Windows File Explorer, and Windows Update Settings page would all become unresponsive on the affected machine. Admins were forced to hard-reset production servers

2:21:40during the day, and the blast radius of this one was pretty significant. Server 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, 2022, 2025, plus Windows 10, 21H2, 22H2, and Windows 11, 24H2, 25H2, and 26H1. You know, like, frankly, the server I'm still running is 2008.

2:22:10It was spared because it was older than... They forgot it existed. What are you talking about? That's right. Although, I'll be up to server 2025 as soon as I bring the new hardware online, but I'm not there yet. So, anyway, Microsoft's reaction was to offer what is known as a known issue rollback, which, you know, they've had to do in the past, which is, again, this is why enterprise IT is a

2:22:40little, you know, careful with these Windows Patch Tuesdays. The known issue rollback could be administered via group policy.

2:22:51And then, finally, on the 14th of September, six days after Patch Tuesday, so it was, actually, it was Monday, the day before last week's podcast, Microsoft pushed seven individual out-of-band updates out to cover all troubled target machines. And for the various servers, unfortunately, on the server, side, those updates were catalog only, so they do not come through Windows Update,

2:23:22and admins were required to get them manually. So, that was a problem. But, arguably, not the worst. There was the domain authentication mess. In some instances, again, the source of this one was really sort of interesting, Windows 11 users were prevented from logging in with valid domain credentials after installing the September 26 security updates, patch Tuesday for this

2:23:53month. Microsoft has been gradually promoting a feature called machine identity isolation. It tightens how a machine account goes about proving itself over the net logon secure channel. Until two days ago, I'm sorry, until two Tuesdays ago, that is before Patch Tuesday, that feature, machine identity isolation, had been present, but it was set to a

2:24:24configured but not enforced state. This is sort of the way Microsoft creeps these things out, Microsoft and others, where they sort of incrementally roll them out, but they don't commit to them. It's the way XP originally had a Windows firewall. It was the first version that had a firewall, but it was there, but it wasn't enabled by default. It wasn't until Service Pack 3, I think it was a 2 or 3, that turned on the firewall by default.

2:24:55Anyway, so same thing here. Machine Identity Isolation Configured But Not Enforced. So you can guess what comes next. September's updates flipped it into its configured state with enforcement mode on machines where it had been previously only configured. The only problem was that it turns out it's only supported when the domain is at Windows Server 2025

2:25:25domain functional level, which it turns out is a small minority of the world. That's right. As a result, anyone, any enterprises running Server 2019 or 2022 domain controllers, which again is way the majority, most of the world, they found that their clients could no longer authenticate to their domains. That kind of puts pasting

2:25:55an Excel in the shadows. Yes, it does. Yes. Yikes. Users received the disturbing and clear message, the trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed. Now, since cached credentials still work offline, users could often log in at home onto their machine, but then find themselves locked out of the corporate network. Windows credential guard machine account authentication also

2:26:26broke and VPN connected devices were especially prone to trouble because they also use the same trust relationship. So it was and still is a mess. Microsoft has acknowledged the trouble last Thursday and offered a workaround but not a patch. The workaround get this is to disable the machine identity isolation feature by whatever means enabled it, which might be

2:26:57Intune, Group Policy, or the registry. So you set the machine identity isolation value to zero, then reboot, and then you have to execute a PowerShell command. Unfortunately, Microsoft documentation warns that enabling machine identity isolation in enforcement mode, which is what they did on Patch Tuesday, then subsequently disabling

2:27:27it, which is what they are now saying is necessary, will break domain authentication and require the device to be unjoined and rejoined to the Windows domain. I'm sure this was a security feature which they built in to be extra safe, but that does make recovery more burdensome. One solution is to run a PowerShell command to repair the broken secure channel. If anyone out there

2:27:58is being affected by this, I've got the PowerShell command in the show notes. It's test-computer secure channel-repair-credential and then parens-get-credential close parens. And that will unjoin and rejoin that machine to the domain. And then you can then log in. So you can imagine how many enterprises got bit hard by this and

2:28:29took away the lesson, ooh, we're really, it doesn't matter how much Microsoft tells us we need to update, this is going to be a problem. And then, of course, I actually heard from several of our own listeners who are responsible for users within their organization about Excel's copy and paste being broken. The update that was responsible was KB 500 2914. The good news is

