This week, on the awareness angle, a dead airline is still
taking bookings for flights that will never.
Exist. Instagram just killed encrypted
DMS Google Chrome secretly installs A4 GB AI model on your
computer. A student stopped 4 high speed
trains with a radio he bought online and a robot.
Lawnmower can be hijacked by anyone on the Internet.
Who'd have thought it? And that includes overriding the
emergency stop. All of that and a whole bunch
more on this week's The Awareness Angle.
And with me, as always is my partner in cybercrime prevention
is of course Mr Luke Pettigrew. How you doing, Luke?
And doing well. Thanks.
How are you? I'm good, I'm good.
I've just realised for the last few weeks I haven't introduced
myself. I've just introduced you.
So I'm Matt Davis and we've been, as always, is my partner
in cyber crime profession. Yeah, don't forget any thoughts,
opinions, anything we talk about on the show are our own and do
not represent those of our employers.
Please don't fire us. Right, So much to get through
this week. It's been a busy week.
We've had to, we've had to be fierce, but it's it's good.
We've got some good stuff so. Should we get straight?
On with some old stories that sound almost made-up, but we'll
get into them. Everything is from a news
source. Don't we haven't made anything
up. There's no we promise there's no
we're not hallucinating. We are not AI.
Look, we're not go. Let's go for it.
Let's go for it, right? This week's breech watch and
kicking us off this week Zara clothing fashion brand Zara data
breach exposes 197,000 customers via a third party analytics
vendor and this is a supply chain breach that we talk about
every week in its both purest form Zara itself wasn't directly
compromised. The attackers went off that
Anodot, an Israeli AI analytics. Company that have processed
Zara's data stole their authentication tokens and then
use those to walk straight into. Zara's cloud infrastructure.
I mean, we've seen this time and time again, you can have the
best security in the world, but if your vendors don't, it
doesn't matter. For customers.
This is being played down saying no passwords or payment details
were taken but 197,000 e-mail. Addresses tied to shopping
behaviours support interactions and geographic markets.
It's still, I mean, that's valuable data for targeted
phishing. So if you've ever contacted Zara
for support or shopped online, you could be in the data set,
which is pretty scary. And it's Shiny Hunters again.
You know they're Shiny Hunters. We're playing hacking group
bingo. Shiny Hunters is like having a
44 on the English lottery. It comes up all the time.
Yeah, it's Zara is of course the flagship.
Brand of the Inditex group, which is one of the largest
fashion distribution groups. They also own Bershka.
Zara Home, we show Pull and Bear everywhere.
My daughter likes to shop essentially.
He's owned by Intertex. Berska and Pull and Bear are
like really popular so. Yes, I mean, it's, it's a data
breach. Data's been leaked.
Lots of details have been leaked.
If you're a Zara. Customer watch out for fishing I
think is what we're what we're talking about on this.
Yeah, and if you have third parties?
Make sure you you know, hold them to account.
In some ways. Yeah, right.
I think that's it for that one. So you can move straight on to
the next one. Oh yes, the next one we've got
Kushwin and Wakefield breached via fishing and two ransomware
gangs claim responsibility for this one says the day of breach
stemming from a voice phishing attack.
And no surprises here, the cyber crime groups involved, the shiny
hunters and chilling, they claimed responsibility worked
together on this and such. But I guess maybe they've done
sort of separate things there, sort of one side getting in and
then sold that access or gave access to the other group.
But yeah, so this one, they say the registered article on the
spokesperson told them that it was limited in scope and
suggested that boy, he was socially engineered.
And so they came aware of a limited data security incident
due to phishing, activated voice activated response protocols to
contain on on a price access and engaged a third party expert to
support their response to it. So they've sort of mentioned
that systems and operations continue to run normally and
they're investigating the incident and idea obviously take
it very seriously. Obviously, obviously they've
yes, they didn't address the sort of cyber groups involved,
but this this article goes on to say that obviously as targeted
by Shanny Hunters, who operates a pay or league model and
chilling who one of the world's most prolific ransomware groups
to go on to say there's no established coalition between
the two groups, which suggests that they're separate but
coincidentally timed. Who knows what happens in the
shadows? No one.
What happens on a forum in the dark?
Web. No one knows, you know Signal
chat. Yeah, it carries on to say that
Shane Hunters attacked them on the May 1st and Chilean listed
information on the data leak site on May 4th.
