Loading summary
Transcript119 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:05]
B
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.
- [02:13]
A
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.
- [02:43]
B
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.
- [05:33]
A
Yeah, I would imagine if you are interacting, you know, even if it was kind of indirectly with Russian, you know, some kind of Russian buyers for this stuff, probably the feds would be pretty cautious about leaving you out of your own cognizance. So maybe that does suggest that there might be some degree of cooperation. But it's certainly a, you know, there's a bunch of, you know, when we hear exploits and this kind of surveillance tech talked about in the more general like privacy surveillance sort of world, we see this stuff being like, well, governments can't be trusted because they'll lose it. Other people will get it, it'll get sold, it will. Like this is the kind of scenari scenario that's often used for, you know, why even good guys shouldn't be, you know, able to develop exploits. And so it's kind of interesting we've got now a story of that kind of happening right in the middle of, you know, US Mill Industrial, you know, in L3 Harris. So that's kind of fun.
- [06:26]
B
Well, the only problem with that argument, Adam, is it's completely ridiculous. You know, I saw JSR from Citizen Lab all over Twitter talking about how, you know, these are supposed to be the good guys and the private sector shouldn't be able to do this. Like if anybody knows the first thing about this type of ecosystem, you know, who, who the buyers of this sort of technology are. It's not just like five Eyes signals intelligence agencies. Like where do you think the FBI gets its exploits from? Are they supposed to have their own team of crack exploit developers? What about ASIO in Australia? What about the Australian Federal police? What about MI5 in Britain? Do you know what I mean? Like, are they all supposed to have crack teams of exploit developers to do counter espionage and counterterrorism? Like the whole thing is just completely ridiculous. Not to mention, oh, ok, the good guys shouldn't be able to have them. Do you think the bad guys are just going to be, you know, you think China and Russia are just going to be like, oh, the Yanks and the five Eyes countries are no longer developing exploits. We should stop too. Like, the arguments around all of this are completely brain dead, like unbelievably thick.
- [07:31]
A
I guess where I was heading was like, we are going to be seeing this on slide decks for a long time making exactly these kinds of arguments. And you know, I'm, I'm kind of with you, right? I mean, this stuff is, you know, the reality of how tech is and how, you know, exploit dev and all this kind of stuff. Like, and the way it's proliferated and the fact that everyone can, everyone can kind of do it even though it's difficult. Like as you say, China, North Korea, you know, can even manage to pull this kind of stuff together. So, yeah, like it's an interesting case study and I'm going to be, it's going to be curious to see kind of what the book that they throw at him looks like and whether or not he's cooperating and all that kind of thing. As you said, we don't know that until, you know, a day or so from now.
- [08:11]
B
Well, I'd like to know if they got anyone on the buy side for this as well. Like there's been no announcement just yet, but who knows, we might see something there. Apparently, yeah, he stole something like eight exploits, which is a big deal. God knows where they went to because, you know, there's a buyer in Russia and from there, who knows? Now I did reach out to the Australian Signals Directorate media team and I'm going to share their response because it's absolutely hilarious. I asked them to confirm for me roughly the year in which this guy started and the year in which he left. Not expecting them to do it, but it's just the done thing when you're going to, you know, run a report like this. They came back to me and they said, thanks for your inquiry and apologies for the delay in getting back to you. On background and not attributable, this is a matter for law enforcement. So nil comment from asd. So that's an on background, non attributable, no comment. What, what even is that? And it's, you know, having the, having the email stamped official up the top is ridiculous. Now one of, one of the questions I had asked them is, are you reviewing this guy's prior work, given that he used to work at your agency? Now for them to reply and say this is a matter for law enforcement, I would posit no, this is a matter for ASD to actually investigate what this guy, guy might have touched. Now, of course he had been out of the intelligence community for some time when this alleged activity is said to have begun. That does not mean that everything he did prior to that is squeaky clean. And of course, if they're not reviewing him, that's ridiculous. Another thing I find ridiculous about them failing to give me anything in their response is they can answer it here, you know, to it to a journalist who's asked them, or no doubt some staffer for a coalition politician is listening to this, and they get to grill ASD over it in estimates and it makes them look bad. And they get to, you know, sling mud at the government for talking about how there's a cover up, you know, based on some spy scandal, you know, on the government on elbows watch sort of thing. So, you know, I would hope to see actually some follow up on this from the conservatives in Australia who are currently the, you know, the minor party. They're in opposition because frankly, it would be reassuring to know that they're looking into this.
- [10:18]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, saying that it's a matter for law enforcement when, like, law enforcement pretty much does not have mandate to go into the intelligence agency and figure out, you know, they can't pull this particular thread because, you know, they're not going to get any more cooperation than you are from. But yeah, this is just, it's a really interesting story. And, you know, I know when we talked about it, you know, last week, the version of the story last week, I did not expect it was going to lead to, you know, the guy's bosses exasperate, you know, stealing exploits like.
- [10:48]
B
Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you another thing. I'll tell you another thing. Full props to Lorenzo too, and I. He'd been working this story for a couple of months. He had known about this for a couple of months and, and I know that because a couple of months ago he got in touch with me. He's like, hey, do you know a guy called Peter Williams, nicknamed Doogie? And I'm like, no, I don't know. The guy's like, oh, okay. You know, and that was like back in, back in August, I believe. Also he was called Doogie as a nickname because of his youthful appearance, because he looked quite young. I know this because I suspected as much because I briefly shared that, that nickname once upon a time here in Australia because I'm of the. Of the right vintage. But look, just a crazy, crazy turn of events. Yeah, a crazy turn of events when you, when you got this sort of stuff. Happening just like what do you, what do you even, what do you even say?
- [11:34]
A
Yeah, yeah, it is pretty wild. Oh yeah, It'll be interesting to see what the, you know, the next step in the process of his, you know, kind of ongoing law enforcement interaction turns up. You know, maybe there'll be some more details we get as it progresses because yeah, it would be no interesting to see if we get any details about, you know, who's buying or even, you know, if there's some way to figure out where the bugs that he sold ended up getting used. If anyone can kind of piece those together, that would be really interesting as well because like, as you say, like where did it go, how much was involved, you know, what, you know, all those kinds of questions.
- [12:05]
B
The grapevine says that he was, he is apparently relieved to have been caught.
- [12:12]
A
I mean, yeah, I guess, you know, once you start playing these games it can be pretty hard to find an off ramp, you know.
