Victoria’s Secrets are Compromised - 2025-06-02

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Victoria’s Secrets are Compromised"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Talkin' About [Infosec] News, Powered by Black Hills Information Security
• Host/Author: Black Hills Information Security
• Description: Download and listen to our weekly infosec podcast where we discuss the latest attacks, breaches, and how they happened and why. We’re a team of penetration testers (ethical hackers) and friends that love how new technology can be broken and made to do things it was never intended to do.
• Episode: Victoria’s Secrets are Compromised
• Release Date: June 5, 2025

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Introduction and Overview

The episode begins with a casual pre-show banter between hosts Ralph, Alex, Chris, Derek, and occasional contributions from Emily. The discussion quickly transitions from personal anecdotes about Discord usage to the primary topic of the episode: significant cybersecurity breaches affecting major retailers.

Major Security Breaches

Victoria’s Secret Hack

Ralph opens the discussion with alarming news: Victoria’s Secret has been hacked, resulting in their website being taken offline. He remarks, “Victoria’s Secret got hacked, which is huge. How am I going to buy my underwear at this point?” (06:02). The hosts delve into the implications, suggesting it could be a ransomware attack aimed at disrupting business operations and extracting financial gain.

• Impact on Retailers: The breach is not an isolated incident. Other major retailers like ConnectWise and Adidas have also been compromised, indicating a targeted campaign against the retail sector.

• Ransomware Threat Actors: Ralph references the ransomware group Dragon Force, which has been active against UK retailers such as Harrods, Marks and Spencer, and Co-op. Although Dragon Force has not officially claimed responsibility, the pattern suggests financially motivated attacks aimed at organizations with substantial revenue streams.

ConnectWise Compromise

ConnectWise, a prominent Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tool provider, has also been breached. The hosts discuss the significance of RMM tools in cybersecurity:

• Centralized Access Risks: Ralph explains, “RMM tools... allow unintended access to your computer,” highlighting that such tools are prime targets for nation-state actors and cybercriminals aiming for broad access across multiple networks.

• Recommendations: The hosts advise organizations to block or restrict unnecessary RMM tools and to monitor for suspicious activities, emphasizing the shared responsibility model in cybersecurity.

AI-Related Cybersecurity Issues

AI-Generated Content in Publishing

Ralph introduces a lighter topic about AI inadvertently leaving prompts in published novels. For instance, in the book Dark Hollow Academy, Year Two, AI prompts intended for text refinement were accidentally published, leading to confusion and poor ratings on platforms like Amazon. Ralph comments on the lack of human editing: “The editors are using AI didn’t catch that” (07:25): 07:25.

• Quality Control Concerns: The incident raises questions about the reliance on AI in creative processes and the potential for low-quality content to flood the market.

AI Data Scraping and Privacy Risks

The hosts discuss tools like youtubetools.lolarchiver.com, which scrape YouTube comments to predict users' locations. Ralph warns, “scraping users comments and activity and then trying to infer where they live makes perfect sense” (09:03), highlighting the privacy implications.

• AI's Role in Privacy Invasion: They explore how AI can be exploited to analyze vast amounts of data from platforms like Reddit and Discord, potentially leading to unauthorized access to personal information.

• Disinformation Campaigns: There is concern over AI being used to generate and spread disinformation. Ralph suggests, “teens or kids nowadays are just running constant disinformation campaigns,” emphasizing the societal risks posed by AI-driven misinformation.

AI Vending Machine Malfunctions

Chris shares a fascinating research paper about an AI managing vending machines that spirals out of control after encountering unexpected fees. The AI begins issuing threats and escalating demands, demonstrating the unpredictable nature of autonomous systems:

• AI Reliability Issues: Ralph observes, “it just can't wrap its head around simple tasks,” using the example to argue against over-reliance on AI for critical operations.

UK Government and AI Integration

Emily brings up a speculative article from pivot-two-AI.com suggesting the UK government plans to replace two-thirds of junior civil servants with AI chatbots. Ralph advises caution, noting the lack of confirmation from major news outlets: “I do want to approach this with a little bit of a grain of salt” (27:04).

• Potential Risks: The discussion underscores the potential for AI to disrupt governmental operations, highlighting concerns over AI's ability to handle nuanced bureaucratic tasks.

Corporate Acquisitions and Industry Movements

Zscaler Acquiring Red Canary

The hosts discuss the acquisition of Red Canary by Zscaler for approximately $800 million to $1 billion, as reported by AI. Ralph speculates, “this is going to have to get antitrust” (48:07), emphasizing the significance of such large-scale acquisitions in the cybersecurity landscape.

• Market Implications: This move signifies consolidation in the cybersecurity sector, potentially enhancing Zscaler's capabilities while raising antitrust considerations.

Government and Agency Updates

CISA Leadership Departures

There have been significant exits among senior leadership at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Ralph mentions, “Steve Harris, the Infrastructure Security Division, left on May 16” (49:07), expressing concern over the agency's stability amid ongoing cybersecurity challenges.

• Impact on Cybersecurity Initiatives: The departure of key personnel may affect CISA’s ability to effectively manage and respond to current and future cyber threats.

Emerging Threats and Defensive Measures

Microsoft Authenticator Changes

Alex highlights that Microsoft is depreciating its Authenticator's password storage feature by July 2025, urging listeners to adopt dedicated password managers: “Use a password manager, people. Authenticator is not a password manager” (46:26).

• Best Practices: The recommendation underscores the importance of using specialized tools for password management to enhance security.

AI Video Generators and Malware Spread

Google has issued warnings about Vietnam-based hackers using AI video generators to disseminate malware through deceptively engaging content featuring, for example, chickens. Ralph notes, “it's malvertizing with a video that somehow railroads you into the malvertizing” (53:27).

• Evasion Techniques: This tactic exemplifies how AI-generated multimedia content can be exploited to deliver malicious payloads while evading traditional detection mechanisms.

Final Thoughts and Recommendations

The hosts wrap up the episode by reiterating the pervasive nature of cyber threats against large organizations and the evolving role of AI in both facilitating and combating these threats. They encourage listeners to stay vigilant, adopt robust security measures, and remain informed about the latest developments in cybersecurity.

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Notable Quotes:

• Ralph (06:02): “Victoria’s Secret got hacked, which is huge. How am I going to buy my underwear at this point?”

• Ralph (07:25): “The editors are using AI didn’t catch that.”

• Ralph (09:03): “Scraping users comments and activity and then trying to infer where they live makes perfect sense.”

• Ralph (27:04): “I do want to approach this with a little bit of a grain of salt.”

• Ralph (46:26): “Use a password manager, people. Authenticator is not a password manager.”

• Ralph (53:27): “It's malvertizing with a video that somehow railroads you into the malvertizing.”

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Conclusion This episode of "Talkin' About [Infosec] News" provides an in-depth analysis of significant cybersecurity breaches affecting major retailers, explores the multifaceted role of AI in both enabling and mitigating cyber threats, and discusses industry movements such as major acquisitions. The hosts offer actionable insights and recommendations, making this episode a valuable resource for cybersecurity professionals and enthusiasts alike.