2:29:00that that update resolved 29 different Excel vulnerabilities, which included a number of which could be used for serious remote code execution. Well, that's good. Yeah. Yes. So, there's that. But in the process, it also broke our good old copy and paste. The thing that caused so much trouble was that the copy and paste failed silently. Microsoft wrote, quote,

2:29:30although users try to paste content, the source remains selected and the destination is unmodified. Unquote. So, no error, no dialogue, Control-C followed by Control-V, you know, copy and paste, does nothing. Autofill doesn't work. Dragging the fill handle doesn't work. Fill series doesn't work. Dragging cells to move them doesn't work. Interestingly,

2:30:00Office 365 users were not affected. Only those using Office 2016-2019 Office 2024 or the LTSC, you know, the long-term servicing channel 2021. They were affected. And, of course, since many people spend significant time working in Excel, this was all debilitating for them. You know, not what you want from a Windows patch Tuesday. Then there was USB audio. USB audio class one

2:30:31devices all stopped working with device manager complaining, quote, this device cannot start and giving a code 10. The result was silence. With volume controls unresponsive, the sound settings page sometimes crashing, and in a related symptom, multi-channel devices lost their 8-channel and 3D audio modes, although stereo kept working. Then there was the WinRE partition to small bugs.

2:31:02The Tuesday update included a secure boot, certificate update, which was larger than the previous certificate. That required the need to resize the Windows recovery partition. Unfortunately, systems whose WinRE partition was smaller than Microsoft's recommended 750 megabytes, which happens to include an enormous number of OEM images that do not wish to waste so much space

2:31:33because they would rather give it to their users, that would all fail to resize and often then fail to boot. Dell's Optiplex machines were widely reported victims of this. It was a mess. Then there's the code integrity failure. When attempting to boot, HP laptops in particular were hitting a stop code of 0x C043-0001, code integrity failed to initialize, and then receiving a black screen

2:32:03or an infinite restart loop because of a secure boot file mismatch. The popular workaround that's been suggested is to disable secure boot in the BIOS, but of course that means retrieving the system's bitlocker recovery key first. There have also been reports of kernel security check failure boot loops on older hardware. In these cases, it was not possible to simply uninstall the update because the machine would not boot far enough

2:32:33to allow the user to do it. Again, another huge mess. And then there was the Windows Desktop Explorer XE. The actual Explorer XE, which is the Windows Desktop, it was crashing on any VDI systems, you know, Microsoft's virtual desktop infrastructure. So, all the enterprises using Windows VDI through Citrix UPM, FSLogix,

2:33:04VMware Horizon, Liquidware, Profile Unity, they all virtualized the desktop with remote servers reporting that Windows Explorer desktop failed to start or was crashing immediately after sign-in, leaving a blank screen with no taskbar. A Microsoft engineer confirmed they're investigating and asked for memory dumps, please, but there's no root cause and no fix. The workaround is restarting Explorer from

2:33:34the Windows Task Manager or just use a fresh profile, but of course, then you've got a whole blank Windows. For an enterprise with thousands of pooled desktops, this is another nightmare. And believe it or not, there's more. I'm not going to go into such detail, but AMD Radeon Video, many of their cards suffered black screens, driver timeouts, and hard freezes. There was the BitLocker event ID 24641,

2:34:04which recurred after every reboot. The message that users received was an unexpected error was encountered attempting to retrieve the BitLocker volume master key during restart. Now, that's not what you want to see. However, the drives remained accessible, so it appeared to be some sort of worrisome cosmetic glitch, but it upset lots of people who were wondering what was going on. Hyper-V and Plan 9 shared folders stopped

2:34:35working Always on VPE with IKE V2 certificate-based VPN. Those connections began failing and dropping immediately. There was a later fix to that using KB 5129-195. And finally, update installation failures. Windows 11, LTSC, the long-term servicing channel, 2024, and various Dell notebooks would not accept

2:35:06Windows updates. They would roll them back at the first reboot, and then it was necessary to reinstall them by hand. So, I wanted to take the time to walk through these rather than just waving my hand and saying there were lots of problems two weeks ago because it's important to highlight the tight spot this puts enterprise IT staff in and the spot they may be in next month, two weeks from now. Microsoft had said, this

2:35:36is a really important biggie and due to the new speed of AI-driven attacks, everyone should patch within three days. And this admonishment was offered, as I said, shortly before the delivery of this massive patch update that did in fact wreak havoc within the networks of many enterprise users. So, what do we do about this? I don't think there's anything we can do. Overall, I think Microsoft did the right

2:36:07thing. Their entire product suite is measurably more secure today than it was two weeks ago. Nearly a thousand patches worth. But they need to learn from this to determine why they did not detect these update side effects. Maybe they were in a big hurry. maybe junior people are asking AI to fix problems and they're not vetting them enough.

