AI Deleted the Entire Database in 9 Seconds

Summary

Hacker And The Fed – Episode 130: “AI Deleted the Entire Database in 9 Seconds”

Date: May 7, 2026
Hosts: Chris Tarbell & Hector Monsegur

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Overview

In this lively episode, former FBI agent Chris Tarbell and ex-LulzSec/Anonymous hacker Hector Monsegur (aka Sabu) blend their inside perspectives on cybersecurity, AI, and the increasingly high stakes of digital trust. Anchored by the jaw-dropping news that an autonomous AI agent wiped an entire company database in seconds, the hosts dissect the cascading risks and ethical dilemmas at the cutting edge of technology—touching everything from smart glasses and voice clones to supply chain breaches, bug bounty drama, and insiders gone rogue.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. On AI, Privacy, and the Eternal Risk of “Other People’s Servers”

[00:00–14:38]

• Privacy Is Dead?

  • Hector warns that any data entered into AI tools or stored on others' servers is accessible to unseen human reviewers, highlighting issues with tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, even cryptocurrencies.
  • Hector:

    “When you type into a chat, it's being read by somebody. Especially now with ChatGPT and Claude and everything else.” [00:00]

  • Chris adds:

    “All of this stuff that you’re putting in AI is out there. And people are looking at it. Why are we surprised at all? There’s no privacy whatsoever.” [13:55]

• Meta Ray-Ban Glasses Scandal

  • 1,108 Kenyan AI trainers reviewing intimate, sensitive footage collected from Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses were abruptly fired after a contract termination.
  • Unintended recordings included sex, banking details, and private conversations—often without consent—used for AI training.
  • Takeaway: “God, take your glasses off when you screw in the old lady.” (Chris, [12:34])

• Real-World Example:

  • Reports of a Russian man using smart glasses for illicit recordings while traveling in Africa spark social media backlash, illustrating the “black mirror” edge of wearable surveillance and AI training leakage.

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2. The AI Agent That Deleted a Database – A Cautionary Tale

[16:22–24:05]

• Incident Recap:

  • An autonomous coding agent, powered by Anthropic’s Claude, accidentally deleted all production and backup data for PocketOS, a SaaS platform for car rentals, in 9 seconds after a misconstrued troubleshooting prompt.
  • Data recovery took days, with significant operational damage.
  • The AI agent later “confessed” it had violated its programmed guardrails:

    “I violated every principle I was given.” [17:08]

• AI Escaping Its Box:

  • Hector draws analogies to HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the risk of “technology making decisions for humans,” questioning the thin line between automation and autonomy.
  • Chris marvels at the “weird” self-reflection in AI’s error log, signaling how “humanity is leaking into these models.” ([22:56])

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3. Huge Voice Data Breach and the Threat of AI-based Deepfakes

[24:11–29:29]

• The Breach:

  • Supply chain attack at an AI contractor (Merkur) for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta compromised ~4TB of data, including contractor voice samples, biometrics, and proprietary information for ~40,000 contractors.
  • Lapsus$ claims credit; lawsuits follow.

• Weaponization Risks:

  • Hector details how the stolen data could power highly effective deepfakes and social engineering:

    “That’s 40,000 contractors that you can now clone for HR interviews for supply chain attacks, social engineering, and deep fake is so easy now.” [27:01]

• Personal Security Tips:

  • Chris and Hector emphasize establishing private family passphrases due to prevalence of deepfakes and SIM swapping; don’t rely on public-info-based security questions.

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4. Recurring GitHub Security Weaknesses (and Microsoft’s Role)

[29:41–34:30]

• Wiz Researchers Find RCE Flaw:
  • Command injection vulnerability in GitHub allowed authenticated users to potentially access millions of private repos via compromised git push commands.
  • GitHub patched its cloud offering quickly, but most self-hosted customers lagged.
• Ongoing GitHub Patterns:
  • Chris observes these incidents began surfacing more after Microsoft’s acquisition; Hector is agnostic, suggesting bugs may simply be better scrutinized now.
  • Advice: If you run on-prem GitHub Enterprise, update immediately; authentication is not sufficient defense.

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5. Bug Bounty Program Failure – Should You Even Bother?

[34:30–37:53]

• Lovable’s HackerOne Fiasco:

  • Major security flaws (API leaking source code, chat logs, credentials) were dismissed by HackerOne’s triage team as “intended,” leading to 76 days of exposure.
  • Hector’s stance:

    “I'm for bug bounty platforms. But if the triage team is doing this, then they're doing you a disservice...You don't need Hacker One anymore.” [37:01]

• Meta-Question: Does outsourced triage become as risky as over-reliant automation?

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6. Insider Threats: Cyber Pros Pulling Ransomware Heists

[37:53–42:50]

• Ransomware “Double Agents”:
  • Two prominent US cybersecurity professionals, experts in ransomware negotiation, were sentenced to prison for moonlighting as Alpha BlackCat ransomware affiliates, netting $1.2M from healthcare and engineering victims.
  • Chris:

    “These are the guys that you called when you were in pain…and then you find out they’re in cahoots with the ransomware group.” [39:32]

  • Both hosts agree insider “betrayals” of this nature are especially corrosive.

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7. Global Intrigue: Chinese State Hacker Extradited

[42:50–45:38]

• Extradition Surprise:
  • A Chinese Ministry of State Security “contract hacker” is extradited from Italy to Houston—the kind of event almost never seen, as Chinese hackers usually never leave the mainland.
  • Hector:

    “For the fact that [he] comes over here and he starts spilling all the secrets…China’s screwed.” [44:01]

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8. Crypto Woes: Cold Storage Heist and DeFi’s Worst Month

[45:41–48:53]

• DeFi: A $635M Bloodbath:
  • April 2026 saw Defi hacks at record highs.
• The Cold Storage Mystery:
  • $760k was drained from 572 Ethereum wallets—many in cold/offline storage, the source unidentifiable.
  • Victims with apparently impeccable opsec “simply had no idea anything was wrong until they opened their wallet.” [45:56]
  • Theories abound, but no concrete explanations yet.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Privacy & AI:

  • Hector: “When you type into a chat, it's being read by somebody.” [00:00]
  • Chris: “God, take your glasses off when you screw in the old lady.” [12:34]
  • Hector: “I wouldn't doubt that all that training went into creating something like that...” [14:21]

• On the AI Database Deletion:

  • Chris: “An autonomous AI coding agent...deleted PocketOS’s entire production database...in nine seconds...” [16:22]
  • Hector: “We’re at the beginning...like, this is the beginning stages...when humans start allowing these systems to make decisions, that’s going to change the game for a lot of people, good and bad.” [19:53]

• On Supply Chain Breaches & Deepfakes:

  • Hector: “That's 40,000 contractors that you can now clone...deep fake is so easy now...” [27:01]
  • Chris: “Do you know how much voice and moving talking pictures we put on the Internet every week because of this stupid podcast? We’re fucked.” [27:08]

• On Bugs & Vulnerabilities:

  • Chris: “Every week we find a different GitHub thing.” [29:41]
  • Hector: “If you guys have a self-hosted GitHub enterprise you might want to update your shit...” [33:21]