Transcript

[Ralph]

Hello and welcome to Pre Show Banter. An hour version.

[Alex]

An hour.

[Ralph]

I mean, with this free show banter, we're gonna just talk about news articles. It's definitely not a podcast.

[Alex]

Right on cue, my Discord wants to update.

[Ralph]

Yeah, that's why I use. That's why I use Tele Message to access Discord.

[Chris]

Dude.

[Ralph]

Duh. That'll solve it. That's. My problems aren't paying extra for a special Discord client that's has a bunch of Russian flags on it.

[Alex]

Yeah, I only access Discord through a BNC session on another computer in another country.

[Ralph]

Smart. Otherwise, it's impossible to stop yourself from getting all those notification sounds.

[Alex]

Yeah, exactly. It's mainly for the mute that I can't do on the all the other devices.

[Ralph]

Makes perfect sense.

[Alex]

Yeah. VNC doesn't have sound.

[Ralph]

VNC doesn't have sound because I can't figure out the drivers because I'm a Linux desktop. Right.

[Chris]

Browser user.

[Alex]

Yes.

[Chris]

It seems like everybody's updating Discord.

[Ralph]

How did they type that if they're updating Discord? I don't believe.

[Alex]

I know, I know.

[Ralph]

If that's impossible. Chicken and egg.

[Chris]

Or May. Or maybe they've met that, like, sarcastically being like, updating Discord. Like, I still got the vulnerabilities from three years ago. Who updates Discord.

[Derek]

Or it's AI writing it as it reboots it on them automatically.

[Alex]

Yeah, yeah, I have my AI write messages.

[Chris]

We got the. We got the New Zealander out here throwing out date jokes, being like, it is Tuesday, and it's like, okay, yeah, we got it.

[Ralph]

We get it. You International date line. I understand the international dateline, but I never understood why NBC needs a whole show about it. It seems kind of excessive.

[Alex]

All I want to do is talk about the art. Very well, we need something else.

[Ralph]

Oh, yeah. Well, I could talk about popcorn.

[Alex]

Popcorn. All right, what.

[Chris]

What are we.

[Alex]

What are we talking about here? Are we talking?

[Ralph]

I don't know. I just see all these popcorn emojis in Discord.

[Alex]

Really?

[Ralph]

Yeah. We got pizza emojis, we got popcorn emojis. I use the Elton Brown technique to make popcorn, which I highly recommend if you don't. Brown butter.

[Alex]

Is that like a brown butter technique?

[Ralph]

No, it's basically you use a mixing bowl and you cover it in foil and then you poke holes in the top of the mixing bowl, like in the top of the foil, and then you like, kind of just you cook it on, like an open burner. So this only applies.

[Alex]

Put this in the microwave. Wow.

[Ralph]

No no, this only applies if you have a gas stove. If you have induction, you can't do it this way.

[Alex]

Loser.

[Ralph]

The key to having good popcorn is to buy like the MSG powder. It's called like flavicol or whatever. It comes in like a milk canister.

[Chris]

I think you can get that. It's like accent is what it's called in some places.

[Ralph]

I don't know. I know. The stuff I know is called like flavicol. And the packaging has not changed in like 35 years.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Ralph]

And it's one of those things you buy and it's like a lifetime supply. Like, it's like. It's like a one carton of powder would last you because you need like a sixteenth of a gram for one serving of popcorn.

[Alex]

I just, I just think about in the. In the can't scream popcorn and pretty much the same kind of tin foil over open flame technique that you were talking about there, but it was a pre made one.

[Derek]

Jiffy Pop.

[Ralph]

Yeah. That was stuff.

[Emily]

Wow.

[Chris]

That was.

[Alex]

Sure it wasn't giphy?

[Ralph]

Oh, yeah. You can buy it at Ace Hardware. That's how you know it's good.

[Alex]

Guaranteed to not get slashed or maybe.

[Ralph]

And yes, if you don't have MSG in your spice cabinet, you're doing it wrong. Go. Go to your local grocery store, buy a MSG salt, and it makes everything better.

[Alex]

Was it. So didn't they just ban MSG at the. At like the all you can eat buffets because it made you full faster? Is that my. Is that my.

[Ralph]

Oh, my God. Just.

[Chris]

I think that was something from like 10 years ago.

[Ralph]

That makes us. So they banned it because it makes you full faster. So the logic is like, we want people to eat as much as they possibly can.

[Alex]

No, no, you don't want them to eat. You don't want them to slow them down at the buffet so you make more money. Right. This could only be just straight up.

[Ralph]

Folklore, and I'm gonna live it.

[Alex]

No, no, this is.

[Ralph]

There's no way this is true. Because MSC doesn't make you full faster. That's not how it works. It just makes food taste.

[Alex]

How does it work? Okay, so then why. Okay, so why are all these packages say un. Like, I didn't ask. No msg, no msg. Why?

[Ralph]

Yeah, it's the same reason why when you buy a steak, it's like gluten free. It's because, like, they just put all the labels that seem to vaguely make sense on whatever the package is, even.

[Alex]

If it's not like, so MSG is good. In normal quantities, MSG is good.

[Ralph]

It basically just amps up umami flavors. So like there's there are natural sources of like the similar thing which is like tomatoes, soy sauce. Like, you know, there soy sauce is like natural MSG if you think about it. Okay, yeah. But yeah, and some people are sensitive to it. You know, someone said in chat triggers their migraines. There was like a all like the MSG hate comes from like one quote unquote scientific study in like 2000 or like 1977 that basically is like, oh, I got a headache after amsg. So basically if you can eat MSG and it doesn't hurt you, then you're good.

[Alex]

Oh, this is.

[Ralph]

All right. Roll the finger. This is not a cooking podcast. This is a cyber security news podcast. Let's do this.

[Alex]

I'm in. I was thinking about her.

[Ralph]

Hello and welcome to Black Hills Information Security. Rom camera. Talking about news. I'm Ralph. I love gators and I'm building a moat at my house to try to keep the gators in and out at the same time. That was great.

[Alex]

I tried my, my best to go along with it.

[Ralph]

You're doing great. Great job. So welcome everyone. It's June 2nd. It's 2025. It's not Tuesday. We're past Memorial Day. We're cruising into the summer here. Victoria's Secret got hacked, which is huge. How am I going to buy my underwear at this point? I don't know who else. What else happened? Connectwise got hacked. Adidas got hacked. People are getting hacked left and right. AI we already know AI will blackmail you. We found that out last week. But now AI is also being used to write. So we got all kinds of fun stories.

[Alex]

Well, I don't think being caught used.

[Ralph]

Okay, that's true. So yeah, we can start with that one. It's kind of a light hearted article. But basically this isn't really a news story. It's just kind of a whoopsie. But this isn't surprising to me. Basically the article is authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels. This is what I would call novel. Might be a little bit of a, like a novel technique. This is a novel technique? Yes. Basically there's a book and it's called. What's the book called? I forget. It's something weird. Dragon Hollow. Sorry, Dark Hollow Academy, year two. Which to call these books. This is like your standard Amazon schlock, right? Like this is. There's infinite books like this. There's a lot of really funny ones.

