FCC Blocks Foreign-Made Routers – 2026-03-30

What what percentage of people even buy a router? Z like, minority, 25%. Eight per no. That's way too high. That's way too high.

90 might be closer.

Yeah. Like Well, it just wraps up ISP. Yeah.

Yeah. What are the ISPs? Like that.

But all those are banned too, by the way.

So Well, only new versions. So really the ISPs can just be like, oh, sorry. We can't give you a newer one here. Have another one

Well, they haven't given new ones in years anyways. This

one's only got doesn't even have four gigahertz on it or five.

But yeah. So it's all of they can't import, like, new new. They just can't do new models, like new versions.

Yeah. Let's hope Xfinity or Comcast has a back stock of 600,000 routers that they now get to burn through over the next

ten years.

But they I mean, they can keep buying the ones that they're already getting is what I'm saying.

Oh, they can't?

Yes, they can.

Only if they won't

It's not new production. It's new models.

Yeah. So they actually Well,

let's not talk about articles when we're live. Right. Right. Banter. Gosh. All of you. It's like your children never podcast before.

Sorry. I'm sorry, guys. I took last week off, so I forgot everything I know about podcasting.

That's all. It's okay. You knew something about podcasting? Apparently not. I'm not Does that have any better news article today? I thought we were all

rookies here. There's not a chicken news article, is there?

No. There isn't. Someone's trolling me and put something in there.

Made you click.

Something's in there, and it's definitely not chicken related, and there's no attempt to pretend it's chicken related.

How did we end up with a article from brobible.com that has a video of a robot slapping a kid in the face.

Wait. What?

What is that? And everything else.

How did I miss that?

We're gonna skip that one on The Real News, but it's it's an article, I guess.

It's definitely worth mentioning.

Is it though? Because it's just a robot trying to dance and then some stupid kid gets in the way. It's not the robot's fault.

No. I just meant like right now. That's it.

Right now.

Yeah. The video is pretty great.

The video

is love the video. I I recommend it.

There's another robot.

It's clearly accidental. I'm sorry. I'm gonna link to bro bible. I I don't know about bro bible. I do not endorse this website at in any way shape or form. I don't know where this falls in the political spectrum or if it's just a malware site. I'm sorry.

This is

My favorite part is the guy with, like, the herding stick. That a robot? Yeah. Like, one of these, you know, robot handlers, and he's just got, like, a big stick that is clearly there to, you know, hit or poke the robot in case, I don't know, hits a kid or something.

It's like one of those high voltage electricity hooks for like when people are flipping big switches and it like has you know, just like grab someone and pull them.

He he throws it up and it immediately moves away from the stick. So they've obviously done some training on stick based discipline.

Carrot carrot and stick based.

Negative one negative one point to stick stick scene.

Now we're not only gonna have robots and AIs, like, doing things to sabotage their their programmers or handlers. Now they're gonna be programmed to be afraid of sticks? Oh, that's not gonna end well.

That's the perfect thing. We've programmed them now to be scared of sticks. We'll be fine. That's it.

Right? Long before they turn those against us? Come on.

Roboapocalypse, you just run into the forest. Movies. You're good. It's like it's it'll be similar to, like, vampires or, like, stakes but sticks.

I mean, of the things that robots could turn against us, I feel like sticks is the least harmful.

I guess it depends on how big the stick is and what the stick is made of.

Yeah. Maybe they make it into a sphere.

A neutron stick that blows the sun up.

That kid should've just got out of the way. He he saw it coming. He literally did he see it coming? I don't know if he saw that coming. He saw it coming. Look. Look. Look. He's like, oh, no. Boom. I feel bad for laughing.

Nah. Kids what is it? What is the subreddit? Kids falling over or whatever? It's one of the best ones. Alright.

Yeah. I'm I'm sorry. I've been just as discombobulated and accidentally hit people. I'm not buying it.

Really? Was anyone there with a stick?

Well, the human had the stick.

So at your like dance recital, someone was carrying a stick just like the guy in the video. Just like

Dude, wasn't a dance recital. It was one hell of a party though.

Oh, was it was one of those weddings,

Alright. Let's roll the finger. Let's do this.

Alright. Here we go. Maybe. Here we go. Oh, sorry. I was I was typing. Excuse me. Here we go.

Sorry. No typing allowed during the show. One. Hello, and welcome to Black Hills Information Security's talkin' about news. It's 03/30/2026.

You gotta start early.

You gotta start early these days. How's it going, everyone? We got Ralph, the cofounder of US based routers for what would it be? Routers for Ragers? I don't know what it what would

your company name be? Routers.

Routers for Rooters? Routers for Rooters. Yeah.

We got Wade who just came back from paternity and is growing his mustache out again. It's gonna

be Takes takes three weeks to grow mustache everyone. Just for me. That's that's the That's

good to know.

Right.

We got Bronwen who is coming to us from debatably the only approved router that you can use in The US now. We got Andy who's wearing his record shirt. We got Patterson, our own incident responder ready ready for us to get breached live on the show and respond to it, hopefully.

Wow. That would be interesting.

And then we got Andrew here to talk about his supply chain experience. I hope we'll put him on the spot.

Alright.

I feel like the first thing we should probably dive into is the whole router ban thing. There's like 10 articles about this. So There's kind of

a lot of articles.

Yeah. So basically for those out of the loop, the FCC, our favorite net neutrality eraser people have updated their covered list, which I don't really know what the covered list is. From what I understand, it's essentially a list of authorized devices that can't be authorized? Like, what does anyone know what the covered list actually is? No. I didn't I didn't

see the

covered list. According to the fcc.gov website, the FCC is going to work with public safety and homeland security to publish a list of equipment and services covered that are deemed to pose unacceptable risk to the national security of The United States. So, supposedly, the covered list is the list of bad routers or other devices.

Right. And the thing is they

It sounds like they're still figuring out which specific names are gonna go on the covered list.