- [12:19]
B
Yeah, yeah, I can imagine he's had a stressful couple of years but fully, fully deserved mind you, if it is the case that these charges are proven and you know, as I say plea hearing tomorrow, we're going to know so we'll update you all next week. But just wanted to share with you all, you know, some details on this guy. Share with you all that he is in fact X intelligence community. And that in my view is a, is a problem. But you know, the idea that we need to abandon private sector exploit development is just, I don't know, I don't know like how these sorts of thoughts enter these people's brains, if I'm honest. All right, so let's move on and man, there's a bit to untangle here but last week we spoke about a bug in wsus which is the Windows Server Update services. Right. So this is the, the, you know, if you want to manage patching of your own Windows machines. So you don't want to, you don't want your users boxes to just insta swallow whatever Microsoft publishes because there might be some problems. There are conflicts with weird enterprise software or whatever that you run. You want to manage your patching. You use wsus now it's only supposed to be used internally. Last week we saw that there was an O day in WSUS and that's when I was like, I wonder how many people against good advice put this stuff on the Internet. You went and looked it up in census and it was like 7 to 8,000 of these boxes and these are going to be in enterprises, right, like SMEs don't use Ws. So that's 7 to 8,000 juicy targets. Now we see the headlines that this thing is under active exploitation. CIS has even got an alert out telling people to patch it. What's interesting though is the bug that we talked about last week was actually not the exact bug that's being exploited now. Funny. Anyway, you walk us through that part of it.
- [14:04]
A
So last week we talked about a bug in WSUS which was deserialization of a particular part of the HTTP messages that get sent to the WSUS server and we were going off a blog post by a Turkish guy who had reverse engineered that particular part of wsus, found remote codexec via this deserialization gadget. And the kind of nuance was that the payload that was deserialized was actually encrypted, but it was encrypted with a hard coded key that he dug up and wrote a proof of concept for. And it was all kind of interesting work. Subsequently he's updated that blog post and it turns out that, and this is me reading between the lines a little because it's not 100% clear, it turns out that when he was reversing this patch, the box that he was using wasn't patched for a 2023 error WSUS bug which was also deserialization. And it turns out that that's the bug that he found and he pulled that thread and I think the aspect of the hard coded cryptokey I don't think we'd previously seen reported. Microsoft triaged that bug as an elevation of privilege as opposed remote prehealth codexec. But anyway, so it turns out that blog post was about the wrong bug from 2023.
- [15:20]
B
Yeah, basically. Basically he had retrospectively upgraded this thing from a CVSS3 to like a 10, right?
- [15:26]
A
Yeah, yeah. So like I think maybe Microsoft said maybe six point something or whatever it was like it was not a particularly juicy bug anyway, it turns out to be a bit more juicy than it was but it has been patched in 2023, the actual bug that's being exploited by WSUS people. The guy kept on going and has now put up a second blog post about the actual bug which is actually worse. It's also deserialization in WSUS reachable via HTTP. But this time there is no hard coded crypto anything. There's no auth. It's just pre auth rce via deserialization in wsus. So same component, same outcome, same kind of thing. But yeah, it was just quite a confusing, twisty Turny maze because Microsoft, so Microsoft put out an out of band hot patch for this WSUS bug and they said that they updated the patch because there was some like it wasn't complete, it didn't cover everything. And I was wondering if that meant there was a whole second deserialization in there. Perhaps not, it turns out, but either way, Microsoft got the patch out. It may be a bit late for most people because of the active exploitation that's underway. We've seen a few reports, few vendors have seen attacks and against honeypots with them it looks like initial access and some recon as opposed to anything being actually deployed yet. But as you say, these things run in the privileged context, both in terms of the machine that WSUS runs on but also the enterprise environments that they're in. So getting them compromised, probably not a good thing. And yeah, Microsoft flubbing the pats a little bit and confusing people, clearly also not helpful.
- [16:58]
B
Yeah, I just think though, putting one of these things look, I mean it's hard though, right? How do you do patch management? And of course the big wild card in all of this was 2020 when all of a sudden, you know, half your staff grabbed their computer off the desk and took it home. So you know, you kind of had to like one solution if you still wanted to control patching for corporate owned devices in people's homes. One of the solutions to that was to actually put WSUS on the Internet. And I can't really think of a cleaner way to fix that problem if I'm honest. Except for yeeted onto the Internet and cross your fingers and just really hope no one finds a deserialization oh day in it.
- [17:36]
A
I mean there really shouldn't be deserialization zero days in it. And the fact that Microsoft fixed one in 2023 and then didn't review the rest of the code base for other usage of unsafe. Net when they themselves say this is not safe to use and the two bugs are, you know, it's basically the same thing. One's binary formatter, one's SOAP formatter, it's the same kind of underlying root cause and both of those are deprecated. So like Microsoft should not have two years later had a second bug in WSUS in this style. Like no, I shouldn't have got that right. But you can kind of see like the, the way, like I'm thinking back to 2020, the way Microsoft was heading then was like always on vpning. So you would have the stuff on a corporate network and all your machines would be Always VPN ing into the corporate network. They had. What was it called? Microsoft's like always on VPN product was like Direct Connect or Direct Access or something like that. Like, I think that's the direction they were going. And then that kind of didn't really get widespread adoption. And so this stuff ended up on the Internet. And as you say, you know, probably never should have been, but here we are.
- [18:43]
B
Yes, here we are. Now, you wanted to talk about some research out of Spectrops and some just a disclosure right off the bat. I am an advisor in Spectrops with a very small, teeny tiny financial interest in the company. But I'm obviously not a technical advisor to Spectre Ops because occasionally they will publish a post like this that goes right over my head. I was reading it, Adam. It's all about Windows Authentication, Gubbins and Credential Guard. And the words actually started to blur on the page as I walked through, as I tried to step through this. So I'm going to let you explain what this research is all about because you're very excited about this.
- [19:20]
A
It's a very intense blog post and there are a couple of bits in it where they're like, you know, for the comfort of the reader, we have just like glossed over this particular bit where we reverse engineered entire Windows crypto subsystems or whatever.
- [19:34]
B
Could have used a little more glossing for someone like, for a reader like me. But anyway, anyway, so this is some.
