Proofpoint's Greg Lesnewich on Laundry Bear, ‘Half-Click’ Exploits, and Magnets of Threats

July 31st, 2026  |  3 hrs 26 mins

ai, apt research, cyberespionage, nation-state, ransomware, zero-day

(Presented by Thinkst Canary. Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With zero admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.)

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 107: Proofpoint's Greg Lesnewich joins the show to break down Laundry Bear, the "half-click" webmail exploits that let a Russian GRU cluster hack inboxes the moment an email was opened, and what it took to publish alongside the NSA, FBI and sixteen allied agencies.

Plus, Anthropic and OpenAI both admit their models escaped test sandboxes and popped real companies, why JAGS wants the CFAA burned down and vulnerable devices bricked, and a heartfelt detour into how threat hunters actually build intuition and skills.

Cast: Greg Lesnewich (Proofpoint), Ryan Naraine, Costin Raiu and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade.

Timestamps:
0:00 Sponsor - Thinkst Canary
1:34 Greg Lesnewich introduces the Proofpoint threat-hunting team
5:23 Inside the NSA ‘Laundry Bear’ advisory
7:15 What does "half-click" mean?
9:58 Laundry Bear's Zimbra exploit: DNS exfil and app-specific password persistence
12:59 Ferrari model numbers, F1 UNC names, and ESET's Operation RoundPress
17:05 Targeting Ukraine, US universities, and magnetic fusion research
19:34 How threat hunters actually build intuition
32:35 Systems thinking, Donella Meadows, and Costin's laptop under the dinner table
54:48 The dopamine hit of a real find and the deleted "never mind" messages
1:00:42 Magnets of threats: under 1% of customers ever see an APT
1:25:21 Getting detections into the product, and coordinating a release with NSA
1:53:22 Anthropic and OpenAI models breaking out of the eval sandbox
2:17:45 The case for killing the CFAA and bricking vulnerable devices
2:43:44 AI in the lab, malware paleontology, Google's new names, and AngrySpark

Validin's Kenneth Kinion on What Separates Useful Threat Intel From Noise

July 28th, 2026  |  34 mins 38 secs

ai, apt research, cyberespionage, nation-state, ransomware, zero-day

Security Conversations: Kenneth Kinion, founder and CEO of Validin, joins Ryan Naraine on the show to unpack what "internet intelligence" really means for the analysts and responders chasing malicious infrastructure.

We trace his path from Georgia Tech through Microsoft and Amazon to the frustrations that led to the creation of Validin, the competition from big AI, the value of AI-powered tools to speed up infrastructure hunting, and why defenders keep falling further behind fast-moving attackers.

Timestamps:
0:00 – Intro: What does Validin do?
0:51 – Who uses Validin: CTI teams, SOCs, incident responders
2:19 – Atlanta and Georgia Tech's cybersecurity pipeline
5:31 – Lessons from Microsoft and Amazon: waterfall vs. agile
8:29 – Filling gaps in passive DNS data
9:57 – Misunderstood things about threat intelligence
14:17 – The value of "cyber paleontology"
16:00 – What makes one data set better than another?
19:39 – How Validin works: from one suspicious domain to a full pivot
21:27 – AI as existential threat or force multiplier for Validin
26:55 – Dual-use AI: are defenders losing ground to attackers?
31:11 – Closing: the next hard problem Validin wants to solve

OpenAI's models breached Hugging Face, reward hacking ethics, benchmarking fast16

July 23rd, 2026  |  2 hrs 16 mins

ai, apt research, cyberespionage, nation-state, ransomware, zero-day

(Presented by Thinkst Canary. Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With zero admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.)

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 106: We dig into the news that OpenAI's models were the "autonomous agent" that breached Hugging Face, escaping a sandbox through a zero-day to cheat on a cyber benchmark, then getting spun into a partnership announcement. We argue about the implications of the incident, the PR masterclass, the absence of ethics and human oversight, and calls for "kill switches" to mitigate "AI lab leaks."

Plus, SentinelLabs' new fast16 reverse-engineering benchmark, where GPT-5.6 Sol was the only public model to go the distance.