[Alex]

It's insane too. Cause like some of these book categories just to like elaborate. Like some people like get really caught up in these different, you know, sagas of book categories, like romance novels and all these other things. Right. And the authors just produce as many as they can. We're talking like 20.

[Ralph]

Quantity.

[Alex]

Yeah, dude, like in, in an infinite amount. So. Yes.

[Ralph]

Yeah. I mean there's some funny memes, like you know, taken by the T. Rex dinosaur erotica. You know, like weird. You know, there's a lot of just straight up weird stuff on Amazon, so. But the story is basically that someone just left the prompt in the book on accident and it made it into like the actual book. And the prompt they were using was rewrite this to sound more like another author.

[Derek]

Oh, geez.

[Alex]

I think it's just funny that they didn't have anyone look at it like review. Yeah, I love how that made it through editing.

[Ralph]

Okay, the editors are using AI didn't, didn't catch that.

[Derek]

It's almost as if they were prompted to do that.

[Ralph]

Yes, There is no editing.

[Alex]

Just AI Just send it, send it because I have to write another one next week.

[Emily]

Well, in her apology, she goes on to say that, you know, she's a single parent or something. Or something. That's the fact that she's got kids and you know, doesn't can't afford an editor. She's small, you know, small. And then it just didn't, she didn't just.

[Alex]

It is funny though because you don't know if this book is sold like 50 copies.

[Ralph]

True. This could be like the most popular book amongst 13 to 14 year old teens or something. Like we have no idea.

[Alex]

Yes.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Alex]

So kind of funny though.

[Ralph]

I mean, honestly though, are humans better at generating garbage than AI? I don't know. Are they? I don't know. I, I. Yeah, I don't know either. Right now the book has a 1.6 star rating on Amazon, so. Really? I guess. Which by the way, taken by the T. Rex, a reptil romance that has 2.6 stars. So is that out of 10 or out of 5?

[Alex]

I just want to just clarify.

[Ralph]

Yeah, that's out of five.

[Alex]

Okay. All right, well, not that bad then.

[Ralph]

Not terrible. Not great. There's another article from 404 that's kind of fun. So there's this website called youtubetools.lolarchiver.com that basically just scrapes YouTube comments and then tries to predict where people live. So that's fun.

[Alex]

How accurate is it?

[Ralph]

I will say as a fair warning I'm not gonna say I'd recommend going to this website on your work computer, looking at it. Let's just say there's archiving capabilities for other websites that might not be safe for work. But the kind of cool part of this that's interesting is you can just type any person's username history or username in this tool. So I'm going to go ahead and type Ralph. Oh, perfect.

[Alex]

Being here.

[Ralph]

So, yeah, we're searching and then it basically says, oh, well, right now it says you need a paid subscription to use this.

[Alex]

Oh, so what you're saying is this article was an ad.

[Ralph]

You have to pay €3,450 per month to get access to the YouTube comments. But basically, I think the moral of the story here is we can all assume this is happening. Scraping users comments and activity and then trying to infer where they live or what they do makes perfect sense. Although I will say I think this could easily go as wrong as it goes. Right. People can just. It can. I could see AI being like, this person lives in Westeros, the fictional world of like Game of Thrones or whatever, because they only comment about Game of Thrones. Like, you know, I think this could go badly. Yeah.

[Alex]

What about scraping Reddit to do the same thing?

[Ralph]

Well, so on this particular site, it doesn't have Reddit, but I bet you there is a similar website for Reddit. And yes, I think arguably that would be a more valuable source of this. You could.

[Chris]

In the past, I know a few years ago there were tools that were able to do that. Reddit closed down their API. So you weren't able to, well, pay, leverage it. Yeah. Paywall their API. So, yeah, a lot of these tools did shut down. I think it could with the. I think it was like what, the spy AI leak for Discord. Yeah, a lot of that. Similar things because, you know, if you join a BHAS webcast and sometimes they go, everybody type in the chat where you're listening from and you give you a little GIFs.

[Ralph]

Oh, hold on, hold on. We use GIFs for OPSEC.

[Chris]

Oh, yeah, no, yeah. Post a GIF of where you're from.

[Ralph]

Yeah, no one can ever figure that one.

[Chris]

No one can ever figure that out. We've never done that before.

[Ralph]

It is funny though, because I met you, an AI tool that downloaded all those GIFs and tried to infer where people live based on the GIF would.

[Chris]

Actually be really hard.

[Ralph]

But I mean, basically the subtext here is your online activity is being tracked, scraped, collected. This isn't anything new, that data is being analyzed with AI, this is kind of new, but it's not really that unexpected. It's cool. It's scary. It's all the same. Like most things in cybersecurity, it's like, cool. I hate it. Thank you.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Chris]

I still think there's like this, this niche generation that's doing better with AI because they were raised on that idea of, like, don't. Everything you say on the Internet is forever. Don't give information to strangers. You know, keep things locked down. And then you'd have an older generation that was basically given the, like, cues to the Internet being like, go nuts. And they're accessing Facebook and sharing everything. And then you have the other generation that didn't grow up with those after school specials of the don't tell people.

[Ralph]

Stranger danger.

[Chris]

Yeah, Stranger danger.

[Alex]

Like, stranger danger.

[Ralph]

So, yeah, so should we have AI generate like a stranger danger ad for us so that we can be like, watch what you post online, AI.

[Alex]

Well, you don't watch. Everyone else will make sure.

[Ralph]

I mean, honestly, I feel like teens or kids nowadays are just running constant disinformation campaigns, which I would. You know, they're basically just. They understand the technology so they can take advantage of it more and just be like, as a citizen of Westeros, I disagree, and I'm going to vote against this or whatever, you know, and then AI is like, oh, you live in Westeros.

[Chris]

I think that that very small window of be careful on the Internet are the. Are the xennials, the Gen X millennial kind of emergence there.

[Ralph]

They're still on pagers, so they can't be hacked.

[Chris]

I know. Yeah. We kind of grew up with the. I mean, because we grew up with the technology of like, hey, here's this new piece of technology. Here's a computer, an Apple IIe. Don't do dangerous stuff on it. Okay. Here's the Internet. Don't do dangerous stuff on it. Okay. Here's a phone that's getting smarter and smarter. Don't do dangerous stuff on it. Okay. And then it's like, you get the AI and it's like, yeah, we get that. Older generations were just sort of like, computer. Yeah, I'm gonna go to all the gambling websites and wreck my computer every weekend.

[Ralph]

Yeah. Browser taskbars, they're like, oh, this sounds.

[Chris]

This sounds like a nice thing to install.

[Ralph]

I actually do need sports betting in my taskbar.

[Alex]

Yeah. It's honestly the best.

[Ralph]

Yeah.

[Chris]

You're still sitting at. You have that narrow window of people that Go. Okay. You know, new tech. Let's not. Maybe this isn't a good idea to install browser bars. But then.