- [19:40]
A
Research into dumping credentials out of Windows systems. So if you land on a Windows box, traditionally one of the things you would do is steal credentials, password hashes and things off the local system. And that would be like NTLM hashes or Kerberos tickets or things like that you could then use to either authenticate onwards or in the case of password hashes, crack them back to clear text credentials or pass the hash. There's lots of things you would do. One of the things that Microsoft has done over the years to kind of harden Windows systems against this type of credential theft, like one's Mimikatz, the tool became widespread. Microsoft implemented this thing called Credential Guard, where they boot the entire Windows operating system underneath a hypervisor, and then that hypervisor can host other virtual machines for various specialized purposes. And one of them is for storing credentials. So traditionally credentials would have lived in process in memory, you know, in the LSAS process in Windows, if your system, you could dump the memory out of that process and steal credentials from it. So what they did was they moved the Credential Store into a whole separate virtual machine running some very cut down environments with a particular API for talking in and out of them. And on modern like Windows 11 systems with TPMs and all of the other modern security governance, that's where creds live. And getting credentials out of credential guard protected machines has been kind of fiddly and it really hasn't been a good way to do it. Spectreop sat down and worked through and eventually kind of figured out a mechanism to get credentials out of Credential Guard, which of course it had one job and that was to not give out your credentials. The research they came up with ended up being that for Remote Desktop protocol there is a mechanism for RDP connections to interact with credential guards so that when you RDP to a remote machine and it needs to use your credentials to authenticate onwards to another place, the it can talk back to your local machine's Credential Guard special magical virtual machine, get credentials in and out and that kind of thing. So they essentially implemented that entire stack themselves so that they can talk to Credential Guard via Windows Remote desktop. And the net result of all of this is a mechanism to extract password hashes, NTLM password hashes and Kerberos ticket material from the local machine if you've got system and from remote machines under certain circumstances. And if you're on a terminal server or you're on a machine that other people are terminal servicing into being able to interact with their credential guards to dump creds if you've got system. So all of this put together results in like, we've got a few more tools that we can use for extracting credentials from things. They reported this to Microsoft. Microsoft hummed and hawed and thought about it for a while and eventually said, actually this is intended behavior. Thanks for the report, but we're not going to do anything about it. So yeah, we have a new tool in our toolbox for doing this kind of thing. Some new ways to steal credentials and you know, even more respect for the scale of Spectre ops, willingness to just do the hard yards because they go there. The stuff they had to actually implement to make this work. Like you think your head was hurting. My head was hurting reading this stuff. And I whoever it was that suffered the emotional damage necessary to implement this, like, my hat is off to you, sir. Well, sir, as it may be, many people, I don't know how many people were involved. It does not sound like a fun ride.
- [23:12]
B
No, no, there was a Lot. It's a lot. Let's just put it that way. It is funny though that Microsoft's response to certain things seems to be, well, that's just too hard, you know. So like when they got, when they got what was that big email breach they had which involved like keys not being in HSMs and stuff and then the attack were just minting their own.
- [23:35]
A
You know, creating Chinese. Was it the Chinese or the Russian?
- [23:38]
B
Yeah, and that was the one there where there was actually a, you know, CSRB report into it. But you know, they'd known about this for a while and they're like, yeah, we can't change it, it's too hard. And like I just sort of feel like when you're, what are they, you know, multi trillion dollar company. I sort of feel like the word's too hard. Unless we're asking them to colonize Mars shouldn't really be in their vocabulary when it comes to make computer work better. Like I figured they are pretty well rewarded for, you know, and incentivized to make computer work better. But then again, I mean, what can they really do here?
- [24:11]
A
Well, that's the thing, right? Like this, you know, they have made it harder to steal credential hashes out of memory and harder is the best they can do. Harder is good, but harder is the best they can do. They can't make it impossible because there are legit uses for those credentials and legit reasons. You need to be able to interact with them. And yeah, I mean I also pity the poor people at msrc. They had to triage Spectrops bug report in the meetings they would have had to have. So yeah, I just have sympathy for everybody involved but also, you know, like, it's just hella good work. So poor Microsoft, poor Spectre Ops, poor US Windows users, you know, lucky hackers who get to dump creds.
- [24:55]
B
Now we got a write up from Dan Gooden here which was fun to read actually because this is about DNS cache poisoning. This is basically, you know, the late, the great Dan Kaminsky actually discovered a, you know, a bunch of vulnerabilities in 2008 in bind. He kept it real quiet though, you know, didn't talk about it much. Dan, for those who were there at the time, he definitely talked about it a lot. It was like, you know, it was like two years of Dan talking about catch poisoning. He was an excitable fella. It's fine. I'm not, I'm not trying to be mean, but it was pretty funny. So yeah, there was A whole bunch of mitigations introduced into the way DNS resolvers like worked to try try to prevent these cash poisoning attacks. And Dan's written up some research which where it looks like people have been able to sort of get around these mitigations, which essentially involved introducing a bunch more entropy so that DNS resolvers just wouldn't eat spoofed answers and you know, update themselves with the wrong data. But, you know, you can explain it better. You're the tech guy, explain it.
- [26:06]
A
Yeah. Okay. So in. So a DNS server sends off a query to look up some result for an end user. That query gets a response going back. This is done over udp. And the way that the response UDP packet is associated with the request that went out is with Basically a transaction ID. There's a 16 bit transaction identifier that's used to tie the response and the original query back together. That's 65,000 possibilities. There's not very many. Dan's idea was given. UDP is trivially spoofable. We'll just send a whole bunch of packets containing DNS answers from where we expect the answer to be coming from, back to the server that asked, and we'll just send all 65,000 packets and eventually one of them will get there. And if it gets there within a time window, which was plenty generous, then that answer would get absorbed into the cache and then used to answer future requests. And one of the ways that this was mitigated is that they needed to add more entropy. They couldn't do that without. They couldn't make that field in DNS bigger without changing the protocol. So the hacky workaround was we will use a whole bunch of different source ports to send those out. And those source ports will kind of effectively become part of the unique identifier. And we can increase the amount of entropy by adding several tens of thousands of possible UDP ports that we could be using. And that's kind of where we are today. So those ports are these basically randomized and used as part of that kind of transaction identifier. This particular reset looked into the random number generation used for those ports and figured out that you could predict what they're going to be and use that to kind of claw back some of the entropy that make some of that entropy go away so that now you can get back to cache poisoning and it's still not zero. Like you still have to send more than 65,000 packets, but links are bigger than they used to be. And so it actually kind of Kind of pulls it back into feasible, which is some super cool research.
- [28:11]
B
Yeah, yeah, it was. And I wonder like, is this. I'm guessing this is pretty easy to fix though, because it's ultimately just a PRNG bug.
- [28:18]
A
Yes. Yeah. So they can make that predictableness in the PRNG they can take care of. And I think that's what we've seen. Patches from bind to Address and some of the other DNS vendors are kind of in similar boats. I don't know if it was the same PRNG issue with Unbound or some of the other DNS servers, but yeah, essentially we can fix it by making the PRNG a bit more robust. But just. It's funny seeing a bug come back from the dead like this because of compute power and network speeds kind of just gradually edging it back into viable.