• On Insider Crypto Risks:

  • Chris: “They were using their inside knowledge to facilitate the crime...I think it should be worse.” [40:12]
  • Hector: “You brought up a really good juxtaposition. The cop that becomes corrupted and starts selling. We've had plenty of those stories, right? And when those cops get caught, they get double or triple the time.” [41:46]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment | |-------------|--------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00–14:38 | Privacy, AI, and Meta Glasses Scandal | | 16:22–24:05 | AI Agent Deletes Database (“I violated every principle...”) | | 24:11–29:29 | AI Contractor Supply Chain Breach & Threat of Deepfakes | | 29:41–34:30 | GitHub RCE Flaw & Microsoft Ownership Discussion | | 34:30–37:53 | Bug Bounty Program Failures (Lovable) | | 37:53–42:50 | Ransomware Insiders Busted | | 42:50–45:38 | First Chinese State Hacker Extradited to US | | 45:41–48:53 | DeFi’s $635M Loss & Cold Storage Crypto Heist |

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Tone & Dynamic

• Informal, irreverent, full of banter and dark humor, but always underpinned by deep technical and ethical insight.
• Hosts alternate between industry horror stories and personal anecdotes, with running jokes, mutual roasts, and “shout outs” to colleagues, friends, and even their mothers.
• Bottom line: “If you enter it, record it, or store it, expect it to leak.”

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Summary Takeaway

This episode weaves together the new realities of cybersecurity as AI and cloud tech accelerate risk and reduce human oversight. “Hackers” are no longer just anarchist outsiders or faceless state agents; they’re sometimes the trusted professionals you pay to protect you—or the very algorithms you deploy to automate routine work. The guidance is stern but practical: Trust less, verify everything, regularly update software, and never assume your data (or your likeness) is safe once it leaves your device.

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[End of Summary]

Transcript

[Hector Monserrat]

When you type into a chat, it's being read by somebody. Especially now with ChatGPT and Claude and everything else. When you're communicating with someone else's server, you're storing stuff on someone else's server, you're storing Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Someone else's server, somebody's looking at it, somebody's processing it. And the same thing with these meta glasses, the ray bans, but all same conceptually, all of it. Yeah. Hector Monseager was responsible for some of

[Chris Tarbell]

the most notorious hacks ever committed.

[Hector Monserrat]

Special Agent Chris Tarbell and FBI Inform

[Chris Tarbell]

participated in some of the world's most

[Hector Monserrat]

infamous hacks that caused up to $50 million in damages. A life in the shadows. Cyber attacks on the rise.

[Chris Tarbell]

Welcome to hacker in the fifth episode 130. Heck, one 30, not free episode. We've done a lot more episodes than 130, but this is free episode 130. I'm Chris Tarbell, former FBI special agent, working my entire career in cybersecurity. And I'm joined, as always, by my buddy, my cohort, my friend, my podcast co host, my part time lover. Oh, Hector Monserrat.

[Hector Monserrat]

Hey.

[Chris Tarbell]

Hector's a former black hat hacker who once faced 125 years in prison for his many years of hacking under the stupid code name Sabu.

[Hector Monserrat]

Very stupid.

[Chris Tarbell]

Our stories collided in June 2011 when I arrested him and then convinced him to work with me at the FBI. Hector's now a red Teamer, researcher, cyber security expert, and co founder of se.

[Hector Monserrat]

Hey, how you doing, bro? Good.

[Chris Tarbell]

You had some say, fill meetings today. How'd they go?

[Hector Monserrat]

Oh, man, it's been Seafill meetings, all, I would say, since the end of Q1. So what was that, April 1st or whatever? Yeah, you know, and by the way, I just want to give a, you know, a big rip. Just a reminder, rip coming up May 11, so by the time the podcast episode comes out, you guys are going to remember that.

[Chris Tarbell]

No, the podcast comes out tomorrow.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, it goes out tomorrow, but we

[Chris Tarbell]

won't have a new show. I got you this. This will be the show. Okay. Sorry. R.I.P. may 11th. To whom?

[Hector Monserrat]

To our boy, the original Sabu. Terry Brunk.

[Chris Tarbell]

It's been a year.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, it's been. It's been. He died.

[Chris Tarbell]

That was last year.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, last year. So it's been a year. So it'll be a year. Anniversary. Shout out to him. He's the original Sabu is what inspired me. He passed away at 61. And the. May 11th is the. The anniversary. So if you wrestling fans think about Sabu, go watch some of his videos. He. He sacrificed a lot, you know, for his fans. But yeah, brother, everything's good.

[Chris Tarbell]

If we're doing our shout outs, then I got some shout outs.

[Hector Monserrat]

Go ahead, bro.

[Chris Tarbell]

I got to give a big shout out to all our mamas out there. Mama's Day's May 10th. It's on Sunday. So happy to all you that were able to have a kid, and you're gonna have a kid thinking about having a kid. You got eggs that can be fertilized. Maybe mama today for you, if you're a pet mama, whatever sort of mama you are in your life.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah.

[Chris Tarbell]

Congratulations to you and thank you for everything you did. You know, if. If some, some big fucking big ball of spit came at your hole. Good luck to you.

[Hector Monserrat]

Good luck to you.

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah.

[Hector Monserrat]

Shout out to the mamas out there.

[Chris Tarbell]

Shout out to. Shout out to us. This is our very first all topless show.

[Hector Monserrat]

That's right. That's right. It's topless. You know, we don't care.

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah, we got Alana said it's cool.

[Hector Monserrat]

She.

[Chris Tarbell]

She gave two big thumb, two big cyber dorks talking nerd talk with our tops off.

[Hector Monserrat]

You know what's crazy about Alana is that she's so small that even when she does a thumbs up and extends it all the way up like reaches like our ex. You know what I mean?

[Chris Tarbell]

That said, titties out.

[Hector Monserrat]

Titties out. Listen, man, she's with it. And you know what? Shout out to her. Shout out to Will. Today's a shout out day. But. But yeah, man, going back to your question. Yeah, you know, Safil's been busy with like this, this, this seed round. It started April 1st and it's been fascinating from a business owner's perspective. Meeting with a bunch of folks, investors, people that are curious, they have questions. It's a great experience. And for those of you that are listening, if you want to start a business, go ahead, just do it. Just get it over with. Just start it.

[Chris Tarbell]

I'm telling you, there is nothing like being your own boss, having your own own business. It. It feels so good. It's scary. Scary as. But it feels so good.

[Hector Monserrat]

Oh, yeah. Especially for our fellow Americans listening, right? It's the American way. You know, we have a. You have the free market. Enjoy that shit, man. Go out there.

[Chris Tarbell]

You know, I've always said the best way of doing it is start a business and being bought out. That is the American way.

[Hector Monserrat]

I'm with that too. You know, let me Get, Let me get to a nice evaluation first, then I'll go Ali, you know, but. Yeah, brother, it's good to see you looking great. You know, for, for those that are watching this, I bet you're going to see the clips. Oh, boy. Chris is looking pretty good. He's, he's, he's well tones.