No. No. So this is what happened. Today or on March 23, they added all consumer grade routers produced in foreign countries to the covered list. So basically, if your router has any components that were manufactured overseas, if the router itself manufactured overseas or it was produced in a foreign country, it's not covered or it's on the covered list, which means it's not allowed to be used.

They can get a conditional approval from the Department of War or Department of Homeland Security. So it's more political grandstand

Oh, similar to what we saw with Anthropic where now every company has to bend the knee to whoever is in charge.

Mhmm. Is this another tweet first, lawyers later routine?

I think so. I I

don't know. I honestly don't really see what the point of this is. Like, if we're okay. So the details aside and and for those that are curious, yes, there are no routers that meet this criteria currently. You could argue a Starlink does vaguely meet the criteria because it's manufactured in The US, but the the wireless components of Starlink are manufactured overseas.

Well, weren't the most popular ones too, especially like the

Yeah.

You know, the Fortinet the Fortinet's with, like, the 55,000 CBEs they've had in, like, the last three days. I mean, I'm being hyper verbal, but, you know,

like Yeah. Ralph, a 100%

only applies to consumer electronics. So Fortinet being enterprise, I think, would be exempt.

They shouldn't.

Yeah. Well I don't I

don't think this goes into, like, the secure when I first read this article or or heard of this, I was like, you know, oh, well, good. Maybe they'll do something. Like, maybe they will actually enforce some kind of product security on this stuff. But it doesn't look like that's what's happening.

No. This has nothing to do with security though. That's the thing.

You know? That No. Years ago though, SZA told everyone to rewrite everything in Rust. So that should have solved security a while ago, but somehow it didn't. Right.

Corey, what if you have a three d printer, a dream, and AI?

It might be possible to make a You could make a router shaped object. I will say ironically, we were talking about this before the show, wired isn't covered. So you could still run your, you know, toilet paper link wired router.

Doesn't seem to have an exclusion on wired versus wireless.

Well, that's easy right now.

It says flat out. I mean, they they quote, volt flax, salt typhoon, cyberattacks, and they basically say that routers from other countries are not considered trustworthy.

What what if you take Right. The computer.

Aren't they aren't they doing this via the the radio frequency certification process? Like, that's what the FCC is using for their enforcement. So if you have Yeah. I don't know what the scope is. Wireless, then I don't think it would apply.

I I think FCC does other kinds of certifications outside of just wireless devices.

They do.

I I I think Communications covers wired and wireless. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So it says here the definition of router's router, it's NIST internal report eight four two five a, which is the most government sounding thing ever, which defines routers as consumer grade networking devices that are primarily intended for residential use and can be installed by a consumer. It doesn't differentiate between wired and wireless.

So So the wireless and wired aside. Here's my hacker brain. I'm like, well, I'll just get a computer, maybe like a Raspberry Pi or some other device that has two ethernet ports, tons of those, and I'll turn it into a router. Right?

Correct. Also, by the way, the only real carrot and stick that they have is FCC approval, which I'm sure I bet money you can go on Alibaba right now and buy a non FCC approved wireless router. I mean, I know you can buy a Baofeng. Right? Like, it's the same thing. And then with

and with with AI now, you could probably start your own router company. I'm not saying you should, and I'm also not saying it wouldn't take a little bit of work. But my last, like, cautionary tale about three d printing and having AI write all your code is you still have to make a board. Right? And those all come from China.

So Ralph, you haven't got the ad for that three d printer micro board thing. I keep getting ads for it. It's like, oh, print your own boards. And I'm like, oh, it's only $8? Like, oh, that's that's and maybe I should.

But For somebody for somebody who's done board production at scale, it's definitely something you wanna hand off to somebody who can build tons of them at scale and has the parts to do that. You know, building, like, one off or two off or, like, three things, that's, like, okay. But if you wanna build hundreds or thousands of these things, you're you're definitely gonna wanna send that to a a batch.

By the way, as Ralph already said, your your pick and place your pick and place machine at home is still picking and placing chips that are made overseas. That's the bigger problem. You need the actual microprocessor that is made in The US to hit the criteria for this. So basically, it's just another day where the government drops a big turd in the punch bowl and we're all gonna have to figure out what happens. Classic.

Yeah. I would I would predict we're gonna green check mark this. Like, they're gonna announce this, and then as the vendor in a foreign country, you're going to be able to buy a green check mark that you've gone through a compliance process in The US. That's where effectively, like, tariff on cybersecurity or routers. Yeah.

Yeah. I could see it. I could see it. Verified on

basically, it's more grift.

I just Sorry.

All all I could think about was Ubiquiti and that you're they're a US company, but all their gear is not made in The US. Right?

I mean, dude, that's true for Cisco and Netgear and every other US company. Right? Right.

Yeah. No. It's so it's yeah. Let's just let's just put it at that. Everything's already made in China or some other so Vietnam. Also, there's other places that do have some electronics. But, yeah, it's all getting imported in.

Do you all or here?

If your cell phone can be a hotspot, is it technically a router?

Oh. Yes. It is. It's definitely manufactured overseas. Whoopsie.

China's the only one producing these suckers.

Yeah. So while we're here in networking device corner, There's been a couple back doors in wait. What why is there an article? Someone someone fished me with an article in this in the news for this week that's from 2018. Whoever you are, you suck. Whoever you are, I don't like you, you suck.

I don't like you.

So let's not talk about an article from 2018.

I mean, was afro, po.

Are there any other networking I mean, are there any other networking news? I don't think there are.

Alright.

We could talk could talk about how people are networking into Kash Patel's email.

Yes. Let's talk about that. What's going on with that? Was his password ILoveTrump?