- [28:49]
B
Yeah, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Like it's been 17 years. Right. I was also thinking that it's actually kind of amazing that a hacky solution like that has endured for 17 years as well and it is still enduring. Like the problem here is not actually the approach to solving the problem. The problem was just that one of the components was substandard in being, being the prng. So, you know, just a, just a cool one. Bit of a blast from the past. A lot of fun. You wonder what Dan would have said about it.
- [29:13]
A
Yeah, I think he would have been. He would have chuckled, I imagine.
- [29:17]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's it. All right. So what else we got here? We got a write up from Talos about the Key Lin. I never know how to pronounce these. It's Q I L I N the.
- [29:26]
A
Key limited could be Keelin, we don't know.
- [29:30]
B
Yeah, yeah, I mean you'd think it could be Qilin if they're Chinese, but they just. I think they're Russians who picked a deliberately Chinese sounding name just to be funny. Well, that's what anyway want you to think maybe. But yeah, apparently these guys are the, you know, they're the, they're the hot new thing in Bransonware as a service, doing double extortion and whatnot. And I always find these sorts of write ups interesting because Telos has done a bunch of write ups on their ttps on this sort of tradecraft, how they work. You know, it's just all about these guys kind of blog post and we've linked through to it in this week's show notes. What I find interesting though is you wonder like what's the threshold for them having problems and that's the New dynamic, right, is you've got a ransomware as a service, it's, it can only get so big before their onion sites start getting RM RF and like their bulletproof host start stops working. And you know, so I always just wanted to include this to go, okay, this is like being identified by Cisco Talos as the, as the next big ransomware crew. How long will they last before they get disrupted?
- [30:30]
A
Yeah, that's a great question. And I guess we can start the counter and see how long they last because you're right, there is a threshold over which you cross. You stick your head a little too far above the parapet and then all of a sudden you're going to get disrupted or bad things start to happen to your infrastructure or your money laundering or whatever else. So yeah, I guess we're going to find out.
- [30:52]
B
Anything interesting in the tradecraft here?
- [30:54]
A
I mean, no, if anything, that's the interesting part is it's completely bog standard. They even use winrar for extra trading data. Like it's sort of almost ransomware or you know, hacker tradition these days to use winrar. But no, they use, you know, memikats. They steal most of the. They seem to be entering through credentials obtained from forums or bought off, you know, data brokers or dumps or whatever else. Like no exciting zero day. You know, once inside the network, it's all, you know, useless sort of Things. They'll target ESX, like VMware ESX to crypt hypervisors network shares.
- [31:26]
B
You know, I mean, honestly, the thing that occurred to me when I'm looking at this workflow is, you know, I'm working with a bunch of companies that, that are doing AI stuff now, this sort of workflow, you could really do this agentically. You could. Like when you're starting with a, with a valid cred pair with no mfa, you know, if you gave the right agent the right prompt, give it the creds, give it the IP address and say go. I don't see any reason it wouldn't work.
- [31:52]
A
No, I mean they're using really off the shelf boring techniques, you know, PS Exec and Powershell and Mimikatz and you know, the same things that, you know, people have been using the hack Windows networks for 10, 15 years now.
- [32:04]
B
Yeah. So I mean, my advice to them is you got to jump on the agentic bandwagon or you're going to get left behind. You know, this needs to be at the forefront of your messaging anyway. No, no, here's an interesting one, right, Because I was getting these notifications I still pop my head into X ni Twitter, you know, regularly actually, because it's like, you know, you read post, racist, racist, racist, racist. Oh, interesting paper. Racist, racist, racist, racist. You know, that's sort of the experience on X these days. But it was throwing pop ups at me saying you need to re enroll your security keys. Right. And that's, you know, like I use Yubikey auth wherever I can. That's one of the places I use it. So, you know, eventually this sort of bled out to people on X saying, well hang on, why are you asking us to re enroll our security keys? Has there been some sort of incident? And like, if you know enough about Fido U2F, like this sort of authentication, you know that like even an incident at X wouldn't actually be a problem. Right. That's the whole point of having keys like this. And eventually instead of just encouraging people, oh no, you need to update them, they've come out and explained why and it's actually a good reason that proves the value of these types of authentication solutions, which is they're deprecating the twitter.com domain. And of course all of these Yubikeys will Only authenticate to twitter.com because they're an anti phishing control. So that's look good for them for actually getting people to re enrol. They've been doing this really weird hacky pass through auth like people are authenticating to Twitter and then that passes a token over to X or whatever and they've decided yeah, no more. But I just thought that was an interesting thing that kind of proves the value of Yubikeys and the like.
- [33:42]
A
You know, that was exactly the point that I took from it like this, this proves that it actually works. There is no other way to do it except making everyone re enroll over@x.com and that's, that's the system working correctly and good job. You know, Fido and U2F, you know, committee standardization people that made this, made that standard work as good as it does. So yeah, success. Good news, good news.
- [34:03]
B
I just think it's, I just think it's real funny that Twitter users used to call it a hell site before the master.
- [34:08]
A
Little did they know.
- [34:09]
B
Little did they know. Anyway, it's a, it's a nasty, nasty little place. But unfortunately people still use it and if you're a journo, you kind of got to be there, right?
- [34:20]
A
Yep.
- [34:20]
B
Otherwise, yeah, staying with Musk. Related news and you know, we spoke about how a congressional there was going to be Some sort of congressional inquiry into Starlink providing service to scam compounds in Myanmar. Oh, boy, that got it moving. Because SpaceX has apparently disabled 2,000 Starlink dishes that were operating in Myanmar scam compound. So, look, that's good news. But what's really annoying is seeing them come out and do corporate comms around it, like, hey, look at us. Aren't we great for disabling this stuff when they've been enabling modern slavery for, you know, like, months?
- [35:00]
A
It's the joy of corporate comms so you can spin anything. And, you know, once again, like, hats off to SpaceX Corp. Comms for managing to make that one smell good, because I would have been struggling, struggling to make that good news.
- [35:13]
B
Well, they said they proactively identified and disabled over two and a half, two and a half thousand Stalin kits in the vicinity of blah, blah, blah. And this is. You know, people have been screaming at him for months over this. And it took. It took, you know, the threat of a congressional hearing to get him to actually do anything about it. But, yeah, there was one interesting thing in this piece, right? Like, right down the bottom. The last paragraph was following a China led crackdown. This is a James Reddick piece at the Record, following a China led crackdown on scam hugs in the scam hug scam hubs in the Cocaine region in 2023. A Chinese court in September sentenced 11 members of the Ming crime family to death for running operations. And I'm like, oh, my God, I hadn't heard that yet. So I googled it. The first thing that comes up is actually Catalan's report on this for us. And it turned out that when he broke that story, I was away, presumably camping. So that's why I did not know that China is now executing scam compound operators and presumably harvesting their organs. And it's not the sort of thing that normally makes me feel good. And yes, Adam.