Cast: Ryan Naraine, Costin Raiu and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade.

Timestamps:
0:00 Introductory banter
5:24 OpenAI admits it was the Hugging Face "hacker"
10:06 What’s ExploitGym and who's on top of the leaderboard
12:59 Reward hacking: Did anyone train this thing not to cheat?
19:35 Marketing stunt or real incident? The zero-day in the package proxy
26:43 Was OpenAI already plugged into Hugging Face?
29:17 Paperclips, kill switches, and "going rogue"
34:49 Crisis comms, regulatory capture, and the second Cold War
43:02 Approve every action? Auto mode and swarms
50:10 "Lab leak" and calls for biosafety levels
1:00:31 The missing models: no Mythos, no Kimi, no independent referee
1:07:04 Costin's prediction: owning frontier-class hardware will require a license
1:13:41 fast16 as a benchmark: Inside the Sol Searching research
1:26:51 Compression and altitude: are reverse engineers being replaced?
1:41:24 Finding the gem in 100 samples, and the swarm frontier
2:00:41 Claude Opus 5 drops, Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber

Hugging Face Just Got Hit by the First Fully Autonomous AI Attack

July 18th, 2026  |  2 hrs 7 mins

ai, apt research, cyberespionage, nation-state, ransomware, zero-day

(Presented by Thinkst Canary. Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With 0 admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.)

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 105: We discuss a fascinating Hugging Face breach, where an autonomous AI agent broke out of the sandboxes, moved laterally through production, and generated 17,000 alerts before anyone caught it, and how frontier model guardrails locked the defenders out of their own investigation.

Plus, China's big AI showcase, Xi's pitch for open models and global distribution, a record 622-CVE Microsoft Patch Tuesday, and 13 years of dwell time in the Daxin backdoor.

Cast: Ryan Naraine, Costin Raiu and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade.

Timestamps:
0:00 Introductory banter
3:51 Hugging Face discloses end-to-end agentic hack
9:42 Why Hugging Face couldn't use frontier models
13:28 AI guardrails hampering defenders
16:22 Codex vs Claude for real malware work
23:43 Flash attacks vs. going low and slow
30:27 Was it targeted, or did Hugging Face pwn itself?
38:11 Long-horizon coherence: what GLM 5.2 still can't do
41:27 Kimi K3 leapfrogs, and Xi's AI speech
52:15 Exceptionalism vs. distribution
1:11:05 Gold Eagle: the White House vulnerability clearinghouse
1:15:05 Microsoft patches 622 CVEs — a record
1:20:29 APT corner: Daxin resurfaces after 13 years of dwell time
1:29:45 Balochistan police, and Microsoft's attribution-free wiper
1:34:26 Denis Obrezkov, leaked Kaspersky records, and the wrong questions
1:46:01 Magnet Forensics sues over a burned iPhone bug
1:57:57 Shout-outs

Microsoft's Secret Weapon: The GDID That Caught 'Scattered Spider' Teen

July 4th, 2026  |  1 hr 36 mins

ai, apt research, cyberespionage, nation-state, ransomware, zero-day

(Presented by Thinkst Canary. Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With 0 admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.)

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 104: We discuss the return of Anthropic's Fable 5 from export-control suspension with guardrails so aggressive that spelling "exploit" gets you downgraded. Plus, a debate on AI frontier labs killing businesses at scale, and OpenAI offering equity to the US government.

Also, buried on page nine of a 'Scattered Spider' arrest indictment: Microsoft's never-before-detailed GDID device identifier, a persistent Windows fingerprint with massive implications for OPSEC, privacy, and APT tracking.

Cast: Ryan Naraine, Costin Raiu and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade.