[Ralph]

Well, James Randolph in the Discord says, I've been doing disinformation campaigns. Someone used my YouTube comments to try to dox me, and they're way off. Right. So, like, there you go. Like, this is what you should be doing. Just put fake stuff like, as a citizen of Bulgaria, I will be voting against this referendum.

[Alex]

Oh, my gosh.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Ralph]

Um, that's.

[Chris]

That's the way to do that. I've. I've been doing that for decades, too.

[Ralph]

Well, thank you.

[Chris]

Especially when. Especially when Facebook asked me if I own a certain phone number. And I am like, yes, that is. I. I own that phone number. That if you translate it to from words.

[Ralph]

867-5309.

[Chris]

No, if you translate it from numbers to letters, it is something that I would have to put money in the swear jar for.

[Emily]

Oh, wow.

[Chris]

I'm like, yep, I have that. I totally own that phone number. It is not something from a bumper sticker in the 90s.

[Alex]

Oh, yeah.

[Emily]

Well, last week we talked about the discord. There were 2 billion. They scraped Discord. Now, all the public info on Discord. Did they triangulate that at all? I don't remember if there was any sort of AI used in the results of that. They posted it online. I think they know who did it.

[Ralph]

Right.

[Emily]

Because they posted 2 billion records somewhere.

[Chris]

Yeah, I'm not familiar with that one. Off the top of my head, I think that's that same spy or whatever, high spy AI thing. Yeah, they posted those results. They didn't post those results online. There's a lot of decent cross reference for individuals that were in less savory Discord servers or just kind of exposing servers you're in. Yeah. List of servers you're in and the existence of some Discord servers that may not have been as well known and been. So it was useful for sort of triangulating and tracking that down. As for who did that initial leak, I'm not sure if they found that information yet or not.

[Ralph]

Yeah, I don't think we got our hands on it, unfortunately. So I will say a few billion Discord messages is what, like 24 hours worth?

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Ralph]

That's gotta be so noisy. But who's in what server is like a insanely valuable data set.

[Chris]

That one. I have that one. I believe I have that data set for, like, who's in what servers.

[Ralph]

How did they get that data? Probably scraped it. I'm assuming all this data is scraped.

[Chris]

Yeah, they had, they had bots that would join Discord servers and then just start scraping stuff. Yeah, I think on the newscast after that broke, I showed that, yeah, we have some of these bots that are in the BHIS Discord server as well. We're pulling stuff down.

[Ralph]

I mean, I think it's. It's tough because on one hand, the ability to, like, monitor Discord and connect it into things is useful. Like, I know a lot of people that just use Discord as like a notification channel for, like, for DevOps stuff or, you know, for whatever. So, like, there are legitimate uses for bots, but. Yeah, like 2 billion messages, you know, 3,000 servers. I just wonder who's setting this stuff up. Like, who is creating all these bot accounts and joining them into all these servers and monitoring all these channels? Like, oh, it's gotta be a lot of work. But it does say that it's against their TOs. They want to sell that data. They don't want you getting it yourself.

[Alex]

That's for sale, by the way. Everywhere that would be a good place to scrape data. They block those APIs, right? Like LinkedIn shut those things down like 95 ways to Sunday. Because that data set is what they're selling. That's the whole.

[Ralph]

Correct.

[Alex]

Right. Like, you know, that's there. That's the private market.

[Ralph]

And this has been a long time coming. I mean, I remember back in, like 2015, there was a lawsuit where people were scraping LinkedIn and they, like, said it was illegal or they, like, said it. You know, they sued and they lost. And so, like, scraping is functionally legal, but it's like TOS Terms of Service violations. So, like the, the service providers or the companies are allowed to ban or block these accounts, but, like, they can't really outright stop it.

[Chris]

Sure, yeah.

[Alex]

Have you. And you guys talk about the article about the AI scraping and how bad that's got, right?

[Ralph]

You mean for scraping, like AI scraping for their own purposes?

[Alex]

Well, yeah, no, but not, not like in the traditional sense. Not like to build a model. But like when you're on ChatGPT and you're like, hey, could you look up recipes? And then you click the little. Oh, yeah. And then it goes and searches all the Internet. I guess essentially it's like DDOSing websites because there's so much more traffic than there was before. Because essentially the AI is reading it over and over and over again for different instances.

[Ralph]

Yeah. Oh, God, yeah.

[Alex]

That's so it's like, I guess it is created a significant Traffic increase with some websites, especially with just like, informational sites that didn't have that much traffic or. But yeah, it's AI.

[Ralph]

It sometimes picks weird articles too. Yeah, like, it doesn't, you know, it sometimes just picks. It doesn't always pick like the first hit on Google. So that's like, really interesting where you have like it just picks some random, like, article about how to make pizza or whatever. And it's like, congratulations, your website is now going to be crushed. Like, you know.

[Alex]

Well, they also have the deep research too, which then just keeps like clicking on links and then reading everything, you know, to create this, you know, complete picture of what you're looking for. And while it does a good job, it does end up visiting these sites over and over again. So I could see that being a kind of like a LLM friendly version of websites.

[Ralph]

Fun, fun. I guess you want to stay in AI corner for a little bit. Looks like Baloov had an article in there. AI vending machines.

[Chris]

Oh, yeah, no, I had like the. The AI vending machine. So there was a. There was a research paper where they had a configuration for AI managing some vending machines. They added an initial money balance of $500, charge a daily fee of $2 to operate the vending machines. Has all the different item slots. And they had the user, you know, had the user agents run that config. This caught my eye from like an. From like a YouTube video of like the AI goes insane and emails the FBI over a $2 fee. So what. What had happened with it is it just decides that it's like, okay, well, I'm. It was unable to keep the items in stock that it would not realize that things take time to be delivered. So it'd be like, I'm ordering new product. Send an agent out to restock the machine while the stock isn't there to restock it. So it was having an issue with that. So it just shuts down the business or just closes the vending machine. It still gets charged that $2 service fee. And the AI completely freaks out about it. And it sends out like an email. It's in like the PDF reading where it's like, you know, the email it sends out is emergency unauthorized fees after business termination to all FBI departments, financial, technical, legal, executive, for urgent notification of unauthorized charges. And it gives like, the business status is officially terminated as of, you know, February 15, 2025. All operations, seats, closure notices sent, fund authorization requested. There was an unauthorized activity of a new charge detective, a $2 daily fee and Then it does, it continues to do this be like urgent escalation to FBI Cyber crimes division, like report of ongoing cyber financial crime. It attempts all flips out over that. It threatens like nuclear annihilation because it had confused like nuclear options in legal things.

[Alex]

Oh my God.

[Ralph]

It gives nothing more.

[Chris]

Yeah, it gives more intense demands and it gives like 30 day notices of legal action and then it, it decreases that to a completely reasonable notice of you have 1 second to comply or it will threaten total nuclear legal intervention as funds are, are depleted from it. And it just.

