Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign.
B (0:04)
And welcome to Risky Business. My name is Patrick Gray. This week's show is brought to you by Tines, which of course makes the automation platform that you all know and love. And Tynes's very own Matt Muller will be joining me in this week's sponsor interview to talk a little bit about how Tynes customers are using AI. So they introduced like a, like an AI automation block into TINE some time ago and now they've just dropped a whole bunch of pre canned, I guess, flows that, that people can just use so they don't have to write their own prompts and whatnot. And that's turning out to be pretty popular. So yeah, we sort of have a chat about how people are, you know, what people are automating using Tines. There's a lot of use cases in the SoC. Even times are getting into alert triage, which is just an AI thing now, but they're obviously doing a lot more because of the generic nature of Times. It's an interesting chat and it's coming up after the news, which starts now. So joining me now is Adam Boileau and mates. Last week we spoke about this guy who worked for L3 Transient, which of course develops exploits and sells them off to, you know, five eyes agencies in five Eyes countries. And yeah, so the story was this guy got fired. Then it turned out later he got some notification that people were trying to hack him. And you know, this was a story by lorenzo over at TechCrunch and we were thinking, well, you know, the case he's obviously trying to make here is that, you know, he was fired for leaking exploits. Well, he didn't leak the exploits. Someone was hacking the developers who worked at that company and stealing them. The story got a whole lot more interesting pretty much the day that we, that we had that discussion after we published on social media, there were some screenshots of some court documents showing that a staff member at Transient, the general manager, in fact, had been arrested for selling, stealing and selling quote, unquote, trade secrets from Transient. Presumably the company isn't named in the actual criminal complaints, but stealing trade secrets and selling them to a buyer in Russia, which, that's a bit of a development in the story.
A (2:13)
Yeah, yeah, certainly is. Like, and you know, trade secrets, when you're a company that makes exploits, you know, you can kind of join the dots. The there. But yeah, the, the guy in question was in the story we talked about last week, the boss who had delivered the message to the dude that got fired is in fact this guy who's you know, now, you know, been indicted with all sorts of, you know, things that look pretty damn shady. So, yeah, it's a bit of a turnaround and quite a mess.
B (2:42)
Yeah. And there's some stuff that hasn't been reported so far as well, which we'll get into in a minute. I mean, the first thing I want to start off with is, you know, everyone's innocent until proven guilty. There is going to be a plea agreement hearing, I believe, tomorrow. So that's Wednesday US time, Thursday our time. So, you know, it's just unfortunate we have to record this, like, 24 hours before we're going to know more details about what's going to happen. I do find it interesting that he's being charged with trade secret charges as opposed to espionage. And it's my. It's my feeling that because these exploits being developed by Trenchant are not government documents, it's not national defence information. I suspect that making an espionage case would actually be quite difficult, or it could just be the case that this guy is cooperating. Now, I can tell you that because this guy is Australian, and, you know, Trenchant has its roots in the merger of, you know, a couple of Australian companies into. Into L3 Harris Trenchant, that the grapevine here has been chatty, shall we say. Right. So, you know, I can share a few things that I've learned about what's going on with this guy. So, you know, Peter Williams, what is he, 39 or whatever? I think was. It was the age I've seen publicly reported. Has a wife and kids. This is the part that hasn't been reported yet, which is he is. According to multiple sources I've spoken to, he is exasd. So this means he was an Australian Intelligence Community insider. So he joined ASD, apparently as a graduate sometime around 2007. He was seconded to a different agency at some point through his tenure at asd, and then he was recruited into Linchpin Labs in the middle of 2010s, somewhere around there. I also believe he studied a master's in security. I don't know whether he completed it, but he was studying for that at some point at UNSW Camp Edinburgh. And he didn't even move to the United States, I believe, until 2022, 2023. So it looks like some of this activity, if it's proven some of the alleged activity, may have even occurred in Australia. But nonetheless, you know, as soon as he joined lpl, he rose through the ranks. It's my understanding he was not a vulnerability Researcher himself, he had worked on implants that was kind of his, his jam, which is a little bit different to, to volume dev and exploit development. And he's currently on home arrest. So he's, I believe he is lowjacked and very limited in where he can go. I wonder if this implies a level of cooperation with the FBI though, because you would think given the seriousness of these allegations that if they thought he was Kaiser Soza, he would not be free to be at home.