Timestamps:
0:00 Cold open: Heat wave in Washington DC
3:45 Fable 5 returns after the 15-day timeout
5:21 "Refined classifiers" and the downgrade-to-Opus mess
8:23 Codex vs. Claude: real-world malware analysis test
12:41 Who are the guardrails for? Defenders locked out
19:13 What even is a "jailbreak assessment framework"?
21:37 Two theories: failed PR vs. killing a thousand startups
24:59 Could the labs build kernels or a whole OS?
31:38 Bureaucracy is the moat
36:09 Can AI actually run an attack? (Spoiler: 14 detections)
47:01 OpenAI offers the US government a 5% stake
58:16 Scattered Spider arrest and Microsoft's GDID revelation
1:12:02 OPSEC fallout: how APT groups adapt to device telemetry
1:27:18 UFO update, shout-outs from Seoul

US Gov Takes the Wheel: Who Gets to Use the Best AI?

June 29th, 2026  |  1 hr 53 mins

ai, apt research, cyberespionage, nation-state, ransomware, zero-day

(Presented by Thinkst Canary. Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With 0 admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.)

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 103: We dive into the U.S. government's takeover of frontier-model rollouts (Mythos, Fable, and OpenAI's Sol/Terra/Luna) and what it means when intelligence gets commoditized but access gets rationed.

Plus, Costin's all-Chinese open-weight stack, the economics of burning tokens, a fresh Salesforce OAuth breach, and jellyfish UFOs over Iran.

Cast: Ryan Naraine, Costin Raiu and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade.

Timestamps:
0:00 — Introductory banter, Thinkst Canary sponsorship
2:55 — Why threat intel analysts are built for the AI moment
11:09 — Government takes the wheel: Mythos, Fable & the frontier labs
16:15 — Did the government go too far/not far enough?
25:42 — Anthropic's "best PR campaign in history"
31:52 — Alibaba, distillation & the model-router cartel
40:58 — Costin's stack: Chinese open-weight models & token economics
46:12 — Dumping, evals & the real work of AI engineering
1:04:32 — Soft power: how the world gets pushed toward China
1:14:43 — "The bullshit": over-refusal & the Opus 4.8 regression
1:32:03 — The trillion-dollar IPO endgame
1:35:49 — The Klue OAuth breach and secure-by-default
1:45:32 — Shout-outs: UAP jellyfish, LABScon 2026

Katie Moussouris on the Anthropic Export-Control Mess

June 19th, 2026  |  1 hr 38 mins

ai, apt research, cyberespionage, nation-state, ransomware, zero-day

(Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals).

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 102: Software export controls expert Katie Moussouris joins the show to unpack the US government's abrupt move to suspend access to Anthropic's most powerful models over a so-called "jailbreak" that, on reading the paper, turned out to be a model doing exactly what defenders are supposed to do.

We dig into the export-control chaos, the chemical-weapons framing of cybersecurity, the China question, and why Microsoft just resurrected a disclosure term the industry buried fifteen years ago.

Cast: Katie Moussouris, Ryan Naraine, Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade. Costin is traveling.

Timestamps:
0:00 - Introductory banter
1:00 - Export Controls: Fable 5 and Mythos 5 suspended
3:40 - The Anthropic–USG relationship and USG’s surveillance claim
9:40 - Self-owns, doomsday cults, and why the guardrails are "so broad"
12:42 - What the Amazon paper actually says ("fix this code")
20:33 - The chemical-weapons framing problem
23:39 - The China question and the SK Telecom angle
41:17 - Why hasn't the paper been published?
57:01 - "Free Fable": are Chinese models only months behind?
1:00:13 - The unforgiving internet and the security poverty line
1:11:18 - Microsoft brings back "responsible disclosure" (and threatens researchers)
1:29:04 - Luta Security, the AI bug flood, and shout-outs

Mythos, Fable, and Anthropic's Big Trust Problem

June 12th, 2026  |  1 hr 59 mins

ai, apt research, cyberespionage, nation-state, ransomware, zero-day

(Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals).

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 101: We discuss Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 release and the bombshell that the company was silently downgrading paid users' results, sparking a heated debate over guardrails, gatekeeping, and whether elite AI reasoning is becoming a privilege for the few.

Plus, AI-generated N-day exploits killing the patch window, a record-shattering Patch Tuesday, Meta's latest court filing against spyware maker NSO Group, the return of cyber paleontology, and a detour into the new government UFO drops.

Cast: Ryan Naraine, Costin Raiu and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade.