It I mean, I bet you was I bet you was in some list. I bet you was

in It had to be. Yeah. So what's going on here? Cash Patel, the current chief, who is a big fan of from what we understand, a big fan of hockey. He his Gmail was compromised by Iranian hackers. What like, what is there I guess, there's some leaks. How how bad is this? Like, I'm assuming he's not doing government communications using his Gmail. Right? No. Whatever.

I didn't see any reports of that, which is also fairly good. Right? Like, it was all personal stuff of him, like, smoking cigars in Cuba, which I was like, alright.

He's Yeah. Going to Who could have predicted this?

Right.

So is that why we let that ship into Cuba?

Yeah. Mainly, it's for the cigars.

It's for the cigar. I mean, I I will say, like, honestly, kudos for not leaking your personal stuff into your or your work stuff into your Gmail. Like, that's good good good on him. Yeah.

I mean, do you think here's my question. Do you think he had so wait. Hold on. I'm just thinking about this. Isn't two factor kind of enabled on your Google account anyways? So nowadays, if you set up a Google account and you don't go in and, like, turn on those things, if you log in from anywhere that you've never been from before, it usually prompts up to do like an SMS or some other kind of authentication. Right?

It seems like it probably wasn't his primary Gmail, but there is no details in the disclosure of what, like, how they got this information. It appears to be mostly going back from 2010 to 2019. So maybe it was like a secondary Gmail that he hasn't used since 2019 and

Is old is it old like Cuban cigar

handle? Handle? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's It's likelikecigarcigarboyboy202019nineteen.@gmail.com

or whatever. These are our these are also state backtackers. Right? So it's not like something on the lower end for them to do whether, like, they send them a fake fake push or something like that.

Yeah. No. I mean, I wonder if they did actually interact with him. I guess that's the question I I was really kinda getting at is if, like, he really got duped or if, you know, it was just something as simple as, you know, what do you call it? Dealer. Yeah. Infose dealer.

Yeah. Password stuffing or yeah. I got you. Something like that. I don't know. I mean, we don't know. There's no information. They basically announced it on their website and didn't provide any specific info. We'll we'll stay stay tuned on this show for, you know, what how it happened if that ever gets published.

It probably will never get published just because he's already probably a little upset about the scenarios.

I thought they did publish it. They posted it somewhere so you could download it all.

They know yeah. They published the data, but I'm saying an incident response, like a full I r right now. It got free.

A k

I was like, I looked

at so many pictures. I'm

You're still scrolling through them. Wow. That's impressive.

So okay. Choose your own adventure. Do we wanna go into trivia stuff, or do we wanna talk about the Fancy Bear stuff? To

to we're already talking about Go ahead, Wade.

I was gonna say we're already talking about states state sponsored, but I I

Yeah. Let's go into it. I feel like Patterson will have some interesting knowledge to share on this. So basically, there's an article posted on control alt intel, which I've never heard of. Is this like a Wade Wade and Patterson, is this like a reputable site? Have you guys ever heard of this?

I've seen them recently, but not long running something like the Differ report. Patterson,

have

you I'm seen familiar. Alright.

Okay. On March 11, I guess it's also associated with hunt.io, which I've also not really heard of. I don't know if you guys have heard of that. But anyway, there's a opsec fail from a fancy bear Russian state sponsored threat actor that resulted in some exposed open directories, like basically directory indexing, classic, and a ton of information about their targets, their, you know, harvested information, 11,000 emails, credentials, forwarding rules. I guess from a business email compromise perspective, Patterson, is this kinda the like standard that people do?

I am honestly catching up and reading this right now. So, yeah, definitely it it definitely seems a little bit unique to me, at least compared to typical business email compromise. Typical.

Is it also typical for threat actors to just leave open directory indexes

on their servers? Clearly, depends on the threat actors and what type of router they're using. But yeah.

Nice. Yeah. I think it's probably worth a read. I mean, it's an interesting, you know, interesting concept. I can only imagine I'm assuming an Intel analyst was just digging through stuff and found way more than they ever could have imagined or expected based on an exposed directory index. Like, that's kind of a gold gold mine.

Dave never heard the term civ forwarding before.

I wonder if that's like the the email server or something?

It says it's some JavaScript that they ran that does a redirect, but I would imagine it still would have to be something in the forwarding rules. Right? Which, like, mo general practice for most organizations is you eliminate all forwarding, email forwarding, just because of this particular situation, and then you only turn it on if someone gets, like, let go, and then the emails from that all emails get forwarded to that user's boss.

If if we wanna talk about, like, normal practices, though, I I think I read in there that, like, half of the accounts that they had creds for that were compromised didn't have any sort of 2FA at all. Just none. So I don't know that we can really fall on standard practices here.

Well and we should we should comment that that, Wade's suggestion should be best practice for every business. But having worked a couple business email compromises of late, yeah, it's well, it won't surprise any of us that best practices are often not in place, even external forwarding, sadly. But

it looks like SIV is just like an open standard for how to design an email filter, basically. Yeah. RFC five two two eight.

Outlook and Apple Mail.

It looks like pretty much everything every mail server supports it or most do. So yeah. I don't know. Interesting write up. Obviously, we you know, we've seen this before. The the NSA did this famously. Right? That's where we got all the Shadow Brokers stuff. So this has happened before. It'll probably happen again. It's pretty spooky.

Kind of like what happened with the team PCP thing?

Yeah. Let's talk about that. Sure Andrew has many hot takes on So Team PCP is a recent a recent threat actor. Their main thing is that supply chain compromise of what is it? Trivy or whatever? Trivy? I don't know.

It's lite l l m. L I t e l l m. It's a Lite LLM. Library.

That was one of the knock ons. Trivy was the first was the initial, which is the the open source product from Aqua Security.

Ah, okay. I just got start through this? I'm sure Andrew has, like, a full on long, marketing approved pitch for this so far. You wanna run us through this?

There's no marketing approved pitch for this because this all actually happened while everybody was at RSA. So, like, that's the other thing about this is, like, all the action on this happened while, like, all the CSOs are somewhere in California at a bunch of parties or something. So, like, the interesting thing is first they compromise Trivy. Right?

