Risky Business #835 -- Why the Fast16 malware is badass

On this week’s show, Patrick Gray and James Wilson are joined by special guest-host Dmitri Alperovitch. They discuss the week’s cybersecurity news, including:

• The US government is mad as hell about Chinese firms stealing American AI technology
• Dmitri has an opinion or two about the US selling Nvidia chips to China
• Speaking of Chinese AI, Kimi’s new 2.6 is very interesting
• The US sanctions a Cambodian senator for earning mega bucks through scam compounds
• And a ransomware family is promoting itself as being … quantum-safe?

This week’s show is sponsored by Trail of Bits. CEO and co-founder Dan Guido chats to Pat about how private inference works and Trail of Bits’ audit of WhatsApp’s private AI setup.

This episode is also available on Youtube.

• Exclusive: US State Dept orders global warning about alleged AI thefts by DeepSeek, other Chinese firms | Reuters
• moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6 · Hugging Face
• Discord Sleuths Gained Unauthorized Access to Anthropic’s Mythos | WIRED
• Newly Deciphered Sabotage Malware May Have Targeted Iran’s Nuclear Program—and Predates Stuxnet | WIRED
• Hackers deployed wiper malware in destructive attacks on Venezuela’s energy sector | The Record from Recorded Future News
• Mystery Around Venezuelan Cyberattack Deepens, with New Discovery of "Highly Destructive" Wiper
• Risky Business #819 -- Venezuela (credibly?!) blames USA for wiper attack - Risky Business Media
• AI Tools Are Helping Mediocre North Korean Hackers Steal Millions | WIRED
• CISA: US agency breached through Cisco vulnerability, FIRESTARTER backdoor allowed access through March | The Record from Recorded Future News
• US, UK authorities warn that Firestarter backdoor malware survives patching | Cybersecurity Dive
• Surveillance campaigns use commercial surveillance tools to exploit long-known telecom vulnerabilities | CyberScoop
• UK regulator closes loophole that allowed rogue companies to track phone users' location | Reuters
• US sanctions Cambodian senator for millions earned through scam compounds | The Record from Recorded Future News
• Vercel says some of its customers' data was stolen prior to its recent hack | TechCrunch
• Supply Chain Security Incident Update
• Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones | TechCrunch
• Kyle Daigle on X: "Wanted to provide more clarity about this. Yesterday, we had a regression in merge queue behavior where, in some cases, squash or rebase commits were generated from the wrong base state, making earlier changes appear reverted in branch history. 2,804 pull requests out of over 4M" / X
• Securing the git push pipeline: Responding to a critical remote code execution vulnerability - The GitHub Blog
• One ransomware crew now drives half of all cyber claims: At-Bay | Insurance Business
• In a first, a ransomware family is confirmed to be quantum-safe - Ars Technica
• What we learned about TEE security from auditing WhatsApp's Private Inference