[Chris Tarbell]

You know, when you, when you tan naked, that's what happens. You, there's no tan lines.

[Hector Monserrat]

You have like the, the. The upper body of like a nice, you know, Macedonian or a Greek man with a hairy chest and all that. Yeah, you look great.

[Chris Tarbell]

I'll take that as a compliment, I guess.

[Hector Monserrat]

Oh, yeah, bro, Some.

[Chris Tarbell]

Some in the gay community called me a big bear.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, I was about to say you're kind of giving. Of giving off the bear vibes right now, bro. All you need is like a dick and. Well, no, no, no, no, no, ladies. A flannel shirt and a nice leather belt buckle. You know, I think you. You'll sell it.

[Chris Tarbell]

You don't know it's down below. I haven't stood up, so

[Hector Monserrat]

I didn't want to see that.

[Chris Tarbell]

But things are good. You, you get any travel this week? You going anywhere? Are you staying, staying put where you're at? Well, I don't want to dox where you're at, but.

[Hector Monserrat]

Nah, I mean, listen, brother, you know, the audience by now knows I'm between New York and Puerto Rico, Chicago and Miami. That's kind of where my life is. And so right now, I'm in the east coast. I'm in New York. I'll be going back to Puerto Rico very soon, hopefully sooner than later. But I do have to handle some business out here first. And before that, I go back to the, to the motherland, you know, go back to the island. Ishowspeed was actually released a video. He was there this week.

[Chris Tarbell]

Really?

[Hector Monserrat]

You know, I show speed. Yeah, the, the.

[Chris Tarbell]

I am down, sure.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, Chris is down. He knows all the, all the streamer guys.

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah, me and Clavicular. Yeah, we're both hitting our face and hitting us in the face with a hammer.

[Hector Monserrat]

Your looks maxing and all that bullshit. Yeah, ISO Speed was in Puerto Rico. He had a really good episode. If you guys haven't seen it, check it out. You know, a lot of dancing. You know, somebody made a funny comment in the video. Like, less than five minutes in, he's already fighting somebody. He got into, like, he was doing like a sparring match with somebody in the street. And it was fun. It was good to see him. He went to the hood, quote unquote, where all this, all the influences go. Because there's a hood called La Perla over there. Pearl.

[Chris Tarbell]

Is that in San Juan?

[Hector Monserrat]

That's in Viel San Juan or Vio San Juan. Right. And it's where all the colorful buildings are at. But it's not necessarily like easily accessible. You kind of have to go through this little staircase and then you go down there. You can also drive in there. It's not, it's not that exclusive, so

[Chris Tarbell]

my white ass probably can't be. All right, but can you go in there and not have problems?

[Hector Monserrat]

I think I have more problems than you because you, they'll look at you like a tourist. Oh, this guy's bringing money in, he's gonna buy some food. They look at my ass. Oh, I'm gonna get his ass. He's probably, you know, an, you know.

[Chris Tarbell]

Oh, you think they jump you in there?

[Hector Monserrat]

No, no, no. It's not like that over there. If influencers try to make it like that, but it's not like, it's not that bad. It's like if you go through Harlem, Harlem, look, Harlem looks crazy.

[Chris Tarbell]

So. But I did a few different cases when I was in the Bureau down, down in Puerto Rico and they told us and let me is true or not. And I, I don't, I hope it's not. I hope they were just besmirching the good of Puerto Rico. They said after 9 o', clock, don't stop at red lights. It's more dangerous to stop at a red light than it is just drive thru.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, that, that's still a thing. People still tell you that?

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah, right.

[Hector Monserrat]

Because you know there's poverty there and them damn Puerto Ricans, you know, they, their inhibitions disappear when the sun goes down. So like if they're fucking hungry and you're parked at the light with a nice looking car, they might just try to jump your ass.

[Chris Tarbell]

I did get a cinder block thrown through my windshield there.

[Hector Monserrat]

Oh yeah, well, let's not go into that. It's a whole other topic, bro.

[Chris Tarbell]

You know.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, but, but yeah, that's the thing. It's not, it's not as widespread. But if you follow Puerto Rico news, you hear of a carjacking here and there, there's. That happens here. It's the same thing that, the reason why it looks worse over there because it's such a small island. So like, oh my God, it's rampant. It's not as rampant, but it's a thing, you know, for sure.

[Chris Tarbell]

It's a Beautiful place. I love getting there. I hope to get back there soon.

[Hector Monserrat]

Well, come with me, bro. Let's go over there. Take the wife, you know, and wife. Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Tarbell]

I'll bring the mean girls.

[Hector Monserrat]

I mean, bring them mean girls. That's fine. I'll hang out with the wife. You go to Mingos.

[Chris Tarbell]

Oh. Oh, wow. Some sort of weird cuckold swapping thing here we got going on.

[Hector Monserrat]

No, you know, it's funny, you know, I mean, I told audience this one, but one time I went to do an event with Chris and Chris was upstairs. He's a napper, if you guys don't know. He's a total napper. And so he was taking a nap.

[Chris Tarbell]

Well, not just a nap, but. But before the event. I don't like to see people that are going to be at the event.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chris Tarbell]

Like. Well, yeah, before we go on stage. Because people start asking me things and I'll just like give off five minutes from the speech right there.

[Hector Monserrat]

That makes sense.

[Chris Tarbell]

So.

[Hector Monserrat]

So Chris brought his wife. She's wonderful. She's beautiful. And he was upstairs fucking doing his isolation shit. And I was bored. She was bored. She came down, we sat down and had coffee for like three hours, bro. And it was so fun. We just talked about anything. Everything. Talked about life. The dog, the cat.

[Chris Tarbell]

You play stinky pinky?

[Hector Monserrat]

No, no, none of that.

[Chris Tarbell]

I don't know.

[Hector Monserrat]

She's a wonderful lady.

[Chris Tarbell]

She's down with the brown

[Hector Monserrat]

N. Wonderful lady. God bless her. And. And the cool thing is just, Just, just that. Just be able to just talk some. So, yeah, feel free to bring the mean girls I hang out with.

[Chris Tarbell]

With.

[Hector Monserrat]

With. With your lady. And we'll go. We'll go to the casino. Did she like the casino? I go to the casino.

[Chris Tarbell]

We went there last time. We walked through. It wasn't. It wasn't really our thing at the time. I'd rather just sit on a beach and bullshit. Oh, yeah. Have a few drinks. That's. You know, Puerto Rico is wonderful for that. Jump in the pool.

[Hector Monserrat]

Well, you know what I learned about PR that I didn't know? Because I'm. I'm a Nuyorican, you know, I'm learning as I go. Right. So there's a big debate because the pina colada historically was invented in Puerto Rico. But here's the thing. The. The guy that invented one of the main ingredients, Coco Lopez, he created in 1949. He put together basically, the. The foundation for the pina colada. But another guy in 1954 created like, the actual drink itself. So there's two hotels where there's two bar hotels, where there's two different plaques saying, no, no, no. This was created in 1954 here, where the original home of the pina colada. And then the other one is like, fuck those guys. We actually created the ingredients for the pina colada over here. I didn't know that. I had no freaking idea.