And then a software supply chain scanner. Right?

Trivy is a vulnerability scanner by Aqua Security. And a lot of other security vendors might not admit this, but they probably just take Trivy and embed this in their vulnerability management scanner, and then they provide

a

dash around this. So because Trivy is provides a bunch

of integrate this into, like, GitHub actions? That Yeah. Pretty much the only way to do it? Okay.

So, people put trivia in GitHub actions. They also put it a lot of other places as well. So, like, really, really interesting from a initial compromise perspective. So, like, because Trivia is compromised, we could assume on March 20 when canister worm and GitHub like, other GitHub actions are abused, that is a result of potentially pivoting from Trivia, like, in CI. So most companies, when they saw this, they just completely stopped building everything.

So the worm, like, the worm functionality here is just dump your secrets and move on. Right? Like, that's the worming. Like, it's like, give me all the secrets that you can access and and Don't wait. There's more

unless you're from a RAM. It it is it's got, an RMRF built in for anybody that it thinks is Iranian.

I gotta change my So what

what this is, like, what I I'm, like, reading between the geo lot like, the geopolitical tea leaves. This is Israel going after Iran through Trivy. They're like, Trivy, Iran's really good at scanning for vulnerabilities, so we'll go after them. Like, I I

I I don't know. I feel like it's gotta just be, you know, some kids, and they thought it'd be funny.

They're like, we read the news.

This has this has more of a shiny hunters thing, like, theme to me. Right? Looking for secrets and then using those secrets to then pivot into a different environment.

So where does this Palinex? I saw that on there. Was I looking

Look at look at the link that I provided in our chat. It has a timeline of, like, the different different repos or the different Yeah. All the things that they

It's a lot. Yeah. It's a long chain of exploits for sure.

The three are trivia aqua

five ecosystems. Yeah. GitHub actions, Docker Hub, NPM, OpenVSX, and PyPI.

Well, packages on those, not the actual Yeah.

Right. What I mean.

That

This is why nobody can

mute and pipe on in that has crossed into those five

ecosystems. We shoulda we shoulda went rust.

Yeah. If you guys would have written this in rust, this never woulda happened.

Don't worry though. Every company has they they every company fully understands their CICD pipelines start to finish, and they have software bills and materials so they know exactly what packages are being used exactly where. Right, Andrew?

Yes. And and they have

an ongoing patch management program.

There's there's a great rant from the, I think it's, like, one of the founders of ChainGuard, how this just kind of, like, unearthed a whole bunch of things in the GitHub actions ecosystem that we have all thought of as blind spots for, like, the last I don't know how long they've had GitHub actions, but it's been forever. You know? There's just not a lot of visibility into what goes on in a GitHub action when the action is updated. Most people don't do basic things like even pinning GitHub actions to specific hash versions and things like they should be doing. So, like, this is an area that is pretty ripe for some good security hygiene, and hopefully, a few more features that we'll see come out from GitHub that won't be limited to, like, the enterprise tier.

Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. Like, basically, don't use the latest version of whatever thing is is, like, the simplest possible fix here. It's, like, pin your version that you're using. Well, tell me

you wanna use the latest version, though, for security?

They replaced all the tags. They they repointed the tags to a different commit. So you'd have to you you you can't just pin by version. You have to pin by commit hash, which I've never heard of before, but apparently, it's a thing.

Yeah. And this this is one of the things that everybody considers a nightmare scenario. Right? Because you should not be able to go back in time and overwrite a release. Like, releases should be releases, and those should be, immutable as a point in time, and you should not be able to go back and just, like, say, oh, version one zero one now is version one zero one plus, like, a 100 more bytes.

Isn't are are those releases tags too, essentially? Right? So they're tagging the release and then putting it into a release package. And then, I mean, you can essentially rerelease the same version package if you want. I mean, I've done it myself. Right? Instead of, like, just continuing to re rev a version up if you're testing, you can just rerelease it.

Yeah. So tags are part of the the Git standard. What GitHub does is they pull that tag in as metadata of a release. A re releases effectively, in this case, a publicly downloadable file.

It's crazy. This is a really, really interesting compromise and super spooky. I guess, do we have a source? Andy, you mentioned before the show that, like, they have the the implication here is there's so many creds that they don't know what to do with them. Like, they're they're soliciting affiliates.

Where I read it. But, yeah, they were solicited. I I read somewhere or heard on one of the other many podcasts that they were soliciting ransomware affiliates because they

just had too many use these creds or secrets. I mean, it's gonna be secrets. Every sys admin right now is rolling secrets that were impacted by this, and the scope is gonna mad.

Percent of sys admins that were affected by this are rolling secrets, and that's why we're gonna have a problem.

Yeah. I thought it would be funny. You know, this is a more aggressive version, but it'd be funny if, like, instead of doing this, they just had, like the vulnerability scanner just never reports any vulnerabilities. It just, like, siphons them off to this threat group. And it's like, the vulnerabilities go only to us instead of actually, you know, this is a more noisy You're a more noisy man.

There was a there was one other cool thing. Well, I I thought it was kinda cool. The apparently, like, the second version of the Lite LLM package. So, like, they they've already iterated on it. But instead of just having it in Light LLM, they had it write to, like, the the root Python, and it would rerun the compromise package anytime the Python interpreter was activated. Ugh. So

if if it's me Claude helping me

the system at all.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is like, right now, some sources are claiming over 500,000 corporate identities are compromised. There are some secrets were compromised of for 500,000 corporate entities and 300 gigabytes of compressed credentials, which is that's like in post dealer levels of credentials. That's a lot. Yeah. I mean, watch for like, I guess, Patterson, anyone? Does anyone have tips? Like, what do I do?

Right. It's okay. We Cry.

This is valid accounts.