- [36:18]
A
Oh, boy, it got dark. It got dark up in here this week's episode, didn't it?
- [36:22]
B
I mean, if you're gonna harvest someone's organs, I figure the people who are running Myanmar scam compounds, like, I don't know, they should charity auction their organs, you know.
- [36:36]
A
Oh, dear. Risky biz. We do have good ideas for, you know, for many cybercrime operators. We've got lots of good feedback for them. And now we feedback for the Chinese government and law enforcement to harvest organs and sell them on the open market. What a world, Pat. What a world.
- [36:49]
B
Charity charity auction. For that, you know, you could buy some kid a liver who needs it, you know, and the money can go to, to charity. Anyway, anyway, my point is, I don't feel sorry for them. I do not feel sorry for those sort of people and I'm totally against the capital, you know, punishment, but in this case I'm just like, I'll, I'll allow it, you know. All right, moving on. And this is interesting actually because, you know, we spoke about the deprecation of the twitter.com domain. Also, what's happening November 17th is unless you've updated your SpaceX like Starlink hardware, it's going to effectively be bricked until it gets an update. There's some very important security update for Starlink hardware and it's pretty light on details as to what that update's actually going to do.
- [37:37]
A
I mean, that smells like certificate expiration. You know when there's a specific drop dead date and everything's going to stop working and one little update will fix it. Like that just smells like, oh God, a certificate's going to expire. We didn't think about how to roll that certificate over the air. We better push an upgrade. Oh God, what about all the ones in boxes? So when in doubt, blame security and certificates is what I is my gut feel. Many years of UNIX admin says smells like certificate.
- [38:05]
B
Yeah, but it says beginning on November 18, their kit will be unable to access the Internet until the update is performed. So why the rush?
- [38:13]
A
So there's two. Their updates said there's two classes of users. There is one set of customers who will be bricked at November 17th and a second class of users that won't be, which smells like two different software revisions. One has a cert that's going to die. Yeah, okay, well that was my reading anyway.
- [38:29]
B
Well, I mean, I've got one here. I got a backup kit, you know, for if the Internet goes down here. I've got a Starlink. I mean I bought it off one of their sales. You know, they have those crazy sales for people in regional areas. I paid nothing for the hardware and then, you know, I've used it a couple. I used it once when we had an outage. What's really funny is all the emails from SpaceX trying to buy my hardware back, which I think is quite funny because I think they were having shortages at one point. So they're like emailing all of the dormant people like me, just saying, please let us buy back the hardware. But no, it's an excellent backup. So I guess I'll haul it out later today and actually run the page.
- [39:02]
A
Make friends with the sky. Yes.
- [39:04]
B
Yeah, let it do its thing. And we got some analysis here from Kaspersky Lab written up over on Secure list. This is all about what used to be hacking team and is now, what is it? Memento or Memento Group or something?
- [39:18]
A
Mentor Labs, I think.
- [39:19]
B
Yeah. So it looks like Kaspersky's got the IR gig cleaning up after attacks against targets in Russia and Belarus. And we get to look at, you know, some of the stuff, quote unquote, we are throwing their way, which is always fun.
- [39:32]
A
Yeah, They've been looking into a case where there's been a bunch of intrusions over the last few years using, I think, a Chrome bug, some kind of Chrome zero day, and a number of pieces of hacking tooling, implants and so on that have some lineage that ties them back to vintage hacking team stuff. And hacking team has been around for quite a long time. And after they got hacked, when was that?
- [39:58]
B
Like about 10 years ago through the sonic wall. We talked about that recently.
- [40:01]
A
That's right, we did, yeah, we did, yeah. So after that whole episode, it was.
- [40:05]
B
Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the sonic wall all day.
- [40:09]
A
After that episode, Hacking team got bought by somebody else or the corpse of hacking team got bought and they said they were going to rip out all of the guts of various bits of hacking team tooling and rewrite it as necessary. And it seems like they've done quite a bit of that. That and Kaspersky has dug into and found like some technical tells that say, you know, that link this back to the old hacking team implants. But yeah, it's always interesting watching or seeing incident response from the other side, you know, like seeing them write up and investigate, you know, attacks in Russia and Belarus and whatever else using, as you said, I guess these are kind of Western tools. I mean, at least, at least Italy's the West. Although we don't really know who is now using them in, you know, who their customers are that are going, well.
- [40:55]
B
You never know, maybe one of the hacking team people sold them to somebody else, you know, on the sly.
- [41:00]
A
This is the same, apparently, what we do now. So the Chrome bug was sweet, though. Kaspersky wrote it up, passed it off to Google to go get fixed, and it's legitimately interesting Chrome bug. So that's quite cool. That was expensive. So, you know, good job. Whoever it's a hacking team pulled that one together.
- [41:16]
B
Yeah, it was one click, like email you a link, one click owned, which is pretty nice. Not quite a zero click. Right. The zero click is still the Holy Grail, but.
- [41:25]
A
Yeah, yeah, but this one's interesting in that it, like, it kind of wasn't really mem corruption. Like it's more of a logic flaw, which in that bit of chrome, like there's been a lot of eyes over that, a lot of real smart people's eyes. So interesting that there's still bugs to be found there and. Yeah, so it's good.
- [41:41]
B
Well, that's where a lot of this stuff is going, right? Yeah, it's going to have to. You got more and more, you know, memory corruption mitigations, like Apple's memory integrity stuff, which, you know, let's see how enduring that is though. Anyway, keep in mind, I've spent the last week just constantly talking to people who work in exploit development to fasten about other stuff. But I think that's the, that's the thing that a lot of people would be working on right now. But yes, moving on. And look, staying with spyware. And Poland's former Deputy Justice Minister is in a bit of trouble. He's been indicted for allegedly transferring something like $7 million from a victims of crime fund into some other part of government. And that money was then used to buy like, I think spyware from NSO group. So this happened back in 2017. So it's been a while now, but the, the, the long tail of consequences of, of people in the Polish government who are misusing this stuff. You know, it's still going on and he's apparently facing up to 10 years in prison. What I find interesting is his quote here, typical sort of quote from a politician of this kind of stripe is Pegasus was used to fight crime. So that Tusk and the Justice Minister, Valdemar Zurek have an allergy to such equipment is not surprising. Just as criminals dislike the police, criminals of all stripes dislike crime detection tools. So, you know, they bought this stuff and used it against their political opposition and now they're saying that was crime fighting. So.