2:36:37I mean, why were all these things, how did they go undetected? But even if the same thing happens next month, it's unfortunate and I feel for the enterprise IT guys who are going to be terrified to apply next Tuesday's patches. we don't know how many they're going to be. Only Microsoft knows and we don't know what quality they're going to be. But I'm afraid we're going to have to go through some pain like this

2:37:08to finally get to a Windows, which not only works for everybody, which of course is always the goal, but is also secure. is that it?

2:37:29I saw you take a drink and I thought, is he done? Okay.

2:37:36That was a shorter segment than I'm used to. I thought we might go on and on about all the flaws, but there were plenty. God knows. There were plenty. And again, I don't know what Enterprise does. I mean, they cannot afford to apply these except to do it in their own test environment. They're going to have to test them and see what breaks, but I'm afraid breakage is the way we get there because who knows what next month is going to look like.

2:38:07That's two weeks away and this is going to happen again. I mean, I do not envy the job of our IT professionals who listen to this show. You guys and you don't want to not patch. No, because then you could be victim now known flaws to flaws, which are now known. Exactly. They're out there.

2:38:29Yeah, better to fix them, I guess. The problem is there's such an onslaught. This is what I was saying two weeks ago that Microsoft probably doesn't have time or the ability to test them. Not as thoroughly as they'd like. There's probably an urgency on their part to get them shipped. I mean, and unfortunately when that happens, this happens. A few years ago, I'm going to have to ask Paul about this. Paul and Richard tomorrow on Windows Weekly. A few years ago, they got rid of their testing team, which was maybe a

2:39:00little bit of a mistake. We talked about it here also. We'll just let our customers be our beta. I mean, right now you need, you want a thousand people. You want somebody on every possible device. You know, you want every computer ever made, every server. You cannot scale that up overnight. And that's what they've had to do. And I think one of the reasons I kind of laugh when I hear of these doomers

2:39:31talking about how AI is going to kill us all is, and you'll see this when you start playing with local AI.

2:39:37So AI is so smart, it found the flaws, but it didn't find all the side effects. You're so smart, you would think it would have noticed that this is going to break paste. And this has been my experience. They do amazing things, but there are gaps. There are places where they're incredibly stupid. Well, Leo, because they don't actually understand anything. There is no understanding. It is astonishing that just language statistics is able to give us this.

2:40:08All it is, is language statistics. We have so much knowledge stored in language that you can query it. You can squeeze it out. But of course, it doesn't understand anything. So I'm having the same experience with my own coding. Really, I'm very, very careful. I have auditors. I have some really elaborate checks and balances. And yet, I thought, oh, that's really good. The other day,

2:40:39I was kind of dejected. I thought, I've got this ad sales system down. Everything's working beautifully. All the numbers work out. It looks beautiful. I said, Lisa, we're ready. I showed it to her. The very first thing she does, it doesn't crash. It says, oh, you can't save that. There's another user. There's no other user. What are you nuts? It's just us. And it's like, ah, so close. And so it's frustrating because, yeah, they're not genius engineers.

2:41:10Even genius engineers make that kind of mistake. what we don't yet know is whether AI code slop or to what degree AI code slop is going to be a problem. Are there, you know, I just enumerated the major problems that were created by Microsoft dropping nearly a thousand patches. We don't know if there are subtler problems. I guarantee

2:41:40you there are subtler problems. Guarantee you. You know, paste the letter Q into Excel and the whole thing goes, pa-booey. I guarantee you there. Because you can't test everything.

2:41:53It seems to me, in theory, I don't know, you're a very accomplished coder.

2:42:00I guess my, Windows is just too big and Office is just too big. But it's deterministic. You know where everything is. You don't though. Wired up and what every, the impact will be of every change you make. It should all be cause and effect. I'm still of the opinion that we could have a much better coding system because this is just using sample code from the internet to knit together solutions.

2:42:30I mean, code is code. It has laws and rules. It's all deterministic ultimately. I mentioned to you, I think it was before we were recording that all of this has been done with a linguistic model. There are other models now underway. There are world models. There are models for specific areas like Microsoft apparently is training up

2:43:01a materials model for some reason. It won't be language. It will be something else. It would be entirely possible to train, I think, somehow, a code model that is not about language but is actually about code. There's a new model out there which you will be able to play with once you get your spark plugged in called JEV, J-E-V, it's J-V on Paradox.