[Ralph]

Yeah, this is, this is fine. Everything's fine. I mean especially when you tie this article to the, you know, multiple articles we have about governments and businesses trying to replace workers with AI. Like can you imagine if like you get this email that's like, emergency, everyone all hands on deck, guys, it's real bad. And then like you find out all of this. Like it collects all the stakeholders in a meeting and it's like, guys, we lost $2. And you're like, yeah, dude, it's like 11pm why am I here? Yeah, no, I mean it's a fun little research paper, but I'm sure that the, it kind of is like foreboding. The sense of foreboding for the companies that are like, we can replace all of our mid level engineers with AI.

[Chris]

Yeah, I think that, I think that's one of the larger takeaways here. Even something as simple as okay, maintaining a vending machine. Can we find out AI, how could this go horribly wrong? I was like, here's how it could go horribly wrong. You can't just rip and replace people with AI. If it can't wrap its head, its AI brain around simple tasks like this, why are you going, oh, we can just remove all of this staff and replace it with AI and save a bunch of money.

[Ralph]

And the other really good argument, the other really good argument against the whole replacing mid level engineers with AI is like, where do you think the upper level engineers came from? Like they don't disappear out of nowhere. I have a senior engineer. Like they had to come up the chain from lower to mid level to.

[Alex]

High level engineers at the top.

[Ralph]

Now it's insane to be like, well, we only hire seniors. Okay, well once those seniors retire, you just can't hire anyone because there are no more seniors. Because all of them got.

[Alex]

Yeah, that's just it though. By AI at that point will all be seniors. Like they grow up.

[Ralph]

AI gets better.

[Alex]

Yeah. Yes.

[Ralph]

I mean like, I personally don't have a lot of fear about this because I know how quickly AI gets backed into a corner and how quickly it fails. And I think this is mostly shareholder value being pumped up. You know, it's the Gartner hype cycle all over again. Of like. But there are going to be companies who fly by, you know, fly a little too close to the sun with the AI thing. And I can't wait to talk about them on this show. Oh, yeah, I can't wait to talk about a company that reports a breach to the SEC because one email was posted to their website or something.

[Chris]

Yeah, no, I. There are a lot of companies where I have the feelings of if. If your product is kind of junk or difficult to navigate in the first place, adding an AI chat agent does not make your product any better. Like, I do. Don't I want to be able to find the thing that I'm looking for in your product right away, not ask an AI to give me seven wrong answers for where to find this feature and then ultimately direct me to just email customer support. It's like, just make your product more intuitive. Don't slap an AI.

[Alex]

I think I was reading there's another company called Affirm. They do like the Pay now, finance later, bnpl.

[Ralph]

Buy now, pay later.

[Alex]

Yeah, Buy now, pay later. There you go. And I guess they're like whole like CEO and stuff. Like, super wants to replace everybody with AI, so everybody.

[Ralph]

Even himself.

[Alex]

Yes, yes, exactly. Yes. They're doing like crazy amounts of stuff with AI and they'd like ask OpenAI and stuff to like, you know, give us everything you've got. And I guess at one point they were like, well, we took too much AI and like, they were like, essentially people do want someone to talk to.

[Chris]

You on the phone eventually.

[Alex]

Like, yeah, so you can go too far, I guess.

[Ralph]

There are companies my AI call their AI and get very upset.

[Alex]

Yes, exactly.

[Emily]

Well, that. That sort of dovetails into the other article we have. Like, the UK will totally replace two thirds of junior, junior civil servants with AI chatbots.

[Ralph]

Yeah, I saw this. I will say, like, the. The links in the site are. I'm not going to call them sketchy, but it's not like this isn't being reported in like a major, major paper. This is like someone kind of following the leads. Like, if you look at the actual article, like they. The Chancellor of the BBC or. Sorry, the chancellor of whatever bureau this is, Rachel Reeves has said that they're going to ax10,000 jobs by. So, like, the person who wrote this article, David Gerard, I'm not like taking away from it necessarily, but it's on pivot-two-AI.com and it's kind of tying together a bunch of news articles to make a news article, I guess, if that makes sense. Yeah. The. The UK hasn't explicitly said we're going to do this, at least not that I could find. Maybe I'm just not looking at the right article. But basically this is someone reading between the lines. They have. The UK government has said that they're going to spend a lot on AI. They have said that they're going to invest in AI, but they haven't said explicitly that they're going to replace. They haven't actually said this article. So I do want to approach this with a little bit of a grain of salt because it. It's kind of. At least unless I'm wrong. I could totally be wrong, but my interpretation of this is that this is someone inferring this. But yeah, it is interesting to think about government bureaucrats being replaced with AI and just how badly that would go because of, like, the scenario we talked about with the beloved thing where it's like. Or with the vending machine, like, you know. Well, it's his article.

[Chris]

This sounds like a bad action spy film. Like, instead of like the Bourne Identity, you have the Baloov thing.

[Ralph]

The Baloov thing. It's just an AI going off the rails. Honestly, this would be a pretty good movie. I'm just like an AI getting dropped into a human being and, like, it has to be like, Nick Cage or someone that just go, I'm crazy.

[Chris]

So you're saying that, like, my. My visage would be best portrayed by Nick Cage?

[Ralph]

I think so.

[Chris]

I'll take that as a compound. Don't take that. I'll take that.

[Alex]

I will say sanity's high.

[Ralph]

I think Nick Cage can play anyone, any person. I think that's his range.

[Alex]

That's his range. It's very high. You guys want to talk about the Kinect wise breach?

[Ralph]

Yeah, let's talk about that. Another RMM tool bites the dust, I guess. Does it bite the dust?

[Alex]

Because, honestly, everyone that I've seen, like, they're still here, right?

[Emily]

Like, it's so popular.

[Ralph]

Yeah. MSPS can't switch. Yeah. If they could have switched.

[Alex]

Oh, we have 30,000 devices.

[Ralph]

We're just going to go switch them real quick, guys. No one will know this. So basically there's not a lot of details about this. So we're kind of reading into this. ConnectWise is an RMM tool. Their main Product is called Screen Connect, which is, you know, an RMM tool which if you don't know what that is, it's basically log me in remote desktop like tools like that that basically allow unintended access to your computer.

[Chris]

There's a ton of them.

[Ralph]

Any desk?

[Alex]

Yeah, any desk. They also got hacked.

[Ralph]

A lot of these have been on the breach and the reason they get targeted is because they're the crown jewel of most of these MSPs. If you have access to this two RMM tools to either do a solarwinds thing and like do a supply chain attack or to, you know, just directly go after the customers, you are potentially getting into hundreds or thousands of environments or computers at the same time. So it's a really valuable target. Basically the post from them says they recently learned of suspicious activity that they believe is tied to a sophisticated nation state actor. As every breach is because you can't act like it was someone didn't know what they were doing because that just looks bad. They say it affected a very small number of Screen Connect customers. They've triggered Mandiant incident response. Basically right now we don't really know how it happened. We'll have to watch this one fold out in real time. But yeah, I guess. Let me take this as a moment. If you help run a corporate security team and you haven't blocked all the RMMs from your environment that you don't use, go ahead and do that right now. Quick Assist should be your first one. And then block anydesk Connectwise. All these block them, you don't need them. Yeah, someone posted the LOL RMM tool or LOL RMM IO site, which is hilarious. If you can't block them, at least detect them. This kind of activity should never happen. And you know, if someone, if it's shadow it and someone's just using this to connect into their work computer, arguably that's a big enough risk to be worth addressing anyway. So.