- [43:18]
A
Yeah, that is some, that's some retroactively changing history right there, buddy. So, you know, good luck with that. When you face your prison now, you.
- [43:32]
B
Got, I mean, I, you know, a face palm isn't adequate for this one. This is, I actually laughed reading it. I know this is like something kind.
- [43:42]
A
Of not even really security, but it kind of is, but it's just so bad.
- [43:46]
B
Yeah. So there's this HB HP like crap where enterprise crapware called one agent. I don't even know what it does, but apparently an update, an update did something funny which was to clean up after itself, it had to nuke a certificate. And its brilliant solution for nuking that certificate was to like wildcard delete any certificate that contained the string 1E, which broke in something like nearly 10% of cases, actually just automatically unjoined machines from Entra and also from Intune. So if the affected certificate was just intune, like it would actually get reprovisioned. But if it was the certificate that joined them to Entra and it got nuked, that was it. Boom. System orphaned, right? And no way to easily bring it back. I mean, what.
- [44:39]
A
So the HP product or component that they were removing was called the 1E Performance Assist component. So 1E was the name in the name of the product. But of course, when you're matching on certificate fields that include hexadecimal strings, 1e is a thing that shows up pretty reasonably in an arbitrary bit string that's expressed as hex. And so yeah, the fact that it then hit the certificate that auths you to Entra is just A, super bad luck on behalf of hp. But B, what a mess. And I think the person who wrote this up speculates that maybe the script that was doing the deletion was actually written by Genai. Like was LLM to just write me a script that will delete these components from these seven different places that I had to go tidy up.
- [45:31]
B
I mean, it feels like a vibe coded thing. You've heard me say this, that LLMs, it's like having access to unlimited work experience kits. Do you know what I mean? Like, that's what it is. You should only trust it to do what you would trust a work experience kid to do. And I think you can get a work experience kid with a little bit of training to do stuff like alert triage. Like I actually think you can do that. And I do think you can get him to write scripts like that. But you know what, Adam, you're gonna want to check them, you're gonna want.
- [46:04]
A
To eyeball them before you ship them out. And, and this particular piece of HP crapware used some like Amazon IoT plumbing to deliver these updates kind of independently of regular corporate update plumbing. So yeah, the stuff was just shipped out, went live, no ring deployments, no nothing, just, you know, YOLO'd into HP's cloud and from there down 12 months for their machines. And like having to triage this, you know, because like you can't even log into the machine now, like without a local cred, because these are domain, you know, intra domain joined machines, you know, they might, they've got like a, you know, laps managed local admin account, but you have to get laps creds out of the domain. Like it's. Yeah, I feel bad for the people that had to go fix.
- [46:48]
B
Well, it's like the crowdstrike thing, right? Like it's hands. Yeah. You got to get your hands on the box. It's. It's hideous. Or walk the user through it.
- [46:54]
A
Or walk the user through it. Like just. Yeah. What a mess. And HP really should feel bad about this. Yeah, they won't because it's hp, but they should feel bad.
- [47:03]
B
Oh, man. Gen AI, what has it given us? Infinity midwidths. Infinity midwidths and a lot more carbon in the atmosphere. Now what have we got here? We got a write up that you wanted to talk about. It comes from Pulse Security in your wonderful country of New Zealand, and it's a write up of how you can use Windows SSH exe to do all sorts of fun stuff on your pen tests.
- [47:27]
A
Yeah, so one of the things like, I mean, I did a bunch of stuff with SSH in my early hacking career and, and I remember saying on Twitter back in the day that OpenSSH is the best hacker tool ever shipped.
- [47:38]
B
Right.
- [47:38]
A
It does everything, remote access and backdoors and file transfer and everything. And I think that the various SSH devs that I interacted with on social media all felt a little funny about that. So it's nice. Now that Microsoft has shipped open SSH with Windows for many, many years, it makes sense that people would start using it. And I mean, I've used Windows SSH for stuff, but this is a great write up and it's not, you know, it's not novel research, but it's just a comprehensive. Like here is how to use SSH in Windows environments to do all of the things that you want to do with it. You know, have a scheduled task to trigger a remote backdoor that will plumb you through and reverse Socks proxy you into the middle of the environment. So, yeah. Dennis from Pulse. Great blog post. Well worth a read. If you're into Windows hacking and Unix.
- [48:22]
B
Styles and you know, hate to plug another sponsor, but you know. Yet one more reason why you might want to consider running Airlock Digital, because most of your machines don't really need to be executing sshexe. Pretty much they don't.
- [48:35]
A
You know, that's some of, that's Dennis's recommendations. If you don't want this application, you know, allow listing, that's what you need.
- [48:40]
B
Yeah, Yeah, I caught up with Dave Cottingham recently actually, who's the CEO at Airlock. Things are going great guns for them, which is just great to see. And they're doing cool stuff too with AI. Right. Like, it makes sense that, that when you've got this amazing instrumentation platform that can control what can execute on a host and really the only annoying thing about it is that you have to manage the list. And a big part of the lists and the policies and whatever, and a big part of what makes their product successful is they've made it easy for people to do that, but they've sort of made it easy enough that you can do that agentically actually quite easily as well. Right. So they're doing some really amazing stuff there and it's very cool. And I don't know when we're speaking to them next, but I'm sure that's what we're going to be talking about. And again, you know, you can actually do some cool stuff with Infinity Midwits, you know, but like, keep it in mind. Now we're gonna, we're gonna finish off with a piece by Andy Greenberg that I really enjoyed reading. I used to play a fair bit of poker, actually. Not, not so much in recent years. But this is a story about how the mob were running private games with hacked card shufflers. The card shufflers actually have a little camera in them and you know, if you can modify the firmware on the device, you can get it to basically, you know, to understand the order of the deck. And you know, you pump that into a, into an app and you know exactly what cards people are holding, what the flop's going to be, what the next couple of cards out are going to be, you know, you know, the whole thing and it's impossible to lose. So just a fascinating story. And indeed there were some guys who did a talk on hacking these sorts of things at DEFCON a couple years ago. And yeah, now it turns out, hey, guess what? The mob have been doing that to fleece people in private games for years.
- [50:25]
A
Yeah, it's interesting kind of write up. And the thing that I found entertaining about this is so the card readers are, the shuffling machines are hacked so that they will ship camera images out to an app. IOActive did some research where they came up with an exploit that you could plug into these devices via the USB port on the back, take over them, take them over, you know, modify the firmware and kind of backdoor them. That way the mob in the system.