Right? Like, valid accounts is probably one of the more harder things to detect. Right? Because they're they're valid credentials. Well, I'm thinking I'm thinking MITRE attacks.

Right? Yeah.

MITRE attacks. So they have a valid account already to your system. So you wanna look for, like, irregular network connections, maybe, like, IPs that are coming out, maybe weird timing. Patterson, you got anything?

Rotate all the creds. I mean, yeah, let's sorry. Incident response out of an abundance of caution. Change them all. Change them now.

Our cloud will keys. Right? Yeah. Cloud cloud if if you do stuff in GitHub, if you use this tool, any credentials this tool had access to it at in during the last I mean, what? The last week? It was like If you're I don't know.

If you're in GitHub, just quickly migrate to GitLab real quick, and you'll be fine. Alright? So

the other thing that it made me think about is that, like, maybe have a plan for how to quickly rotate your keys without, like, having a pants on fire moment. Right? You know? Because some of these things that it obviously these organizations didn't have control over it. They were kind of a victim of a of a bigger of a bigger play.

Yeah. And by the way, your developers are putting your keys into LLMs already. I guarantee you. So you should probably be rotating them on a regular basis.

Yeah. Just get, like, an automatic rotation system, right, that just freaking rotates these things out all the time or every 30 days. Right? Mean, I they're already moving that with SSL certificates. I mean, they're they were like, you know what? Certificate revocation, it's broken. So guess what? Everyone's gonna get thirty day certificates now, and you just gotta rotate them over over and over again. So.

Yeah. I mean yeah. And also least privilege applies here. Right? If if they compromise the key that can only read an s three bucket, that's better than a key that can write an s three bucket or create a new one or whatever. So like Sure.

You know.

But it's least privilege on keys and identities and things. I'm sure no one's just using an IAM role that's just like AWS global admin.

No one

would ever do that.

No one is doing that. Everyone is doing that, Corey.

Leastprivilege.passwords.text is in that s three bucket.

Yes. Yes.

This is why I use canary tokens, right, all

over the place. Another good one too. Canary tokens could be useful in this scenario. Right? You might get some hits, especially if you, you know

Now it wouldn't it wouldn't help in this, but what about, like, having a, you know, NPM or PyPI clone on prem that, you know, you're you're lagging yeah. And you're you're lagging behind. Like, has anybody actually set one of those up? Like, in theory, it sounds like a good idea. In practice, it kinda sounds like a nightmare.

There's no I I mean, I I have no idea. That would be a question for Andrew. I I I can't even begin to imagine how that would be set up.

You're muted, Andrew. Andrew.

Oh. Uh-oh. Uh-oh.

Maybe just use sign language to explain CIC security. It'll be fine.

My back? My I'm back.

I'm out there.

So a lot of people do build the node in the Python proxy. Right? But we also have an open source project that's called supply chain firewall that just wraps the node to Python commands with a bunch of some rep rules that scan for malicious code. And if they detect it, they will block the installation of that, which is I I like that approach versus, like, kind of a, a node proxy approach because oftentimes, as we all know with egress proxies, people find a way around them or stuff sneaks into the environment in other artifact forms. So having the, like, kind of some heuristics for detecting, malicious code, especially in dynamic languages, way better.

Yeah. I mean, there's a it's a good point. Basically, have some heuristic methods running on whatever programs you're using. If you're using programs that are constantly hitting a bunch of heuristic checks, maybe look into that. Right?

Right? Like probably not

that's not good. Whether it's intentionally malicious or whether it's been supply chained, I still wanna know this tool is looking in all my credential files. Although in this case with trivy, it probably was exempt from a lot of those, you know, because it's supposed to be doing that. Right? That's what its job is is to look for exposed credentials and bad things. So it's kind

of a perfect storm. It's it's a GitHub action. So like it's not even running in your environment so much. Right?

Well, it depends on how how how you have your runners set up. But yeah. For sure.

I would use I would if I would see it and I had some type of false positives, right, going off on it, I would immediately allow list that not thinking

Because it's a vulnerability scanner. Of course, it's looking in the secrets.

Yeah. Visibility of GitHub actions is so hard, though. Because, like, if you think about it, if you're building on prem or something with, like, a Jenkins box, you can at least do EBPF, like, for observability. In GitHub actions, we don't really have any way to monitor what's going on inside of the action. It's like a neutral third party and then ship telemetry from that. So people have all these hacks, but none of them are good.

So it might be time for GitHub to spin up some more telemetry for actions, it sounds like.

So this is when Andrew pitches his visible actions product right now.

And It'll be behind a a pay paywall. You know? And and that's the thing that is my big rent is that every cool feature for security, you have to pay for a very expensive tier GitHub just to gain access. So for a long time I don't know. Is it still the case that you have to pay just to get access to org logs?

Does anybody know? They I thought I thought they allow they stopped that. My because there was such a big uproar from the community that they do Microsoft did buy buy them.

Right? Microsoft yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say that's Microsoft's play.

That is Microsoft's, like, play. Right?

Yeah. That's their play. Arguably that e nine license. Yeah.

I know I know the GitHub logs too, you get different things where if you run, what, like, integrations with certain tools versus you writing some code to hit the API too. It's a different log set, which is also scary. Right? Because you think you're you have all the logs, and then next thing you know, it's like, oh, no. These logs don't exist in this pipeline. So

Well, the okay. So Go ahead.

In in 2017, when I was at Mozilla, we actually had to write web bots that would, like, log in to GitHub and would pat page through the logs and then scrape them with beautiful soup just to get them into the SIEM because all of our repositories are free repositories. So, like, the I think the thing that I'm I'm trying to say is the open source projects that we depend on the most oftentimes have the lowest level of access to the security tools

Mhmm.