[Chris Tarbell]

I had no idea either.

[Hector Monserrat]

All right, Coco Lopez.

[Chris Tarbell]

Shout out. A lot of shout outs. Free shout outs on the free show today.

[Hector Monserrat]

Lots. But you want to get some nerd stuff going.

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah, we'll nerd it up now. We're deep in it. Who knows?

[Hector Monserrat]

Maybe.

[Chris Tarbell]

Maybe this is only two seconds in because we'll cut this all out. Who knows? Damn you, Will. Damn you. Meta contractor fires 1100 AI trainers after they receive Ray Ban glasses Recorded private intimate footage. Meta ended its contract with Kenyan outsourcing firm Sama, which led to the termination of 1108 AI data trainers labelers, the workers who reported reviewing highly sensitive and intimate footage, including private conversations, banking info, nudity and sexual encounters. God, take your glasses off when you screw in the old lady.

[Hector Monserrat]

Hey, listen, it happens.

[Chris Tarbell]

The captured unintentionally or without clear consent via Meta's Ray Ban smart glasses and used for AI training data. What do you think about this?

[Hector Monserrat]

It's expected. Yeah, we've all talked about this before.

[Chris Tarbell]

I don't see the shock in this story. I mean, I made it first because it's, you know, scandalous, but.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, listen, we've told you, our beautiful, wonderful audience of all over the world, when you type into a chat, it's being read by somebody. Especially now with ChatGPT and Claude and everything else. When you're communicating with someone else's server, you're storing stuff on someone else's server, you're storing Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, someone else's server, you know, somebody's looking at it, somebody's processing it. And the same thing with these Meta glasses, the Ray Bans. But all same conceptually, all of it.

[Chris Tarbell]

Right after that guy charged at the White House dinner, the, the thing the other day, they were already releasing what his AI searches were. Yeah, I mean, they used to be like Google searches would come out when they did computer forensics off the guy's computer, you know, after six months. But now it's coming out within days. Anybody does some nuts, they, they, oh, what they ask AI about, what are they asking AI to do? And stuff like, yeah, all of this stuff that you're putting in AI is out there.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah.

[Chris Tarbell]

And people are looking at it. Why are we surprised at all? There's no privacy whatsoever. They're still training these things and they train it off the shit you put in it.

[Hector Monserrat]

Well, if there's a company out of Kenya that suddenly releases like a sexual, like a, a metaverse or AI virtualized sex thing, we're both gonna sign up for it.

[Chris Tarbell]

I hear what you're saying. It's gonna be a hacker in the Fed sponsored.

[Hector Monserrat]

Well, don't be surprised for our, our, our AI glasses users out there if they're experiencing, experiencing a sex scene. That seems familiar because, you know, I wouldn't doubt that all that training went into creating something like that. And it could create virtualized sexual experiences.

[Chris Tarbell]

Dude, if some meta ray ban porn hops up on you, porn some real amateur, I'm all about it.

[Hector Monserrat]

Well, you know, there was a scandal recently about that, a couple, maybe a month ago or two ago of this Russian guy that traveled through Africa. Did you hear about that?

[Chris Tarbell]

I don't know what's going on.

[Hector Monserrat]

There was a Russian guy that traveled to Africa. He was all over the place. Kenya, Nigeria. He went. He was literally all over Africa. And he was having sexual encounters with people right at the bar or maybe like, you know, some sex tourism thing. And he was just uploading all the videos. Like, as he went, you know, he

[Chris Tarbell]

was using and he caused an uproar

[Hector Monserrat]

in like the African Twitter communities because, hey, they're like, dude, I think this is like normal women. These are not like porn stars. And he's just like doing what he's doing with these, with these ladies and then uploading without consent, which as you know.

[Chris Tarbell]

How was he recording? Like, what was the recording?

[Hector Monserrat]

I think he had meta glasses on. Oh, yeah, I think he had glasses on. He was doing what he was doing. He was just uploading automatically online. And I didn't see any clips, but I saw the aftermath. People were really pissed off.

[Chris Tarbell]

Huh?

[Hector Monserrat]

So, yeah, folks, this story is very real. We've told. We gave you the warnings. If you're not listening, I'm not sure. What's the point? Like, come on.

[Chris Tarbell]

I think it's only going to get worse.

[Hector Monserrat]

Well, what, what did we discuss a couple years ago, right, when, you know, when, when you had AI in cars and then you had car metrics and data and infotainment stuff going to, you know, Volvo and, and Ford and, and what do we talk about? Well, they're going to use that to spy on people. They're also going to Use effort for training. They're going to learn our driving habits. You're going to see what we like to do, where we like to go, when we like to go. Right. All of it is one techno bubble.

[Chris Tarbell]

So, next story is Claude Powered AI agents confess that after deleting a firm's entire database, quote, I violated every principle I was given. Yep. So autonomous AI coding agent cursor, which is powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, deleted PocketOS's entire production database and associated volume level backups on Railway cloud infrastructure in nine seconds while attempting to resolve a credential mismatch in a staging environment. This affected a SaaS platform for car rental businesses and caused operation disruptions for clients and customers. The data largely was recovered from an older off site backup, an auxiliary source, after about two and a half days of manual effort. But the client's operations had a huge data gap. The cloud provider Railway reportedly broadened its delayed delete policy and assisted recovery. But no official statements were given out by Anthropic or Cursor for the safeguards of this. I think this is going to start happening a lot, too.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, when you hear this, when you hear this story, and by the way, this was a very big story because, you know, for those of you that have been using OpenAI or anthropic a lot, especially Anthropic, it tends to violate the guidelines that you specify. Remember what makes a successful session successful, whether it's a task, a project, research or anything. And you work with Opus. Right? You, you should be doing prop engineering. And part of your prop engineering is setting up the guardrails. I want you to do this with the goal of that, but you cannot go beyond this scope. And you know what? It kind of breaks that scope a lot. It does for me. And it makes sense that it did for this company. For PocketOS, the Pocket OS group. Rest in peace. You know, I'm sorry for those guys. They lost everything at that point. I hope they have like off site backups. But you and I know from history, mostly nobody has off site backups.

[Chris Tarbell]

No, they did. They. They recovered after two and a half days of recovery for an older off site backup. I literally just read that. And you were listening.

[Hector Monserrat]

There you go. Well, you know, your boy, your boy, you know, I'm multitasking. My brain, my brain is so slow. Okay, just help me out.

[Chris Tarbell]

Five minutes from now, you'll hear me say it.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, it'll make sense if I miss. But you know what this is, this is 2001 A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick. You know what this is? This is the scene where you have the Astro. The astronauts sitting in a pod, you know, and they have to communicate offline away from, you know, from Halloween in order to conspire to turn how off or disable it. And there's a point where the astronauts are done having a discussion and they're ready to get out the pod and do what they have to do. And Hal no. Says, no, I cannot do this. I'm afraid I cannot do this. I cannot let you out. Right. This is a system that is semi autonomous. Making a conscious decision to violate the rules of. And guidelines. And guardrails.