- [50:52]
B
I think you would need to leave that USB device connected though, to actually transmit the data out. So I don't think it was a case where you just put the device in, pulled it out and then walked away. I think you needed to leave it in, which makes it unviable in a casino environment.
- [51:06]
A
Right, right. Because that was presumably the radio interface didn't have a way of getting it out without some other mechanism. Right.
- [51:11]
B
That was just my reading from reading the Wired but piece.
- [51:13]
A
But anyway, in the mob case, they were actually just backdooring these devices themselves, so they were providing their own card shuffling machines at games that presumably were not in mainstream casinos. And the machines themselves are pretty well recognized. Like you recognize the brand, like they're implicitly trusted because they look like a legitimate one. But of course, you know, if you can open them up, you can do anything you like with them. You know, you could add a camera even if there wasn't one. But yeah, it's, it's kind of fun seeing this kind of like it felt movie hacking. And I think Andy Greenberg's write up kind of captured the movie hacking vibes of, you know, cheating in high stakes poker with, you know, with technology and yeah, just funny that people were actually doing this and I think raked in something like, what was it, 7 million bucks.
- [52:01]
B
And you wonder like some of the people who lost money, you know, think about the sort of people who get invited to poker games hosted by the mobile. Brian, think about, just visualize what that person looks like now. Stick this article in front of them and ask yourself, what are they going to do?
- [52:18]
A
Yes, exactly.
- [52:21]
B
So some fun times ahead for people who are involved in hosting those games. But Adam, that is it for this week's news segment. Thank you so much for joining me as always. It was a lot of fun this week and we'll do it all again next week.
- [52:33]
A
Yeah, thanks Pat. I will talk to you next week.
- [52:44]
B
That was Adam Boylow there with a check of the week security news. Big thanks to him for that. It is time for this week's sponsor interview now with Matt Muller who is at Tynes. Tynes, of course is an automation platform that enables you to automate, you know, basically anything. Obviously there's a lot of security use cases there, everything from phishing, remediation, automation and reporting and whatnot, through to alert triage and they've even got like a lot of AI functionality in the product these days to, to enable you to do that. So Matt really joined me to talk about like the way people are using AI and tines. It turns out the soc Use case and alert. Triage is a really big one. But some interesting stuff sort of emerged through this interview and one of those things is that, you know, they shipped the ability for people to insert their own sort of automation block with, you know, plumbed through to a, to an AI agent. But people found it a bit intimidating because they weren't quite sure like how to write a prompt to get it all to work. So now TINES has just shipped like immense catalog of predefined automations that use AI so that people can just start playing around with it. Anyway, here is Matt Muller from Tines. Excuse me with that interview. Enjoy.
- [53:55]
C
Yeah, I think AI is really helpful where there's just what I call the terrifying tedium, right where the 99% of the time you might actually be looking at false positives, right? Particularly if you have, have an alert that just is not tuned particularly well but you have to go look at it the same way every single time with maybe a timer ticking down in the background. And to me that's just the human brain is fundamentally not well suited for that. AI is extremely helpful. And so we've started to see people building these AI triage agents within Tynes. Now that said, what we also are seeing is that AI alone is not necessarily going to be sufficient when it comes to triage or it might be sufficient, but you're going to be funding a lot of the foundational model providers, maybe more than you need to. Right. Because AI isn't always going to be the most, it may be equally effective or more effective than a human but won't necessarily be as efficient as traditional automation.
- [54:59]
B
Well, I mean, you just said it there, right, which is you might need to get it to rule out a false positive when things aren't tuned correctly. So I think there's a bit of an, you know, bit of a few misunderstandings among some people where it's like, hey, I'm using AI, I don't need to tune my detection stack anymore. And that's, that's not right, you know, but I mean, you know, eventually, you know, you've got these models, they can actually give you feedback on what you should be doing to your detections to make them more efficient.
- [55:24]
C
Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is where, you know, we love empowering people to start, you know, building on top of these, you know, these agentix solutions for themselves because the same AI based workflow that does a good job of triaging an individual alert or set of alerts in isolation may not have the same set of prompts or analysis done or data provided into it that you would for sort of looking at a macro set of alerts and saying, right over time, this is how we'd recommend maybe tuning the detections for those sorts of things. And so again, I think maybe disabusing people of a little bit of that notion that it's not all one AI agent that's running all these things. One of the big mistakes that I think we see people making when they first start applying AI to all these things is saying, because we as vendors, I think maybe do ourselves a little bit of a disservice by saying, treat it like you would a junior analyst. Okay, well, a junior analyst is one person. And the reality is you're probably going to need multiple different AI agents to all sort of decompose the problem a little bit it and not just stuff everything into one agent that ends up being very, very expensive every time you run it.
- [56:29]
B
Yeah, it's funny that you guys have wound up kind of doing this alert triage stuff because fundamentally TINES is more of a Swiss army knife generic automation tool that you can throw together workflows and whatever and now add agentic stuff wherever you want to. Because, yeah, like we were talking earlier and I work with one of the agentic AI like alert triage companies, which is Dropzone. What's been really interesting about that is they were sort of early to the, to the market with that stuff. And now there's got to be like 6,000 companies offering this. Right? And now Times is there as well. But, like moving beyond alert triage, like, what sort of stuff are people doing in the SoC, because this agentic stuff that you've launched, you know, we had Owen Hinchey on the show, like one of my favorite interviews of the last few years, to be honest, like talking about where he saw the future of AI just in it in general, not even just in security. And it was, you know, really, really interesting chat, that one. But, you know, you've actually shipped that stuff. Now people are using it. As you've mentioned, alert triage is a big use case. And I, you know, I agree that that is like fundamentally, like that stuff is going AI, right. Like, people who are in denial about that, they're just wrong. But what else, what else are people using it? Because as I said, this is a very flexible tool. You could do your own automations and, you know, make them agentic wherever you want. What else are people doing with them?
