A Thousand Agents Walk Into Hugging Face

August 28th, 2026  |  2 hrs 27 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 111: OpenAI finally published a technical Hugging Face post-mortem, and Costin's verdict is blunt. He reads it as a document written for policymakers rather than for the blue teams who have to survive a thousand-agent swarm.

We also dig into NVIDIA's $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, why JAGS thinks a frontier lab standing against open-source looks weak, and what that new industry open letter on cyber defense actually asks anyone to do. Plus, hotel Wi-Fi tradecraft after CaptiveCrunch, the FBI's ORB network takedown with Lumen, Chinese routers that ship backdoored from the factory, and the TeamPCP arrests in Australia.

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

Timestamps:
0:00 Introductory banter
1:11 TLPBlack, incident response, and why it starts at the router
4:11 CaptiveCrunch and Juanito's travel router kit
7:59 Costin's VPN/hotel WiFi stack
12:36 State of Statecraft, LABScon, and Offensive AI Con
17:16 OpenAI's Hugging Face post-mortem technical report
21:43 A swarm of a thousand agents
27:35 Who was OpenAI’s report written for?
33:05 Fail2ban, canaries, and catching agents in your logs
40:34 NVIDIA buys Hugging Face for $12.9 billion
44:42 The open weights fight and rooting for China
52:47 Nemotron, DGX Spark, and the RAM price spiral
1:03:26 Open letter on collective AI-powered cyber defense
1:30:21 Lumen's Quartermaster and the FBI ORB takedown
1:59:05 Backdoored ZBT routers, Chinese phones, and the TeamPCP arrests

Inside the EncroChat law-enforcement implant, Irregular's AI sandbox failure

August 21st, 2026  |  2 hrs 11 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 110: We dig into Computer Weekly's scoop on the EncroChat hack and news that the French law enforcement implant was cobbled together from GitHub. Plus, Irregular, the $450M startup running sandboxes for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, drones over Romania's gas platforms, OpenAI's two-week training pause, and T-Mobile taking scissors to a cable during Salt Typhoon incident response.

Stick around for a UFO segment that somehow involves Dr. Phil.

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

Timestamps:
0:00 Introductory banter; LabsCon speakers announced
9:06 A naval drone reaches the Neptun Deep gas platform
17:38 OpenAI pauses RL training: what "slowing the pace of scaling" costs
24:34 Guardrails vs refusals vs alignment.
33:54 Irregular, formerly Pattern Labs: $80M, $450M valuation, one job
46:11 JAGS on why security needs a new batch of startups right now
1:06:52 EncroChat revealed: a GitHub-sourced implant, IOCs
1:15:12 Law enforcement malware vs intelligence malware
1:21:07 T-Mobile, Salt Typhoon, and cutting the cable with a pair of scissors
1:32:06 Captive Crunch: hotel Wi-Fi, OAuth token theft, and the MSP supply chain
1:47:00 ICE RELIC, UNC6293, and the trouble with subcluster naming
2:00:39 UFO corner: David Grusch, Dr. Phil, and the Skywatcher Project
2:05:44 Shout outs, the Costin Challenge

A tiny 12 KB Windows backdoor, one victim, and a dead domain

August 17th, 2026  |  2 hrs 23 mins

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

(Presented by State of Statecraft: A security and intelligence conference that brings together multiple disciplines, backgrounds, and nationalities to share research into the covert activities of nation-states and other malign actors.

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 109: The buddies dig into a new White House memo handing vetted private companies real offensive cyber authorities, and Costin explains why a stack of ransomware takedown cases has been sitting on a shelf waiting for exactly this.

Plus, a tiny 12 KB Windows backdoor found on one machine with a dead C2, the mercenary outfits quietly living inside telcos, and why Google continues to flounder in the race for AI dominance.

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

Timestamps:
0:00 Introductory banter
0:58 State of Statecraft, and a late CFP window
3:24 The White House offensive hacking memo
6:37 "Hack back" is the wrong frame for what's being authorized
11:20 Ransomware cases sitting on the shelf
17:01 The million-dollar bond and who can realistically play
22:29 Where DPRK crypto theft falls under the new definitions
28:15 Would TLP Black take a contract?
36:55 Gen Digital's 12 KB backdoor hiding its C2 in desktop.ini whitespace
46:57 Passive DNS, registration patterns, and pivoting on a dead domain
57:32 Feeding a one-off find back into detection engineering
1:02:14 Metador, Mafalda, and the mercenaries who love telcos
1:17:07 Armored Likho and what "Western APT" really means
1:28:16 The IOC market, private reporting, and CTI’s matching problem
1:58:10 Google's culture problem, the weekly model churn, and Patch Tuesday math

Inside OpenAI's Black Hat Confession

August 8th, 2026  |  2 hrs 14 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 108: OpenAI got on the Black Hat stage and walked through how its own agent swarm hacked Hugging Face. We discuss and struggle to decide whether to clap or panic.

Plus, why only the attacker can do forensics now, frontier models being built as cyber-weapons on purpose, APT29's "Dark Hotel" comeback in luxury hotels, China's swipe at Palo Alto, the Iran-water-system FUD, and an eye-opening Liechtenstein money-laundering hack.

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

Timestamps:
0:00 Introductory banter - Black Hat went full RSA
1:11 TLP Black sponsor read
3:58 A deflated, AI-pilled show floor
8:31 AI stunt hacking and AI slop
16:20 The OpenAI–Hugging Face talk
21:00 Not all the same incident: OpenAI vs. Meta, Anthropic, and Irregular
25:49 Swarms of agents, Artifactory message boards, and the defense gap
32:26 Offense vs. defense: what's really in the training data?
41:22 Guardrails, KYC, and "too dangerous to release"
48:07 JAGS's unpublished Opus 5 benchmark — grinding to 25% and stuck
59:30 AISI, recklessness, and the OpenAI Frontier Risk Council
1:06:27 Stronger models everywhere: Qwen, Sol, Astra, rushing off the cliff
1:18:32 APT29 / "Dark Hotel" reborn + travel OPSEC
1:39:56 China's Palo Alto review, spy-agency rankings, Iran/water FUD
1:57:28 Liechtenstein AML hack, JAGS's promotion, mental health

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