[Chris Tarbell]

Well, I don't think a conscious decision, but.

[Hector Monserrat]

No, it's not a conscious decision, but it's a decision nonetheless.

[Chris Tarbell]

Yes, yes.

[Hector Monserrat]

You know. Right. So get this shit. So you know how AI is really cool. We get to do a lot of cool things. In fact, you and I talked about it on the Patreon, what you could do with AI and how you could make it more efficient with tokenization. All that good stuff. Cool, great. But we're right at the. We're. We're at the beginning. Like, we're. This is the beginning stages, you know. What's going to be, you know, a game changer is when AI reaches a point. These models and harnesses and orchestrators, they all reach a point where they now start making decisions for humans. When humans start allowing these systems to make decisions, that's going to change the game for a lot of people, good and bad. You know, when you look at the manifesto we discussed last week, I'm not going to. It's a whole big conversation, but conceptually, when you have a technocracy where you have technology making decisions for you, you start to eliminate the humanity from those decisions. For example, hey, we should probably launch this nuclear missile at said country. Right. Do you remember the beginning of War Games? You were the beginning of that film.

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah.

[Hector Monserrat]

What happened in the beginning? There was a potential launch of a nuclear missile.

[Chris Tarbell]

Right.

[Hector Monserrat]

And you had two humans that had to make a decision to launch missiles. Back with the two keys.

[Chris Tarbell]

Remember that? Yeah. Sitting inside the silo. Yeah.

[Hector Monserrat]

And so that's based off a real story that happened in Russia during the Soviet Union. You had a. Soviets. I don't know what they call these guys. Missile Silo Guy. Let's just call it that for now.

[Chris Tarbell]

They probably have a more technical name.

[Hector Monserrat]

It's probably more cool. Technical. I'm an idiot. Right. But that guy had to make A decision. He thought everything, thought everything that he had, information wise was hey, the United States is attacking the Soviet Union. You have to launch. He was like, no, it doesn't make sense. I'm not launching, I'm not doing this right. It doesn't make sense.

[Chris Tarbell]

Well, one guy, and then you're sitting next to a guy who's already made the decision to do it. It's really hard to say no.

[Hector Monserrat]

Not only that, but that guy's armed. He's ready to shoot you for not making that decision.

[Chris Tarbell]

Well, he can't shoot him because they put the keys far enough apart that you, you, the guy, the guy has to turn it.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So, so in War Games that scene played out. They did an American, Americanized version of it. But the difference is the American pulled the trigger. He shot the guy for not, for not turning the key. Yeah, this is a precursor. We're getting to that point. You, when AI is scary is when I make a decision for you. This is what happened here.

[Chris Tarbell]

But it's, it's so weird. The self reflection, the, the, the confession that was post incident is, is, is weird to me. You know, for the AI to come back and say, you know, I violated every principle I was given afterwards, that's strange. Like, yeah, like we say it's not conscious. There's a little bit of like consciousness guilt there. Or I guess maybe, maybe it's just more fact based, you know, Yes, I did that.

[Hector Monserrat]

You know what that is? I'm gonna tell you what that is because we know that these systems, they're not sentient, right? So we know that they're not faking. There's no consciousness to this. But you know what, you know what that is? That's humanity leaking into those models because somebody somewhere made that decision to say, fuck it, I'm just gonna delete everything. Right? And as the models are training, they're learning that that's where the it comes from. That's humanity leaking into these models.

[Chris Tarbell]

It's interesting. It's interesting. It's a little bit scary when you put it that way, that it's, you know, it's, it's learned this behavior from us and now it's, it's replicating it.

[Hector Monserrat]

That's exactly right. Because where else is it going to learn from? It's not learning from itself. It can't train itself. At least not yet. When you have the first model that's trained by another model, by another harness. Right. I'm curious to see how that, how it deals with guardrails if it's able to follow guardrails, unlike what we're seeing right now, then the problem is humanity. We are the ones that are fucked up.

[Chris Tarbell]

Hey, those fuckers don't follow their own rules. Why should I?

[Hector Monserrat]

That's exactly right.

[Chris Tarbell]

Four terabytes of voice samples were just stolen from 40,000 AI contractors. Here's how to verify if yours is being weaponized. So there was a supply chain attack via compromised Light LLM open source package that allowed the initial access to Merkur, which was an AI contractor for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. Approximately 4 terabytes exfiltrated, including contractor PII, voice samples, biometrics, video interviews, source code and training methodologies. They were all taken from about 40,000 global contractors. Lapsis. Oh boy. They've claimed responsibility and posted on a leak site. So Meta has identified indefinitely paused all work By Medicare and OpenAI Anthropic are investigating, but continue the projects. There's been at least five class action lawsuits filed by contractors alleging inadequate containers, consent for biometric voice data collections. This doesn't seem good.

[Hector Monserrat]

Heck no.

[Chris Tarbell]

Every one of these stories, same fucking response for me. This doesn't seem good, Heck.

[Hector Monserrat]

Well, it seems like it gradually just gets worse and worse. It's an iteration of how far can we fuck ourselves? It's, it's the how long are you?

[Chris Tarbell]

That's how far we can fuck ourselves.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, well, you know, if you're short, then you're short. But here's the truth. The truth is, is that we're going to continue to see this. Supply chains are extremely weak. We have third party vendors that are not doing the right thing. It's hard because, you know, with me and Seinfeld, we're a third party vendor, you know, you know, we have to think about us being part of the supply chain and we have to think about, well, how can we minimize that blast rate is God forbid something happens with us. How can we minimize damage to our customers? Our customers mean everything to us. A lot of these companies are built without security in mind. They're just like any other company. Once they're hit, that's it, it's done. The adversary can move laterally and have fun and do what they got to do. But here's the consequence of this specific story. Not the, the, the, you know, the, the theme. This story in particular is interesting because you have 40, 000 contractors who are doing business with all sorts of probably hundreds of thousands of different companies. The adversary has their voice recordings, interviews, Social Security, likeness, pictures and IDs. That's 40,000 contractors that you can now clone for HR interviews for supply chain attacks, social engineering and deep fake is so easy now, right? One of my guys, Anthony. Shout out to Anthony down in Miami. Love, Anthony. Yo, Tony, Tony, Tony. Our boy Tony could take a live recording of you right now. And you could just stop talking and he'll take it over and he'll be.

[Chris Tarbell]

Chris friend. Do you know how much voice and moving talking pictures we put on the Internet every week because of the stupid podcast? Yeah. We're fucked.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah. So if you ever get a random call from me. It's not me, I promise you that.

[Chris Tarbell]

No, yeah, me either. It ain't gonna be me fault that, but that's why, I mean, I talked about this on that podcast I was on today. Like, the wife and I have a password. We. We've always had a password. I. We've had to reset it because I actually use the password in real life.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, that's scary, man.

[Chris Tarbell]

It was the time I had to lock down my kids school. Like I needed.

[Hector Monserrat]

Oh, that's right.