- [57:51]
C
Yeah, I mean, we're seeing, you know, outside of the SOC people are using those same capabilities within tines for, you know, IT style use cases as well. To, you know, to Owen's point, you know, things like onboarding and offboarding users. Service access requests are a big one. We've seen people building workflows, you know, where, you know, I think a classic example is I need access to a particular system. The way that, you know, that approval is granted and the request is granted might be semi unstructured, right? For example, a JIRA ticket where I just type out in plain text. Here's my justification for getting access to X, Y or Z and having a human in the IT service desk sort of map. Okay, here's the access request, here's the approvals, here's the context, right? Like this is all stuff that AI is extraordinarily good at and can sort of flag discrepancies in saying, okay, the, you know, the justification provided wasn't necessarily, you know, sufficient based on policies, right? Or we're looking up this person's role and again, we're seeing some anomalies or some red flags that would maybe say this access request isn't truly justified. Maybe it needs some escalation. And so taking what was sort of a pro forma process in a lot of organizations where, yeah, policy says we have to go do the approvals, do the reviews, all that sort of stuff suddenly becomes actually meaningful when you can add AI to do a little bit more of that analysis. So that's a pretty powerful one. Right? And again, it's all happening in the same platform where, where the SOC is doing some alert triage. But now they can share some of that context with the IT Org with potentially the insider risk organization. Everybody is able to build workflows that help actually help meaningfully reduce risk versus just sort of saying, right, here's either the trade off is either build it in yet another isolated platform or just do it by hand and hope that people follow the same process every time.
- [59:37]
B
Well, see, that's what I was just wondering. I was wondering in the future, is it going to be easier to socially engineer a person or an LLM? And I'm guessing it's going to be possible to sort of socially engineer an LLM by tricking it and fooling it. But then you look and you think, oh, that puts us in a worse place. But you look at how bad humans are with stuff like that. There was one big breach recently. I can't remember who it was. It was high profile and it's resulted in a lawsuit. But the call center transcripts was seriously just like the attacker ringing up and saying, hey, it's Fred reset my password. And the help desk is like, okay, you know, that was it. So I'd imagine that like with an LLM it might even be more difficult.
- [60:14]
C
Right, right. I read that transcript as well. And my favorite line is the call center employee saying, would you like me to remain on the line while you try your new password I just gave you? And the cybercriminal says, yes, of course, thank you again. Say what you will about LLMs and prompt injection, but at least they will try to follow a semblance of a documented process that's been given to them.
- [60:35]
B
Yeah. So how much of it is LLMs are good versus people are just really bad?
- [60:40]
C
LLMs are consistent. Right. Or more consistent. And I think, but I mean, we.
- [60:44]
B
Always say they're not deterministic, they're not consistent. And here you are saying, well, they're more consistent than people. And I guess, look, I mean, that's probably true.
- [60:51]
C
Right, right. And I think for us, where we've always sort of embraced both Tynes traditional workflow building capabilities alongside LLMs and AI capabilities is the fact that you can add those checks and balances in there. Right. AI will be consistent, if not deterministic. And I think for us, being able to harness some of the best of both worlds where again, the AI doesn't require the same level of structured data that a traditional workflow would, but you can absolutely force it into structured outputs that can then be checked deterministically. So yes, absolutely. You might not get the exact same outputs every single time, but you can also check and say, hey, if you're putting out an integer that's above zero, we can check that determinant, things like that. So yeah, you do get.
- [61:37]
B
Well, you'd think that, but often you ask AN LLM what two plus two is and they say 37. Right. So is minus two an integer over zero? I mean, sometimes according to, according to ChatGPT, you know, it can be, it's all context dependent. So one thing we were talking about before we got recording actually is, you know, how to view tines in terms of it, like in terms of the buy or build question. Right. Because quite often when it comes to, you know, new technologies, you think, well, do we buy an off the shelf solution or do we build our own? You were kind of pointing out that the tine sort of exists in between these two paradigms. Right. I found that pretty interesting. Right. Because it is, it is. I mean, an automation platform that's you're building your own automations but you don't have to build the platform. Right, right. I mean that's got to be the way customers see it too.
- [62:32]
C
Yeah, exactly. I think, you know, when, when you're purchasing tines, I think what you're purchasing is ultimately the ability to achieve your goals faster. Right. So you know, I come from a background myself of just inherently, you know, instinctually saying oh surely I can do this with a Python script. Okay, well who's going to maintain that Python script when I'm on vacation? Who's going to think about, you know, retries and you know, what happens when the API I'm calling is going down? Who wants to think about, you know, sort of maintainability over time and all those sorts of things. Nobody really wants to be thinking about some of the, you know, the governance capabilities, the audit trails, the things that you really need in an enterprise to, you know, to be able to build successfully and you know, meet organizational control requirements. So that's the, you know, that's ultimately what we're providing with Tynes is you don't have to think about sort of all the, you know, the non functional requirements. Right. You can think about the goal that you're trying to achieve achieve and that's where we think over the long run it is sort of buying that ability to build. Very early on in Tynes we had what I think I would call the blank sheet of paper problem, which is you could build anything but then, oh my God, I have to build anything. And that's. So we launched the Tynes library which today contains over a thousand different workflow templates. Some of them are fully deterministic, some of them are very agentic these days. And so I think for us sort of seeing that missing puzzle piece of saying yes, people want to be able to build, but if you're building a workflow that's kind of the same across a bunch of different organizations, maybe we can help you shortcut that as well.
- [64:08]
B
That's interesting too that you're plugging in because I think initially, right, it was like people could just add LLM blocks into their tines automations but it makes absolute sense that you're starting to plug them into those pre canned automations. I mean are they proving popular? I guess the question is is this stuff taking off to the degree that you would expect or is it like more of a slow burn? Like what's the uptake been like?
- [64:32]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I think what we're really seeing, if you look at things like the AI examples that have started to really get adopted out of the TINES library is people are a little intimidated writing their first prompt and putting that into production. But they really want the customizability. They really want to be able to say, okay, I understand what this process now looks like and what best practices look like in a vacuum. And I actually feel pretty comfortable adapting that to my organization.
- [64:57]
B
So the pre canned, the pre canned ones are the ones that are popular, whereas people weren't so much confident in just grabbing that block and throwing them into their own automations.
- [65:06]
C
Yeah. Or, you know, again, sort of, you know, being able to model for folks what best practices look like. We've seen, you know, and helped with AI, you know, implementations across a ton of organizations at this point. And so we're, you know, really happy to be able to, you know, share some of those best practice pieces of knowledge in the templates that we give people. But again, knowing that everybody still has that control and, you know, ability to adapt it to their own organization.
- [65:28]
B
All right, Matt Muller, thank you very much for joining me to talk through all of that very interesting stuff. Good to see.
- [65:34]
C
Thanks so much, Patrick.
- [65:36]
B
That was Matt Muller from Tynes there. Big thanks to him for that. Big thanks to Tynes for being a Risky Business sponsor. And that is it for this week's show. I do hope you enjoyed it. I'll be back next week with more security news and analysis, but until then I've been Patrick Gray. Thanks for listening.
- [66:06]
A
Sam.