2:43:32It's a classifier. It's not an LLM. It doesn't do prose. It doesn't do language. It's very fast and it's very interesting. I have about 11 tests going on in different things because it is a very fast and effective way to say this or that. You give it the criteria. It gives you a percentage match and it's really good and it isn't language. This is that branch that wonders if large language models are not compressors

2:44:02because GZIP is basically a statistical compression and so it turns out that you can do some odd things. It's sort of a branch of what you're talking about. I have run across that but I haven't played with it. Some very interesting stuff and because it's so fast it's very cheap. They don't even charge you for tokens out. Just tokens in. This is the good news. We're at the very beginning

2:44:33of a revolution. Leo, that's what I keep saying is that yes, this is fun. We are riding a tidal wave and nothing we know today is true 60 days. Which is why I'm really, really glad that you got a spark because I want you to start digging deep into this. I'm very interested. Well, I want to accelerate my app development because it's dumb that it takes me years to create an app.

2:45:05The only thing I would ever have it do would be to build my UI but I spend an awful lot of time moving buttons around and tweaking margins and centering things and doing stuff that's dumb for me to spend time on. Having a core, my own MASM core in the back end and a clean interface API between it and the UI, then I would always

2:45:36be using agentic cloud coding to code the UI because I'm only going to go for the best and local is never going to be as good as the cloud. So at least for the foreseeable future, I do foresee a day when Microsoft is offering enterprises an AI server. There will be a Microsoft AI server. And the other thing that is weird, I shot you a

2:46:07note about it the other day, is to remind ourselves that none of this AI is training. I mean, all we're doing is building big prompts around a static AI. It's wrong that an AI that a corporation uses wouldn't learn about the right things about what the corporation is doing. We're just building really fancy scaffolding around static AI. So we're just at the beginning.

2:46:38Baby steps. Well, I'm excited and I'm so glad you're here to guide us through it. Steve Gibson at grc.com, the Gibson Research Corporation. That's where you'll find Spinrite, the world's best mass storage maintenance recovery and performance enhancing utility. It's a must-have 6.1, the current version. You can go there and get it. If you already have it, you can get the upgrade for free. He has another program he just put out, which is really cool, the DNS

2:47:08Benchmark Pro, $10 for that, and that will help you find the server for your particular network, which almost certainly is not the one you're using, at least not if you're using your ISP's DNS server. That's a really nice utility, very nice tool to have. If you go there, besides those two things, you can also get a copy of the podcast. He has unique versions in every respect, a 16-kilobit audio version, which is a little scratchy, but is small. That's its primary accomplishment.

2:47:40He also has the 64-kilobit, which sounds fine, still smaller than the one we offer, and he has the show notes, which are always fantastic. It's like a little mini novel arriving at your desk, 20 pages of stuff. There's pictures, there's all sorts of things you can read along as you listen. Reference on the road. By the way, you can go to the website, here.com and click the link and download it. By the way, there's also transcribed versions

2:48:11of the show. You can download those for searching as well. Don't I are wonderful.

2:48:16But if you want to ask me, you can also do that. You need to go to grc.com slash email. Now, the main purpose of that page is to whitelist your email. Send Steve pictures of the week, ideas, thoughts, questions. So do that. Fill out your email address. He has some magic formula. He'll verify that you're a human without CAPTCHAs, I might add. But there are two little checkboxes below that. One is the show notes,

2:48:47so you can get on that mailing list. The other is a very infrequent new product mailing list. I would say check both of them, but they're unchecked by default, so you'll have to do that by hand. We also have copies of the show at our website, twit.tv slash sn. There's a YouTube channel for the video dedicated to security now, and of course, you can subscribe audio or video in your favorite podcast client. Now, if you want to watch us do it live, it's right after MacBreak Weekly every Tuesday. It's supposed to be, and usually is, close to, roundabout, somewhere within an hour of

2:49:181.30 p.m. Pacific, 4.30 Eastern, 20.30 UTC. You can watch live if you're in the club, and I hope you are, because that really helps us out, helps us keep doing these shows. If you're in the club, you can go to the club, Twitter, Discord, and watch there with all the other club members, but you can also watch, everybody can, YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik, we stream it every month. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Thank you, Mr. G. Have a wonderful evening, and we'll see you next week.

2:49:49See you on the 29th. Bye.

2:49:55Security now.

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