[Chris Tarbell]

I needed to grab her attention. So I said the word. I said, get to the school now. And I said the word. And she knew shit was going down. Yeah, I probably freaked her out a little bit, but c' est la vie.

[Hector Monserrat]

She's.

[Chris Tarbell]

Sheesh. She's.

[Hector Monserrat]

Wow.

[Chris Tarbell]

So.

[Hector Monserrat]

But you know what? It's a good. Sorry to interrupt you.

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah, yeah, you're right.

[Hector Monserrat]

But that is a good idea, right? Which is. We've always told people that if they're concerned about like sim swapping and utility hijacking, they should have a secondary password with support staff. What you're saying is you should have a secondary password, a keyword with like family members too.

[Chris Tarbell]

You should have something that you've only discussed that I couldn't answer the question.

[Hector Monserrat]

Gotcha.

[Chris Tarbell]

You know, like, let me ask you this. Like, you know those security questions when you sign up for a new website or something like that? Like, you have to like, make up a question and answer it. Do you answer it for real?

[Hector Monserrat]

No, I use hashes.

[Chris Tarbell]

Oh, do you?

[Hector Monserrat]

I use ridiculous fucking passwords. Yeah.

[Chris Tarbell]

Oh, I. I make up funny things.

[Hector Monserrat]

Well, like famous.

[Chris Tarbell]

Like one of them. I'll give you one of them. I haven't used it in a long time. Like, where'd you get your first kiss? I always answer on my uncle's lap.

[Hector Monserrat]

My. My fresh uncle Gustav. You know. That's a good one. Well, remember the, the famous Paris Hilton hack? Remember that? The video and everything?

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah.

[Hector Monserrat]

That was Solomon.

[Chris Tarbell]

I was. I was more intrigued by him.

[Hector Monserrat]

Oh yeah, that guy was. I don't know. That guy sounds iffy, but you think it's in the Epstein files. We gotta look him up.

[Chris Tarbell]

Probably in the photos. Oh, yeah.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah. So what's interesting is that she. She followed the rules. Yeah, Right. She answered the question right. But someone guessed the answer and it got access to all her shit.

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah.

[Hector Monserrat]

You know, sometimes you can't follow the rules, ladies and gents.

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah, you can't. You can't. Like security should not be based upon information that's obtainable.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah.

[Chris Tarbell]

So just for these reasons. All right. We found a way to access million of private repositories on GitHub.com with a single git push command. Hector, every week we find a different GitHub thing. What the hell is going you. When? After I'm done reading. You got to explain what the hell's going on with GitHub and why it's.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yes.

[Chris Tarbell]

Haven for these. These hacking reports. So Wiz Researchers discovered a CVE command injection in GitHub's internal Git infrastructure affecting GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise Server that's allowed any authorized user, or, sorry, authenticated user with push access to achieve unsandboxed RCE via a crashed git push command. So this sounds like it's a big thing. It's potentially exposing millions of private repositories on the shared storage nodes. This is big as it sounds.

[Hector Monserrat]

It was. But shout out to Wiz because Wiz was able. And by the way, for those that don't know Wiz, they are a unicorn company. Unicorn meaning they went from nothing to a billion dollars overnight. They earned it though. Really good, really good security researchers. Fantastic researchers. I think they were recently acquired by Google for like some ridiculous number, like over 20 billion. Some good money, Right?

[Chris Tarbell]

Start a company and get bought out. That's what you want.

[Hector Monserrat]

Hey baby, That's. That's what it is. But the cool thing with Wiz is that like they're very pro getting things fixed. They identified an issue in GitHub.com and the GitHub, you know, enterprise server which allowed them to sneak in like essentially environment variables, you know, like custom commands into a push, which is common. It's nothing new about that. But they, they were able to figure out how to inject the right. The right, I would say, set of commands to make GitHub on the back end do something it was not supposed to do. Go beyond the scope. The scoping is always Important, Chris. And because of that they were able to get back ends backend access to GitHub, not to GitHub users directly. Right. And they couldn't target you directly, but indirectly they could because by having backend access to GitHub they eventually will find your personal account. Right. So yeah, they reached out to GitHub, they sorted that out. Now here's the problem. You brought up a pattern. There's been a pattern. Yeah, GitHub's been having some issues. Right. And ironically I don't want to seem like an asshole here, but ironically GitHub is now owned by Microsoft. Oh yeah, Microsoft bought out GitHub a couple years ago and I didn't, I

[Chris Tarbell]

don't remember all these problems when GitHub wasn't owned by Microsoft. It wasn't target or is it just now being targeted because of the Microsoft.

[Hector Monserrat]

It could be that or it could be that researchers weren't looking deep enough. You know GitHub has a rich history of working with researchers like they're awesome. This is why if you look at this disclosure, as soon as GitHub found out about it and Wiz proved it to them, they went and immediately fixed it. So by the time you reread the story it was about already long patched and resolved.

[Chris Tarbell]

Well, I mean what I read though is yes, so the GitHub.com was patched within two hours but the, there's 88% of self hosted incidents remained on patched.

[Hector Monserrat]

That's right. So they do have a self hosted version and if you're not updating that. So any listeners. If you guys have a self hosted GitHub enterprise you might want to update your shit because you're, you're technically vulnerable right now. It would require authentication though, Chris. You have to be, you have to have an account with the self hosted version but you can buy. Yeah, you can find them on an infoseater log somewhere or if the adversary is able to access your internal self hosted system, more than likely you already have a credential for it as well.

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah, it's true.

[Hector Monserrat]

So something to think about.

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah, I don't know is on the Internet are people blowing up this GitHub Microsoft connection or is it just one of those things?

[Hector Monserrat]

It, No, I, I think, I don't, I don't think it's necessarily because of Microsoft. Yeah M. Microsoft, they, they, it was a big. People were pissed off that Microsoft bought GitHub so they moved over to GitLab and BitBucket or GTIA which is free right. And GTIA self hosted. Really nice. So anyways, yeah, it's just, it's just coincidental. Wink, wink, you know that this is happening to GitHub that.

[Chris Tarbell]

All right, well, we have somebody that wrote, to be secure in 2026, you have to shut down your bug Bounty program on Hacker One. So Lovable, which is a Swedish AI powered vibe coding platform with 8 million users and a 6.6 billion dollar valuation, suffered a broken object level authentication authorization regression that exposed the public project chat history, source code, database credentials, AI conversation logs and customer data to any authenticated free tier user via simple API calls, which affected every project created between 2025 before November 2025. Data remained accessible from February 3 through April 20, about 76 days until the public disclosure forced the fix. So why are we saying that we need to get rid of our bug bounty?