Because they are free open source tools.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. That's a really good point. I I guess last question I have on this. Does anyone know who Team PCP is? Do we have any idea who this threat actor is? They just came out of nowhere and said, hey. We just crushed, you know, 500,000 companies overnight while everyone was at RSA. It feels pretty significant, but I guess does anyone have any intel on that? Do we know who this is? It could be shiny hunters, I guess. But Or wouldn't they just branded a

shiny hunters? My feeling, but also only CSOs go to RSA. Right? Like, the people in the trenches were

still Only CSOs.

We're still we're still at work. The real people doing the analysts, freaking out the alerts, very little of them get the privilege to go spend a very expensive hotel and to sit in a TSA line and hope your flight hopefully, you get your flight soon enough.

So no one knows who this is or what nation state they're affiliated with, if any. They're just it's the next lapses, I guess. I don't know.

You can also tell that I'm a little I didn't go to TSR or RSA.

No. The result Do you wanna go?

Maybe maybe. No one asked me. No.

I mean, I wouldn't mind going to the parties, but I don't know about, like, the conversation.

I wanna go win a Switch two at a booth or something like that, you know, like

Switch two.

For the price of one night in San Francisco hotel.

San Francisco hotel, you get, like, three Switches, dude.

You can get a Switch two for it. You can just expense a switch too for supply chain reasons. It's fine.

Yes.

Alright. Let's move on. What's next? You wanna talk about Florida? Yeah.

Let's talk about Florida because Ralph and What?

Ralph's here. And because like

Ralph and I have been in in this exact spot together.

Oh, yeah. Us about the Space Coast.

The Space Coast. Right? Space Coast. Right? When I look at this, I think of, like, Hack Space Con. That that was that was my first thing. That that's why. But pretty much, this article is just describing how the Space Coast Of Florida, right, all of where Blue Origin, SpaceX, NASA, all just have a bunch of top name scientists and has become a hotbed for espionage, both Chinese and Russian.

So what are they doing? Just driving around war driving, looking for people's Wi Fi passwords?

It's like next level going after people too. Sit in bars, getting people drunk, trying to get people to to talk about secrets. The old ways. Of one of the interesting is they're using real estate as a weapon. So federal authorities are tracking suspicious property buyers, right, in order to find sensitive sites.

where exactly can you get in the world of Florida? What where is this? This is the like, give me a

geographical It's called Canaveral. It's on the Okay. Pacific.

Atlantic.

Right? The the South or no. The, yeah, the Southeast Tampa, Florida?

It's close to it's on the other other other coast. Right? Middle of middle of the state, near Orlando, probably about an hour and a half.

So So if you live in the Space Coast and you've recently made a new friend who's way out of your league. It might be time to it might be time to question question

their intentions. Speaking speaking of the Space Coast, they're gonna be launching the Armenis.

Wednesday. Right?

Wednesday. Yeah. So we're going back to the moon. Way to

leak the launch date to the foreign enemy.

I know. A little bumpy.

In May, we've got SpaceTechCon.

Hack space.

Hack space. Space. Space. Space.

Space I like space can we go can we go back to Spacehat? I like SpacehatCon. I know you said hack, but I like Spacehat.

Hack spacecon is a good conference. Like, one of the few conferences I've been multiple times on the East Coast and, like, highly recommend it. One of the more cool one of the more interesting talks I heard there was a dude talking about all the satellite hacks and how you don't hear about anything because the government doesn't want you to know how many satellites have been hacked. That is

Don't worry. All those satellites are FCC compliant to the latest standards. It's fine.

They've all

been It should be fun. One of one of my to do list items when I go to hack space con will be to get chatted up by a spy.

Oh, there you go.

So

My goal every year is just to see Ralph. You know?

Oh, that's a really good goal. You gotta see Ralph. Yeah. So while we're on the topic of AI that I just started, Anthropic came up with these cool. Accidentally released these mythos models, maybe?

They did accidentally release it. They left an open database of sorts. Right? Yeah.

It's like they like leaked unintentionally. Their CMS left 3,000 unpublished assets in a data store.

Why did they have so many articles pre written? I mean like are they like

Why AI? Nature?

All AI. Never mind.

Alright. Fine. Alright. Fine. You know what? I deserve that. You're correct.

Yeah. So basically, this is I don't know. It's kinda cool. Like, I don't know. The claim is March 2026. They just released Opus

I know. Two months ago. Read all into this because I'm like, I'm all deep into like the next drug addiction. But so

Ralph's like, give me give me some more extra usage. I need some more extra usage.

More tokens. More tokens.

People are starting to ask in job interviews, can I get paid in tokens?

Oh my god. No. So alright. Here's the wild part. So, again, let let me be crystal clear. This is all claims probably written by AI. Okay? But and every time they say it's the best and the fastest and all this other stuff. Okay? So, like, let let me get it will clear the air.

Right? And by the way, that ship has already is sailing right now. Like, right now, we are burning massive stacks of cash to try to use AI to attack our customers, and every other threat actor is doing the same thing. Like like last week, we spent and I'm not these are real numbers. We spent $4,000 on Amazon Bedrock trying to find a zero a critical vulnerability, and we actually did get one for a customer.

Wasn't there a recent article? So I got sent an article talking about it, but I don't even know where it was from. But there was a talk at someone Anthropic that was running Claude finding zero day vulnerability live at a conference.

That also did happen. Yes.

Alright? Which man. Yeah. Like Yeah.

Yeah. It's it's definitely I mean, it really is. It's the new like, that I mean, it's just the new thing that people are doing. I will say looking at the like, this is a template page, and I know there's template content. But it says here, Ralph, as with all of our models, we have tested Claude with those on a wide variety of safety and capability evaluation. So it's fine. Don't worry

about it. Fine. Yeah. No. It's it's super interesting. So, like, the one thing that a lot of researchers have kind of put into place is that anytime you can get a known output and you give enough credits at these models, you can get to the to the if it knows what the answer is supposed to be, it it can pretty much get its way there. Right? Yes. That's why benchmarks always keep adjusting. They're like, well, no.