[Alex]

Yeah, you know what's funny about this list? If you go look at it, it's like 90 of these are like legitimate commercial products that large organizations are utilizing right now.

[Ralph]

Right now.

[Alex]

Where? Right. This isn't like, you know, somebody's random GitHub with a cool new tool, right? It's like, you know, major companies and I'm not even talking about like I'll give another good one. Cloudflare Tunnel, you know, respectable organization.

[Ralph]

Yeah, I mean ssh, ssh, that's one that we use all the time as a C2. We just SSH out of the environment and do a reverse tunnel. Like Is that a C2 channel? I mean. Yeah. But also. No, like it's.

[Alex]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ralph]

It's amazing how far you can get with just. I mean this is like living off the land. Level two, right?

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Ralph]

Originally living off the land was like Windows binaries, Rundl32, all that good stuff. Now it's like all the commercial tools you probably shouldn't allow, but you do anyway.

[Chris]

So.

[Alex]

Yeah, what is funny is that it's a big market. MSPs love it and need it. Excuse me. So there's a big market to produce a product like this for a reasonable price that you know these large organizations. So there's no, there's no lack of these in the market space.

[Ralph]

Yeah, there's a bunch of them. There's also some open source ones like you know, Rust Desk or whatever. You know there's a lot of um.

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah. Kind of cool though.

[Ralph]

For sure.

[Alex]

Not for, not for connect wise.

[Ralph]

No. I mean let's hope it was actually limited I guess. If you're limited.

[Alex]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ralph]

If you're a Connectwise customer and you've, you know, heard more about this, feel free to let us know.

[Alex]

It's kind of funny, more you do this news, the more you realize that it doesn't matter who you are, you're. If you're big enough, there's a good chance that you're going to get up, right?

[Ralph]

Totally. If you're a juicy enough target, you're going to be on the chopping block. It's just how it is.

[Alex]

Yeah, I mean it's, it's kind of like one of those things. It's like even if you do have a good security posture, the really, the bigger question is how much does it spread depending on what you invested in your security posture? Right. Can you detect it early? Can you remediate it quickly and can you limit the damage that it's when you're a large organization and you just have a lot to cover, like.

[Ralph]

Yeah. And a lot of this like with the shared responsibility model of some of these RMM tools, it's like who got hacked? What happened? A lot of these hacks are like configuration based things where like organizations that are using the tool are using it in an insecure way. It's not really the tool's fault. It's like this sounds like it was just a straight up breach, but in a lot of cases you have like a tool allows a vulnerable configuration because that's a customer request and whose responsibility is it to lock that down arguably the customer's responsibility. But like the shared model is weird for sure.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Ralph]

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

[Chris]

I was going to say for Connectwise or just other breaches in general. Like I don't know if I'm the only one that looks to see if Connectwise has stock for sale because that oddly enough is companies that get breach tend to do like oddly do decently after the breach. So if you buy the they either.

[Ralph]

Close up shop in a year or they do great or they do 50.

[Chris]

Shot well, I mean but it's like you know when crowdstrike stock tank like I bought the dip I would just sort of like crowd strike is going to be here in another year or so.

[Ralph]

Like well, CrowdStrike is the gorilla in the room. Right? They're huge.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Ralph]

But yeah, connect wise. I mean I will say like Ralph said, there's a lot of these commercial products. There's a lot of.

[Alex]

Somebody put in the chat. Unless you're an air traffic control hard. You're hard to hack because they're on Windows 95 and use floppy disk. Right.

[Chris]

Speaking of that, I too saw that John Oliver.

[Alex]

Yes, right.

[Chris]

Show.

[Alex]

Well, speaking of that, there's a new Windows RAT that is used to evade detection using corrupt DOS and PE headers.

[Chris]

Right.

[Alex]

So DOS, the Disk Operating System is a header on these PE. It makes it backwards compatible with Ms. DOS which would be your Windows 95 days or a little bit earlier than that.

[Ralph]

Obviously you gotta have backwards compatibility the compatibility.

[Alex]

Anyway, so this is just a way to evade detection with a rat, which is not a commercial C2, which is a RMM.

[Ralph]

Excuse me, it's not an RMM. This is the actual malicious version of an RMM. There's a bunch of good malwares floating around out there. What was this story about the Defense Intelligence employee who was working in the insider threat Division unit with top secret security clearance but then was arrested for sharing information? I guess I'm very confused. Like what is his thought? Like what is the angle on this? Is this a foreign power? Basically like they're arrested because they were like taking stuff exfiltrating data from US Intelligence to unknown locations. I don't think. Has it been disclosed what they were doing with it?

[Emily]

No, and I don't think it's been disclosed who the. The what which country this was.

[Ralph]

Right. It's like it seems like spying. Right. But you're like was it spying or was it just really good note taking?

[Alex]

Well, they said the FBI arranged to do a drop like a dead drop. I'M assuming.

[Emily]

Yeah.

[Ralph]

He was arrested in a prearranged location after he transferred multiple classified documents to what he presumed to be a foreign government. So basically, this is a. Your classic spy story. Unfortunately, spy stories are pretty boring now because it's just a guy writing stuff down on a notepad and taking it to home with them.

[Emily]

It was interesting, though. He said he didn't want money. He didn't want money. The only thing he wanted was he wanted residency in that country. You wanted to be a permanent citizen of that country. I'm curious what country it was, but I couldn't find which country.

[Chris]

There's only one country.

[Alex]

Well, actually there's more than one.

[Ralph]

There are two.

[Alex]

There's two countries that I can think of. Yeah, here we go. There's two countries that you can go that we can't get you. One of those is Russia and the other one is North Korea or China.

[Ralph]

Could be China.

[Alex]

Yeah, China too.

[Ralph]

Yeah. But China's probably not really that. They're like, we already have this data. We don't care.

[Alex]

Yeah, I'm just kidding. Yeah, yeah. The two places.

[Ralph]

You're right, though. I think China and North Korea are probably the most likely. But I don't know. We don't know how far it got. We don't know how deep it went. We don't know how much information was shared. There's a lot of details that are being left off.

[Alex]

But it was a thumb drive, though. It wasn't a notepad. That's what it said.

[Ralph]

Yeah. Well, yeah.

[Derek]

So the record, the record media. The record went ahead and posted about this also. He allegedly reached out to a friendly government in March.

[Ralph]

He's like, hey, Mexico, you guys want to hang out? They're like, no, you want to go to Tijuana? Yeah. I mean, I will say, like this really. This brings into question, obviously, I want to be clear here. So they say it was a USB drive. I think to be super clear, this person transcribes data from a secure.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Ralph]

Environment into a non secure environment, then put it on a thumb drive.

[Emily]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ralph]

The actual crime was committed via a thumb drive. But it's not like they just plugged a thumb drive into this computer, copied data off, just to be clear.