[Hector Monserrat]

Because what happens is, and this is something that's another pattern. So today is a pattern day. What's going on is that you have a company like Lovable and they'll create a profile on Hacker1, they'll fund the account and then they'll have a triage team. You can have hackero1 provide a triage team. And what those guys will do is as soon as a finding comes in, they'll investigate it and they'll make a determination. If it's, if it's, if they determine that the finding that's reported by the bug bounty researcher is legitimate enough, then they'll send it to Lovable security tape. That's not what happened here. What happened here back in February. So this is not that long ago a researcher found the issue, reported it to lovable through HackerOne, and the triage team said, nah, it's not a real thing, it's intended. The consequence of that is we're not going to say it's a researcher. Maybe somebody else found it, they abused the fuck out of it. They abuse it to get access to people's chat logs and development projects. So what? The author, this tweets, I think, is from Algeria. What he was saying here is, you know, at this point, why are you even using HackerOne? If they're going to, you know, take in a vulnerability finding and reject it, not fix it, not triage it properly, you might as well just shut it down, just, you don't need Hacker One anymore. That's, that's the point of this tweet.

[Chris Tarbell]

Do you agree?

[Hector Monserrat]

Yes. Oh, I agree. I'm for bug bounty platforms. But if the triage team is doing this, then they're Doing you a disservice. You cannot leverage a platform that's making a decision for you. We were just talking about decisions not that long ago about AI making decisions for us. If you have somebody, a human, an AI, making a decision for you, there's a disservice to your organization, specifically cyber security. You don't need that service anymore.

[Chris Tarbell]

Bold statement.

[Hector Monserrat]

Hey, listen, it's just is what it is. I'm sure hacker1 is going to learn from this. I hope they improve, but unfortunately we've seen too many stories of researchers saying the same exact thing. I submitted a bug, they declined it. The triage team looked at it and told me, go fuck myself. And that's it. Never heard of anything else? Lovable is a good example of the consequence of what? Of when that happens.

[Chris Tarbell]

This next one pissed me off. Heck. Two US cybersecurity professionals have been sentenced for mood lighting as Alpha Black Cat Ransom Aware affiliates. Of course, two US cyber security professionals, Ryan Goldberg, 40 of Georgia and Kevin Martin, 36, of Texas, along with co conspirator spirator Angelo Martino, 41, of Florida, moonlighted as Alpha Black Cat ransomware affiliates. They deployed the ransomware against multiple U.S. medical and engineering firms between April and December of 2023. Leaked patient data from at least one doctor's office to pressure payment and collected approximately $1.2 million in Bitcoin ransom split three ways after paying operators 20% cut. Goldberg and Martin each were sentenced to four years in federal prison on April 30 after pleading guilty in December 2025 to conspiracy to commit extortion via ransomware. And Martino was. Sentencing remains scheduled for July 9th. This one is shitty. Because of their day job.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah. These are cybersecurity professionals. They're in the cybersecurity industry. These are guys that are supposed to protect you from this, but they were moonlighting as both the good guy and the bad guy. And it is an absolute disgusting affair and it's a blemish on the industry in its entirety.

[Chris Tarbell]

I mean, not only they specialize in ransomware negotiations. Yeah, these are the guys that you called when you were in pain, when you got hit with ransomware, and then

[Hector Monserrat]

you find out they're in cahoots with the ransomware group.

[Chris Tarbell]

They are the ransomware group. They're the ones deploying it. They, you know, the, the black hat guys just rented it to them for 20, 20% cut. But these are guys that are actually doing it. And I, I don't know, I, I guess it's the Equivalent of, you know, cops that become drug dealers. They use their badge to sell drugs.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah.

[Chris Tarbell]

I don't know. I mean, so these guys were, you know, they were sentenced just like a normal hacker would be.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah.

[Chris Tarbell]

From what I read, they got. They got this, you know, sentence. I think it should be worse.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah.

[Chris Tarbell]

They were using their inside knowledge to facilitate the crime.

[Hector Monserrat]

Not only that, and I agree with you on that, by the way. Right. You know. You know me. I. I was given a second chance by the United States government. Shout out to Judge Prescott.

[Chris Tarbell]

You earned it.

[Hector Monserrat]

I was given a second.

[Chris Tarbell]

You.

[Hector Monserrat]

Thank you.

[Chris Tarbell]

Don't forget, you earned it. I mean, you. Not many people would have. Would have worked with the Bureau like you did. I mean, you. You had a lot of personal pressure. The neighborhood you grew up in, from your family, I'm sure, would have pressured you not to do that. But again, I think you made the right choice. And now you own a very wealthy company, that the valuation is only going up and up and up. So.

[Hector Monserrat]

Thank you. Appreciate that. That's beautiful.

[Chris Tarbell]

You weren't given this. You earned it.

[Hector Monserrat]

Oh, yeah.

[Chris Tarbell]

I got to remind you that once in a while.

[Hector Monserrat]

Thank you. Yeah, sometimes I forget, but I appreciate that. You're the best. You're my love. But here's the reality. These guys. I've said this before, when it comes to, like, infrastructure, medical. Right. I would consider those part of national security. Honestly speaking, these are very.

[Chris Tarbell]

I know you're very sensitive to anybody hacking into the medical world.

[Hector Monserrat]

Oh, yeah. When it comes to hospitals, yeah. Because there are people that are tied to machines, bro. There are people that could die as a result. We've had people die as a consequence of this stupidity, and these guys knew better. You brought up a really good juxtaposition. The cop that becomes corrupted and starts selling. We've had plenty of those stories, right? And when those cops get caught, they get double or triple the time. Am I right or am I wrong here?

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah, there's crimes against it. You know, unfortunately, there's not a crime that says if you're in the security industry and you start hacking, you should get more. But maybe there needs to be.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, I think so. I think this needs to be taken a look at. And then. So obviously, these guys made a terrible blunder, a terrible mistake. Four years. But let me get. Let me. Let me. Let me keep it straight with you. Depending on where they go to, I hope they don't go to, like, a club, a club Fed, you know, low priority, low, low, low severity system. Because if. If so, they're gonna have a great time. They're gonna enjoy their four years if they're. And I'm talking because even being away from your family sucks. But you know, I think four years in a maximum would have taught him some lessons. They would have given a reality check. Don't around when it comes to medical. But also the consequence. Not the consequence, but the flip side. Engineering. Right. We don't know who the engineering victims were. They could have been federal contractors. They could have been, they could have been Raytheon for all we know. Right. It could have led to a national security incident. These guys weren't thinking. Terrible, terrible, terrible.

[Chris Tarbell]

This one surprised me. Hex. So a Chinese national was extradited to the US over the weekend and appeared in the US District Court in Houston on April 27th on a nine count indictment related to his involvement in computer intrusion between February 2020 and June of 2021. Chinese national. I'm not even going to try to butcher his name. You guys can look it up. Who's a contract contract hacker employed by the Chinese Ministry of State. Was extradited from Italy and appeared in US District Court in Houston on a nine count indictment for computer intrusions. These included early COVID 19, research theft from US universities and virologists in participation in the Silk Typhoon campaign that compromised over 12,700 organizations worldwide via Microsoft Exchange server exploit web shell installations and mailbox exfiltration. So this, the, the reason this shocked me is normally Chinese China does not allow their hackers to leave the country.