Yes. No. A 100%.

Yeah. I will say I did I'd ran, like, two very very large queries and completely ran out of tokens last night. And I did the Ralph and I was like, fuck it. I'm upgrading. Like, I I threw money at it. Like, give me the next tier, more tokens.

There you go. Dude, the last last week of having double usage on Anthropic, like, I I I don't know if I can go back, guys. Did

did you go the five x or 20 x, Wade?

I'm not you know what?

I probably can go the 20 x with

Just go just go the

two I went five.

Just go to $200 and just let it go because Bro,

I went

I went pro to 20. I was just like, I mean, five times as much money for five times as much usage. I mean And then for only double that, I another

four or five times. Times usage, I'll upgrade again. We'll see. We'll see. I'm not made of money over here.

I'm not made of money over here.

I'm not using it for I am not really using it for business stuff. This is me, like, building my app. Like

I will say, though, I I do think, like, we talked about GitHub and open source, and now we're talking about AI, and I wanna bring it back to open source. I do think that they Anthropic or, you know, whatever, they're kind of the leader right now, but any other AI model producer, they should have a free or low cost option for people to use AI tools to attack their own open source projects and find vulnerabilities in them. Like, just like GitHub for these high, you know, high importance open source projects like Trivy, they should be providing enterprise level, you know, logging in capabilities for them. Anthropic or other other companies should be providing open source software developers with the ability to assess their own tools using Claude or using whatever models. Like, talk about how what you should do before you release the latest model.

I think both of the frontier labs have kind of been doing that. So Claude had whatever their security thing was, and then open I OpenAI had Aardvark. And I believe that they were they weren't publishing everything, but they were going through and testing a lot of this on open source things and finding it and, you know, doing responsible disclosure with them beforehand. And I know Google's doing it through through DeepMind as well. So, I mean, they they're not just giving they're not just giving it to open source devs and saying, hey.

Yeah. I mean, at the very least, it's just something that we need to be aware of is that as these tools get more advanced that production are gonna use them, we should beat them to the punch if it's a matter of dollars. Like, I would donate a, you know, pile of tokens to for someone to go look at, you know, an open source tool and find vulnerabilities. That that's like easy money to spend versus doing this huge incident response because it had a vulnerability and I'm dependent on it. So basically, if you're a company who used an open source tool, throw it through your throw it through your AI, burn some tokens on it, and report the vulnerability to the developer.

Honestly, what we what I do with my own software, I have a pipeline that runs every week that will run through a whole essentially prompt to look for security issues. Right? And then makes issues related to those. And if they've already been addressed or moved, then it just it just keep on going. So you can build that into your own into own setup. Yeah. It does take tokens, though, back to Corey's point.

Yeah. And if you're wondering why we're all fiending for Claude tokens, the biggest reason why is because they have a million context length. Yeah. That's why that's what makes Opus so killer. That million context length means you can go significantly further and deeper than you could with a two fifty k or a smaller context. That's just

Well, and it's Opus. I mean, Gemini

had Yeah.

It is Opus.

1,000,000 context, and I was still using Claude.

Yeah. I I have a good so I was playing I've been playing around with Cloud Code for the past five weeks. Like, that's all I've been doing.

He's he's on the drug. He's

straight up.

Completely. Completely. They're restraining on be able to get on. Yeah.

But the amount of utilities that it has that are similar to RMM tools is semi scary. So if I were to keep several remote remote control sessions open on different servers throughout my enterprise, right, and then I get, like, hacked. That pretty much just completely bypasses whatever security you had between that end user and the servers. I'm waiting for something to use that mechanism, and I think it'll be really interesting.

Yeah. Right now Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. I mean, dude, even now we're building, like, MCP c twos in house. Yeah. That like, you know, it's a it's a thing for sure.

I put together a

c two

with one passport. Works great. Did you do I was gonna ask, did

you do it? Did you do it? Send it to me, please.

It works. No. You did. Yes.

He did. Yes. I agree. Corey wasn't on the news last week. We were talking about c twos, and I've been saying I wanted to build one for a while.

That's amazing. Very fast, but it it is efficient.

That's awesome.

Please send it.

Efficient is good.

Yeah. There's Ralph's talk at hack space code.

There we go.

I hacked your password manager, and I don't know the key.

Has anybody tried Claude Cowork, like the new Claude Code Dispatch Hunter, which requires you to disable pretty much every single security control on a MacBook?

It's like Claude wants access to the outlets.

Without disabling security controls on Windows.

Cloud wants to access your files. Cloud wants to access no. Absolute I mean, yes, but no. Yes.

You know what? Ask so many questions, and I just turn them all off. Just say, you

know Always allow. What could go wrong?

What could go wrong? I'm good for this.

I did that, and it it did a git push that I wasn't expecting. I'm like, wait. Wait. What's going on?

That that was an article a couple weeks ago, or maybe it should have been. Yeah. Was should have been. Yeah. I do. Okay. Yeah.

We were just talking about heuristics, you know, like Andrew was bringing up, like, oh, you can have a heuristic tool that analyzes your the software you're running. I think it's funny that Claude, the code that it writes oftentimes, it'll say, you should review this because it looks like obfuscated code. Like, it it'll write a Python, like, a Python one liner, and it'll put it in quotes. It'll be like, hey. This looks like obfuscated code.

That was my cousin. You closed the window. I'm a new

It's like

Speaking of MCP, did you guys catch the fact that Google has shipped web MCP?

No. Did you

see that article?

What is this? Please. Yeah. Scare me. Well, okay.

So MCP is a protocol for working with agents.

Mhmm.

And Google has apparently shipped through Chrome one forty six Canary a new protocol that allows websites to expose structured functions directly to AI agents.

So the I like this.

So that this as a concept?

The the idea being that if you want to browse a website, traditionally, you would have to read the DOM and then execute the page in the Yes. In the screen,

the code. Click.