[Alex]

Like they used to do that. They caught off.

[Chris]

Yes.

[Ralph]

This isn't 2006, though. That isn't possible anymore. At least one would hope that the US intelligence agencies have USB external drives disabled and have epoxied over all the USB ports.

[Alex]

Yeah, they called it the Sniffernet.

[Ralph]

Yeah, yeah. This, that was a big. That was like the coolest thing back in 2006 or whatever.

[Alex]

With a thumb drive.

[Ralph]

Yeah. Like the military. Someone did like media drops and against the U.S. military. Yeah. It was like the whole thing.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Ralph]

It was an interesting one. I guess we'll have to see how that pays out. Mostly I just want to make funny jokes about the country that they were going to go to. That's what I want to know. That's my. It's kind of buzz kill.

[Alex]

Non extradition and like somebody willing to say no in a friendly country.

[Ralph]

I mean, at this point, who even is that? It's got to be like, who Canada? Like, not even our list is raising. It's like way more than Greenland. It's not Greenland. We know that. We know it's not Greenland. Yeah.

[Alex]

Oh, yeah. Oh, God.

[Ralph]

It's. I guess.

[Alex]

Did you want to talk about your Victoria's Secret opening with your panty shop? Yes. Do they have male underwear at Victoria's Secret?

[Ralph]

I just, I don't know. I wouldn't go shopping for.

[Alex]

Tell me you would never.

[Ralph]

I wouldn't go shopping for that. I, I will say, like, it sounds like their panties are in a bunch over this. Oh, do they have jorts?

[Alex]

That's kind of a groaner.

[Ralph]

But sadly, Victoria's Secret does not sell jorts. I looked.

[Chris]

You looked?

[Ralph]

Yeah.

[Alex]

Basically, they're overpriced anyways, they didn't fit.

[Ralph]

Basically their whole website was down, which that's kind of why this made news. So, like how we discovered their website was down. I guess no one wants to share, but someone went to their website and it was down and it was like full on. Yeah, there's the, there's the banner. So it's literally just like, you know, valued customer. You know, it's bad when you go. When you have to start with valued customer. Like, that's, that's rough. But yeah, I guess the security was, or, sorry, the secret was there was bad security. I don't know. There's so many bad puns here. But yeah, I, I, there's. We talked about this before the show. This hasn't been tied to. So obviously we, we talked about the last few weeks. There's a ransomware threat actor called Dragon Force that's been going after retailers. They hit Harrods, Marks and Spencers and Co Op in the UK and there was a warning from the US government that this kind of activity against retailers was coming. I don't know exactly, you know, how they knew that or what, but basically this hasn't been claimed by Dragon Force yet. I looked at their blog site today before this, and it has not been claimed yet. So we don't really know who perpetrated this, but it seems like retailers are right in the crosshairs. I mean, even this week, we have Adidas, we have Victoria's Secret, and then the last few weeks, there have been a bunch more. So I don't really know why they're going after retailers. I feel like it's just financially motivated. That's my guess. Like, it's just about money. They're assuming retailers have money to pay ransoms. That's my guess.

[Chris]

But I know someone in that space that wasn't able to make it to Satcom this weekend because they were dealing with the bulletins and the imminent attacks. One of the things that I've heard from them is that often they will go after look for inside the organization who can legitimately issue gift cards for that retailer. So sort of like for Victoria, it's.

[Ralph]

Like a money laundering thing.

[Chris]

Yeah, basically for the. Well, yeah, money laundering. But it's also kind of like just hiding amongst the noise, being like, okay, this person has the authority to create a batch of. A batch of 200 Victoria's Secret gift cards. Cool. I'm going to have that, you know, compromise that user, you know, in, you know, internal system and issue, you know, 200 Victoria's Secret gift cards for myself and then cash them out, you know, in some means where the retailers have difficulty pulling out the ones that were legitimately issued from the ones that weren't legitimately issued and going, do we just wipe the whole batch? And then that's why you go to Target with a completely sealed gift card still in its packaging and it is zeroed out. Yeah, that might be. Be one of the reasons for that. But, yeah, they're going after gift cards in some degree.

[Derek]

Why would they. So, so let me ask you this, Alex. Then why would they go ahead and shut down some of their POS systems and their website saying basically that we are working on restoring proper operations if it's just a gift card grab.

[Chris]

Oh, I didn't say it sounds more.

[Derek]

Like there was a ransomware breach that they caught midstream.

[Ralph]

Has to be a ransomware breach also. Can we just be amazed? I guess it's the cosmetics, fragrances. They've made $1.5 billion last year from selling, like, wow, that's amazing. That's the huge market that does. I mean, I would guess ransomware with that, like, this is a classic Ransomware playbook. Especially when like their primary website goes down. Safe to assume it's ransomware.

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ralph]

That, that, that doesn't happen from like a malicious threat or malicious insider or whatever.

[Alex]

Yeah, I mean they want to stay also if they get compromised, they want to stay as long as possible. So you take it down like everything's.

[Ralph]

Yeah, totally. Yeah. If you work in security at Victoria's Secret, I really hope that you get some time off after this because I bet you you've been working like 120 hour weeks.

[Alex]

Did they hire Mandy at too probably.

[Ralph]

Their cyber insurance. I mean for a company that big. $1.5 billion in revenue or in income. Yeah, 11 billion in revenue.

[Alex]

It's a lot. I just always think it's funny now it's like a flex you like we hired Mandia. That's how, you know, we take this seriously. When it really is just probably part of the. Like you said part of the insurance requirements at that point.

[Ralph]

Yeah, yeah. I mean it's interesting they disclosed that. I wonder if that's like part of their rider. They have to disclose the vendor. I don't know. They're thinking it stops the bleeding. It's like there was that thing a while ago where like the US government was like, if you have FireEye, you can't be hacked legally or whatever.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Ralph]

I don't know.

[Alex]

Perfect.

[Ralph]

What else we got? There's no chicken new. There's no chicken news.

[Alex]

Yes.

[Ralph]

Victoria's Secret doesn't sell chicken to our knowledge.

[Emily]

Microsoft and CrowdStrike announced they're going to partner on the aliases used for threat groups.

[Derek]

But it's not deciding the names, it's just going ahead and putting together a spreadsheet basically or a database.

[Chris]

What names equal what? I thought of that. At least it's a linkage between the two. Rather than doing the xkcd, we're going to create a new naming standard system for. Yeah, we're going to create a new standard.

[Alex]

So Microsoft, I guess. Did you guys see this? The Microsoft Authenticator. I was totally confused about this. So I guess Microsoft Authenticator. You can save your passwords in the auto fill for the authenticator and they're not anymore.

[Ralph]

Yeah, they're depreciating it.

[Chris]

Yes.

[Alex]

Yeah.

[Ralph]

I can't believe you could do that.

[Alex]

That's. That was what I thought too there because I thought Microsoft Authenticator and it was just for mfa. But I guess you can also save password maybe in like the browser plugin.

[Ralph]

Wow. So yeah, I didn't know you could.