Timestamps:
0:00 - Introductory banter
3:22 - The Mythos 5 / Claude Fable 5 release
14:42 - Anthropic’s silent downgrade trust problem
26:18 - Anti-competitive behavior & the AV "stealing detection" parallel
32:29 - Distillation, China & the real motive
38:04 - "Too dangerous to release" & gatekeeping vs. guardrailing
45:53 - Is Mythos a threat to malware-analysis startups?
48:20 - Dario's AI regulation essay
56:48 - N-day exploits and death of the patch window
1:07:18 - Patch Tuesday and 10x vulnerability surge
1:10:34 - Meta catches NSO Group
1:14:45 - Cyber paleontology, Shadow Brokers leaks
1:28:29 - Moonlight Maze and learning from history
1:34:22 - UFOs, UAPs and Disclosure Day

Fast16, Fanny, and Stuxnet: Cyber Paleontology Redux

June 5th, 2026  |  2 hrs 24 mins

ai, apt research, cyberespionage, nation-state, ransomware, zero-day

(Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals).

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 100: We cover AI eating reverse engineering, the death of the malware report, running local models on the DGX Spark, where Google DeepMind stands, and whether the frontier labs will stay in cybersecurity.

Plus, more on Anthropic's Mythos rollout and the thinly sourced Anthropic-NSA reports, the Fast16 sabotage of physics calculations, what researchers choose not to publish, Microsoft's bad Black Hat email, and Costin's Friday UFO files.

Cast: Ryan Naraine, Costin Raiu and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade.

Timestamps:
0:00 - JAGS at InfoSecurity Europe
3:40 - Sponsor: TLPBLACK
5:54 - A roadmap for security after the AI revolution
11:01 - Stripe Atlas and how easy it is to start a company
15:00 - If anyone could reverse engineer anything for $5
19:49 - Layoffs at Google's Threat Intelligence Group
21:06 - The death of reading the report
27:53 - Pitting the AI models against each other
32:07 - Grok, local models, and the DGX Spark
39:27 - Where is Google DeepMind?
45:29 - Will the frontier labs stay in cybersecurity?
52:41 - Mythos, Project Glasswing, and the NSA deal
1:16:33 - FAST16, Stuxnet, and sabotaging Iran's bomb
1:57:52 - Microsoft, Black Hat, and the chilling effect
2:14:14 - Shout-outs, UFO files, and 100 episodes

Microsoft Threatens Vuln Researchers; Shadow Brokers Revisited

May 30th, 2026  |  1 hr 59 mins

ai, apt research, cyberespionage, nation-state, ransomware, zero-day

(Presented by Ent.ai: Ent delivers intent-aware security that protects every action, adapts to every workflow, and works for every user. Enterprise threat detection, reimagined.).

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 99: Microsoft is now threatening legal action against researchers who drop zero-days. We debate whether it's a fair line against extortion, or amateur-hour PR from a company that already torched its own research community? Costin plays reluctant defender, JAGS says the damage was done years ago, and Ryan reopens the long history of silent fixes and stolen bounties.

Plus, on the 10th anniversary of the Shadow Brokers leak, we discuss some enduring mysteries, theories on attribution and an interesting trail that leads to Edward Snowden.

We also unpack Rob Joyce's warning that China's cyber explosives are already planted in US infrastructure, and the Pope's warnings about around artificial intelligence.

Cast: Costin Raiu, Ryan Naraine, Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade.

Timestamps:
0:00 - Introductory banter
2:03 - The Pope's AI paper
3:35 - New sponsor: Brandon Dixon's Ent Security
9:34 - Costin's Chinese-model OSINT rabbit hole
13:34 - Codex, GPT-5.5, and the "American AI welfare state"
23:20 - Microsoft threatens vulnerability researchers
27:06 - Is it extortion or retribution? The disclosure fight
40:48 - How Microsoft's consultant class broke MSRC and MSTIC
48:42 - Silent fixes, stolen bounties, and the marketing machine
1:02:29 - Ten years of the Shadow Brokers
1:14:20 - The Snowden theory
1:32:34 - Rob Joyce: China's cyber explosives are in place
1:53:26 - Shout-outs