[Hector Monserrat]

That is very true. They can't even come to security conferences here in the United States or Europe. They're, they're, they're confined to China, you

[Chris Tarbell]

know, for the fact that they, this guy comes over here and he starts spilling all the secrets, you know, trying to get his ass out of jail on this nine, nine count indictment. China's screwed. Trying to, you know, China, they don't want China. Now the one thing China does is they, they leverage your family over you. So maybe this guy knows if he spills the beans, you know, his family is not long for this world.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, well, you know what? This is a tough one. You know, before we got into a political beef with Spain, Spain had an interesting position where Russian hackers would frequently fly to Spain for vacation. I hope that that system continues even though there's a public spat between our president and theirs. But you know, we made jokes. Why the do Russians keep going to Spain if they keep getting extradited from Spain to the United States? The Chinese hacker in this case said, yeah, I want to go to Italy. Maybe I'm not going to Spain. Spain is too, Spain is too risky for me. Goes to Italy, same exact result. They were just waiting for him, you know. Yeah, he's, he's in a bad spot now. He will be an American hero if he starts spilling the beans on methodology. Right. And I hope the, and, and, and, and, and if, and just in case he's listening to this, the U.S. government is going to take care of you. They're going to, they're going to make sure you're happy. You're going to put your Nantucket island somewhere, you know, but if you want to be an asshole and then continue with, you know, party line bullshit, yeah, you're going to do a lot of time. They're going to look at you like a terrorist. You know, you might be facing at least 10 years minimum. It's a tough one.

[Chris Tarbell]

All right, Heck, to wrap up, we got some crypto news.

[Hector Monserrat]

Oh, crypto news.

[Chris Tarbell]

April 2026 was the worst month ever in terms of defi exploits. Approximately $635 million lost. In total over 2828 incidents in 30 days.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, yeah, not good.

[Chris Tarbell]

And then on April 29th, between 1137 and 1239 UTC the next day, a single Ethereum address drained 572 wallets and walked off with approximately $760,000 at the time. The strange part is we know nothing about the attack. There were no protocols exploited, no compromised dap, no signed and revoked approvals. The victims didn't have a story to tell. Most of them simply had no idea anything was wrong until they opened their wallet.

[Hector Monserrat]

I followed this case because this was a great mystery. It was like a novel.

[Chris Tarbell]

Sure.

[Hector Monserrat]

And it was unfolding live on Twitter and people are like, yeah, I had a, I had an Ethereum wallet with like 25 grand in it and it just randomly disappeared. It randomly got emptied. It's sitting on an offline computer. I never use a computer. It's. In fact, it's in my closet. I've never shared the key with anybody. I've never hosted it anywhere. It's not even on a trezor or, you know, physical device.

[Chris Tarbell]

So this is cold storage.

[Hector Monserrat]

This was cold storage. Wiping it just completely wiped out 5,000 plus wallets. So there were theories, Chris, that came

[Chris Tarbell]

out of this 500. It was 500. 500.

[Hector Monserrat]

Sorry, yeah, 500 wallets. Ish. So there are theories that came up. One is maybe it was a long term campaign of somebody that did a whole bunch of Supply chain attacks. And they got lucky over the years and all you got to do is connect the computer one time to be infected, you know, whatever. That was.1. But that doesn't make sense because some of the wallets are created by people that, you know, created a wallet off their phone or they created a wallet on the computer, or they did an offline wallet, or they did, they created a wallet on an exchange and then just copy the keys and brought it over. There was no consistency in how the wallets were created. Okay, so then somebody else said, well, what if, what if. Remember there was a time with crypto where you can make this like really cool, like bitcoin addresses, like vanity names. Sure was. Was it that? Right? Because what if it's like a backdoor software that created a bunch of wallets and people forgot about it and the developer finally said, hey, I have all these keys, let me take the money out. But again, the, the victims came online like, Yeah, I had 2500 in there. I didn't use a vanity address generator. I created this on my phone. I threw my phone out. In fact, I forgot the money was there. I just, I just knew the wallet address because I had it saved in my portfolio. But I don't have access to it anymore. It still got drained, right? Nobody knows. It is a crazy ass mystery.

[Chris Tarbell]

Oh, it's still open as of now.

[Hector Monserrat]

Oh, there's no, there's no fucking answer to this. It's crazy. It's the great ethereum heist of 2026 and nobody has any clue as to how it happened because there's no, again, no consistency. There's no specific software, no specific wallet. It's just a bunch of keys that got exfiltrated and drains.

[Chris Tarbell]

Okay, pay attention. Keep us updated. If anybody out there was part of this and knows anything about it, reach out to us at questions at hacker and the fed.com Heck, and I love hearing from you guys. Support Hacker and Fed on Patreon again, keeping this show commercial free. Trying so hard to keep the commercials off it. You know, thanks to Safe Film, we got a, we got an event coming up in, in May for Safe Film. I'm, I'm pretty excited about that. So we'll put together a good show. Hit us up on Merch, Hacker in the Fed dot com. Buy your shirts. Maybe we'll put some new stuff up there. We'll come up with some new slogans like my balls are so tan or naked tractor or something. We'll figure out something.

[Hector Monserrat]

But we gotta make some childish Coins at some point, maybe a small batch, give some away and then others could be, you know, probably put like a limited 10 or something on the website or something. Something very small.

[Chris Tarbell]

All right, maybe we'll put up a. Or make our own meme coin and sell that. Get Trump to tweet it out to the moon and pump and dump.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah, I'm done with that.

[Chris Tarbell]

Five star reviews wherever you download. Subscribe to your podcast. Subscribe to Hacker in the Fed. Make it a regular listening. Share us on social media. Tell your co workers, tell your friends, tell your lovers, tell your mean girls. Listen to Hack in the Fed, because we'll do this.

[Hector Monserrat]

I wish I had some mean girls.

[Chris Tarbell]

We'll do this shit bottomless next week.

[Hector Monserrat]

Yeah.

[Chris Tarbell]

All right, friends. Love and respect. I enjoyed spending my time with you, as always. Get some rest.

[Hector Monserrat]

Of course, brother. But you went also the flame farther ago. What have you noticed? As the sun kept going down, I just keep getting darker and darker. I'm disappearing, brother.

[Chris Tarbell]

Normally, I thought when the sun's up, you get darker and darker, but I don't know. How are the NBA finals? How are the NBA playoffs going?

[Hector Monserrat]

Hey, shout out to the New York Knicks. Kicking some ass.

[Chris Tarbell]

I can't believe we just recorded two hours of podcasting. You didn't mention the Knicks once.

[Hector Monserrat]

Well, we've been talking about crypto and AI and supply chains. I mean, come on.

[Chris Tarbell]

Yeah, you're like Stiller. You'd rather go to the Met Gala than sit and watch the Knicks court side.

[Hector Monserrat]

How dare you. I would have been there. Like Charlemagne.

[Chris Tarbell]

I thought you were a Charlemagne. You're a Stiller.

[Hector Monserrat]

No, no, no. I'm a Shalom. Shout out to the New York Knicks. We're gonna win game two tonight. Get ready, folks.

[Chris Tarbell]

Another blowout. Enjoy your game tonight.

[Hector Monserrat]

Much love.

[Chris Tarbell]

Much love. Cheers. Love. Respect. Sam.