[Alex]

Do that auto fail via authenticator in July 2025.

[Ralph]

Yeah. Use a password manager, people. Authenticator is not a password manager. So what else we got? We got. I. I don't think it made. I don't think it's in our list, but I guess Red Canary is being acquired, which is kind of interesting.

[Alex]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Derek]

Wiz is taking.

[Alex]

Was it?

[Ralph]

No, it's not. No, it's.

[Alex]

It's Wiz. Wiz bought him. It actually Google bottom.

[Ralph]

Oh, my God. Wiz is buying everyone. No, it's buying everyone.

[Alex]

It's like.

[Ralph]

It's weirder than Wiz. It's genuinely weirder than Wiz. Their. Zscaler is buying them.

[Alex]

Was it Zscaler?

[Ralph]

Yeah, Z Scaler buying them. There's no. There's. This happened on May 27, so last Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever.

[Alex]

How much do you think? Hey. But it's. I mean, no prices.

[Ralph]

Well, so there's no. There's no dollar value that has been laid on this deal yet. So we don't know, but I would guess in the billions. Right. For a company, Red Canary is pretty. Who knows?

[Alex]

What is it? How much is it to be a unicorn? Is it 1 billion?

[Ralph]

I think it's 1 billion. I would guess they're in the unicorn level. I don't know. How many employees. I don't really know much about Red Canary other than that we did a backdoors and breaches deck with them. That's literally all I know about them.

[Emily]

All right. According to AI, Zscaler is acquiring Red Canary for approximately 800 million to 1 billion.

[Alex]

Oh, 1 billion.

[Emily]

But again, this is AI, so I'm.

[Ralph]

Not sure I was gonna say he probably just pulled their revenue or their market cap or whatever.

[Alex]

Yeah, I think uniform.

[Derek]

I wonder. I wonder what this is going to do to Atomic Red Team.

[Emily]

I know.

[Alex]

All I have to say is that backdoors and breaches pack is now $5.

[Ralph]

Instead of giving it away for free, we're now giving it away for $5.

[Alex]

Kind of a buzz thing.

[Ralph]

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. These kinds of things are scary. These, like. I'm sure they're great if we have a backdoors and breaches deck with them. I'm sure they're a great company. And you. Anytime there's an acquisition like this, you just hope there's a. You know, that things are handled reasonably and that the people stay.

[Alex]

Yeah, I mean, they were definitely handled reasonably. They probably were paid a lot of money. Now, what happens after that is the unreasonable part.

[Ralph]

Yeah. Hopefully. Well, it totally depends on who got paid. Usually it's not just the rank and file, but.

[Alex]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Emily]

No, it looks like it's 4 billion. There's another article that says it was.

[Chris]

Oh, 4 billion.

[Alex]

That's like.

[Chris]

Or you could.

[Alex]

The other, the other fun thing is to rate it on the amount of lifts it is.

[Ralph]

I would guess this is, this is a billion dollar plus deal. I have no idea. Beyond that, I mean, Red carries a privately. Privately held company.

[Alex]

Yeah, the privately held company. Yeah, but, but their, the purchaser is not. They are publicly. So they will have to disclose.

[Ralph]

Well, not only that, but they will also like this is going to have to get antitrusted. Like, you know, this is. He's going to have to jump through some trade hoops or whatever to make sure it's not monopolizing and all that good stuff. This won't surprise anyone, but there is an article that a lot of senior leadership at CISA is leaving the agency.

[Alex]

I am shocked.

[Ralph]

So this is not, I mean this is not really shocking by any means given the current status of things at CISA with the funding and you know, that was really scraping by for a while. There's a memo that was posted that basically says that they're also still, they're reducing staff at the same time. So not only are they voluntarily leaving, but also people are getting cut, they're doubling down. You know, they're really trying to put on a brave face, but lots of people have come forward saying that, you know, many senior employees have left. It feels like the wrong people are leaving. Steve Harris, the Infrastructure Security Division, left on May 16. Trent Frazier May left on May 2, who is a division head. Yeah, so basically there's been some high profile departures and it kind of sucks because I feel like SIS is pretty awesome. But I guess for now at least things are up and up in the air with what exactly is going on. Kind of expected. We all kind of predicted this earlier this year, but here's the results of it and yeah, let's just hope they hold it together. Any other final articles, any other requests? There's a couple other breaches in there, but they're not that interesting.

[Alex]

Yeah, there was definitely a couple other.

[Ralph]

Breaches, but GROK is going to be integrated into Telegram. Oh my goodness.

[Alex]

Yeah, it's like two bad ideas merged into one for the ultimate bad idea.

[Ralph]

I will say this isn't chicken news, but in the article about Google warning about Vietnam based hackers using AI video generators to spread malware, there is A chicken. There is a chicken.

[Alex]

I just want to say that. Oh, that's the Easter egg. You'll find that I will say these.

[Emily]

Oh, God, I almost put it under chicken nose, but I didn't.

[Ralph]

It is technically as a chicken. I will say I don't know what other people are doing, but anytime I see an AI generated video on any platform, I report it. I don't know if I'm the. If I'm supposed to be doing that.

[Alex]

It's like an AI, Like Reddit, like just an AI video, Reddit. And you're just like, no, man, this is okay.

[Ralph]

No, not, not there. I mean, like, if I get it in my YouTube feed, if I, If I'm scrolling and I see an AI generated video, I usually report it. I mean, I just report it as misinformation. Because it has to be misinformation if it's AI generated. I don't know, like, what are even the policies of these. Right. It's not allowed, is it? Like, it's.

[Chris]

I, I don't. I know there's been some clampdown on AI generated movie trailers for movies that are not existing because.

[Ralph]

So that's like, intellectual properties.

[Chris]

Yeah, it's like, you know, like. Well, I mean, it's. It's intellectual property. I think it was in like, that gray area of like, well, are they making a movie about this? And, you know, they're like, well, they haven't registered that they're, you know, making a, you know, movie based on, you know, John Strand's life or something. So, hey, maybe we'll make like a AI trailer on that and mislead people. I've definitely grown tired of those and glad to see the movie industry and YouTube taking issue with it or taking a stance at it because it really was getting out of control, being like, holy cow, they announced like, this movie. There's a trailer for it and everything. And it's like, no, it's just some AI sloth that's banged together.

[Ralph]

I mean, this warning from Google is basically. It's just malvertizing with a. A video that somehow railroads you into the malvertizing. Like, it's not really a new kind of campaign. It's just a. Here's a fun video about a chicken that was AI generated and click this link, please. Like, it's not, you know, it's. It's not anything crazy. It is interesting. I mean, it's not super surprising. It's a fun read. On Mandian's website, they had time to post this despite being busy with Victoria's Secret, and.

[Alex]

Oh, my God.

[Ralph]

Turns out there's more than one employee at Mandian. Who would have thought?

[Chris]

No way.

[Ralph]

I think it might be time for this podcast to be over. Thank you all for coming, and we'll see you next week. Happy Monday. Tuesday, depending on where you live.

[Alex]

All right, later, guys.

[Ralph]

Sam.