The code. The the JavaScript, the HTML, that's all for us. That's not for the computer. Right? Yeah. Yeah. That's for the MCP, if I'm correct, is to make it easier for the AI agent to browse. Right?

Well, here's the really twisted thing, though. So now they've they've shipped this web MCP that allows this new interaction directly machine to machine between the agents. But they've also just patented a tool where you can basically, if your website website is coming up in searches, but their analytics decide that it doesn't have enough content, they'll have AI rewrite your website on the fly and that's what they present to the client.

Basically, you're talking about an an AI generated parking page. They pat they patented this. This is not a tech release. But basically, it's an AI generated parking page that will just make up whatever it thinks the person searching for the page was trying to get to.

It sounds like a fishing dream.

The the combination is just nuts.

The new four zero four page is an AI generated version of the page you were trying to reach.

Yeah. If for some reason Google's AI decides that you didn't put enough content or the right content or, you know, you're not gonna get any any click throughs on this, it'll redesign what it presents as if it in presented on your behalf.

I'm glad that we're ratcheting up AI gaslighting us to one new level. That's great.

So here's here's the question though. Does this make malvertising better or worse?

That's a

really good question. Makes typosquatting worse, but it it also makes typosquatting better at the same time.

I mean, does it

make Depends on whether the AI removes the malicious code embedded in the websites websites or whether it's going to propagate it.

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, it it to be clear, it will depend on the implementation. This is just a patent. This is just, you know Yep.

I signed you up for a subscription. You owe $20.

It it was so painful. And of course, the worst part is you can watch Claude. Like, you can watch its browser window, and I'm like, dude, this is worse than the one I worked tech support in college. And I would watch a professor. I'd be like, okay.

Claude or Gemini because you can use Gemini in the browser, or you can load the Claude extension to get agentic in the browser now.

Yeah. Yeah. I think

if if it if it

can't figure out what to do, it actually will just take a screenshot of the page, and then it will start to

screenshot, see our

which just chews through a ton of tokens.

Correct.

Like, that's

what it did.

You're lighting your tokens on fire.

Yes. That is exactly what it did. It it did screenshot it OCR, and then it had the entire web page in every response. And so, yes, it burned through all my usage. Yep.

And this is why RAM is so expensive, everybody. Just to let you know.

What? No.

RAM prices are going down. You didn't see that article?

What's up? Will say it's worth it. I I it was so funny having AI be like, oh, no. Evan got lost on his way to the restaurant. And I was like, I don't know. I'm not invested in this at all, but it's like AI is, like, in-depth researching all these people and telling me what their trip experience was. So silly.

See? I I found a receipt earlier today. I bought a 128 gigs of RAM and a four terabyte hard drive, like, almost exactly a year ago. It was $560. I went on Micro Center's website, pulled up the same stuff today, 1,700.

Yeah. So that that the this article that you just posted was about the the drop in memory prices. And this was actually to one other notable thing. This is not necessarily security related, but Google's new quad or turbo quad int or whatever you wanna call it. Like, it's essentially a compression algorithm for AI.

Yeah. Alright. There's no there's no chicken news this week. Does anyone have any final articles before we end the show? Any last last thoughts? Last feelings?

Yeah. The I think some of us have classes coming up.

Yeah. Let's plug. Let's do some plugs. Plug it. Who's teaching? When are they teaching? Andrew, you go first because it's yeah. I don't know. Ryan should bring up some little graphics and things, but go ahead.

Yeah. April, securing the cloud, which has a ton of AI based content. If you wanna hear my spicy take, which is that MCP is already dead, and we'll be talking about something different, like, two months from now.

Spicy. You can hear it in my class.

I may have to

sign up that one.

Now I have

to have my AI go and then summarize the entire thing.

I'm actually getting my AI to find your class right now.

Alright. By the the

day, dispatch might be done.

Patterson, do you have a course coming up?

I I have a course coming up on Friday, this Friday. Yeah. And so when all of these things go horribly wrong, you're gonna wanna come to this class. Oh.

So then

you know what to do next.

Yeah. I mean this I mean with all this trivia stuff with all like oh my goodness. There's so many IR scenarios to get into.

It's crazy. Here I'm here for you. Dedicated day on Friday.

Nice. That's awesome. I like that it's simplified. I need that. I'm with you.

And John's got sock course skills, pay what you can starting next Monday.

Bring your socks, and they'll be knocked off by John Strand's ranting. Sock off. Anyone else have anything to plug while we're here? Wade, do you wanna plug your mustache oh, no. Beside San Diego's this week. Right? Or

We were we sold out tickets. Don't email me, please. There's been so many people.

So Wade would like to plug not going to be

Not going to be asides because everyone else will be there.

You can't can you see it? Let's see. Hopefully, nothing. If you move my camera and then this box over here is full of all of the raffle gifts. Extreme

fun stuff. Nice.

There's books. There's dude, Raspberry Pis are expensive nowadays. Like, for a whole kit, it was gnarly. And then portable monitors, Legos, some Game Boy things.

It's

fine. Those should be good times. If you didn't buy a ticket, I'm sorry. But

Next year.

If you did, come sit Yeah. 600 tickets sold out.

Still tickets for b sides Tampa, which is coming up May 15. You know, there's Okay. Spy stuff in Florida.

It's actually

B sides Tampa is one

of It's actually a pretty big conference.

It is.

A b of a

Russian spy too. It is. Tampa? Weather.

It's the weather.

Florida Florida has really good cons. Like, they have Tampa and or b sides of Tampa and Orlando are both really good. Hack space con's pretty good, and there's a couple others too.

Go now before it turns into a swamp. Before hurricane season gets underway and Yeah. That's why

they do it early. Just, you know, Yeah.

I'm sure it's really nice there. Alright. Cool. Well, thanks y'all. Thanks for coming and we'll see you next week. Bye bye.