Shiny Hunters claims it's stolen over 500,000 Salesforce records
containing PII and other corporate data and they've set
deadline of May 6th for them to contact them but that hasn't
happened and assuming they've probably shed the data that.
I think that's why we're talking about it now.
Yeah, Probably. Yeah.
I'm I. Yeah, 5 GB, 50 gigabytes.
After the ransom negotiation, negotiations failed.
So they don't waste any time. They're very headline boom.
Truck deadline. Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, voice fishing in this case.
It's exactly the same as we talked about last week with ADT.
It's their, you know, it's the modus operandi and This is why
we see. Security awareness vendors now
like all running to bring out voice phishing.
And I know there's been some queries around the legality of
doing voice phishing, but you know, This is why companies now
we can't, we can't just send phishing emails anymore.
We need to start. Thinking that a lot more than
that, isn't it? Let's not forget phishing emails
are still an important part of protection.
Like 80. 5% of all attacks start with some kind of phishing, so
phishing emails are still dangerous.
But we need to look wider and like you said last week, we
shouldn't be focusing voice fishing just on those high risk
areas like. Help desks and.
Stuff like that. Anybody, anybody is vulnerable
to voice fishing. So it's really, I know
businesses that have done it just to those high risk
frontline kind of technical stuff.
You need to go wider than that. You need to.
You need to do your whole workforce really.
And talk about it. Make people aware it happens.
This is a great example. Not a lot of people outside like
Cushman and Wakefield. Massive real estate company.
I've not heard of them before. I might be naive.
Had you heard of them before? No, I haven't.
They're not house, they're not household.
Yeah, they're an American company.
Yeah. 53,000 employees according to YEAH.
So they're not the best example to tell everyone about, but if
you've got a real estate department that deals with
offices and. Facilities and rents, They've
probably heard of them. So it's relatable to them.
ADT we spoke about last week, massive household brand
everybody's heard of ADTI would imagine and they're a security
company. So there's a great piece of news
to make it relatable to those individuals.
Yes, like we said, no one wants to appear on no one wants a
Google alert telling them that they've appeared on Shiny
Hunters League site. So no, right, that's it for this
week's breaches. Let's get on with the news.
So this week I'll kick off the first one and I'm going to keep
this brief because this we could go down a technical rabbit hole
here, but we're not going to consent fix version 3.
So we've spoken about consent fix before.
This is the phishing attack that bypasses multi factor
authentication by using Microsoft's own award flow.
So this is a new automated phishing technique that's
circulating around on hacker forums and it hijacks Microsoft
Azure accounts through legitimate authentication flows.
So if you're not technical, Azure account is the account
that you sign into your computer with if your computer has user
accounts. That are managed by Microsoft.
So if you use Microsoft A365, Microsoft Office, if your e-mail
is Outlook, you've probably got a Microsoft Azure account.
And this attack basically bypasses the authentication that
you have for that account. So it tricks.
It's a bit like click fix. It tricks you into pasting and
dragging a URL into a page that looks like a normal Microsoft
login page, but isn't. But because you're doing it,
you're basically opening the door for the.
Attackers. The attackers.
Aren't hacking, they're socially engineering you to kind of.
They're tricking you into opening the door.
For them and it can be done within 30 seconds and all you
see is a verification successful message.
So yeah, it doesn't try and steal your password, it doesn't
intercept your MFA code. It lets you complete a
completely legitimate Microsoft login, but captures the
handshake, the access tokens after you've authenticated.
So you do everything right, You use your password.
You approve the MFA prompt, but you still get compromised.
Where this is different. So version one this is version
3. Version 1 was a manual copy and
paste. You had to copy some stuff and
paste it in. Version 2 added drag and drops.
You just had to drag something. And this version 3 is fully
automated. So fake cloud, fair pages, a
pipe dream web hook back end that exchanges codes for tokens
in seconds. So this is like the industry.
This is like someone's actually built something now that works.
It's industrialisation of it. Yeah.
So this targets first party Microsoft.
Apps that are. Trusted in every Azure tenant
and can't be deleted or restricted by default.
There's no patch for this. That's the scariest thing
because it is architecturally vulnerable.
The way it is built. It's been built in a vulnerable
fashion, so it's almost like you've built a house that has a
foundational floor in its design.
And then everything you can patch is the people, which is
just like a nice piece of merch. I was going to say we've got
some stickers with people Patcher on and Submerge with
people Patcher on. If you're a people patcher, what
great segue into If you're a people patcher and you want
submerge all you want our newsletter, get yourself to
risky creative. Dot com there's a shop with some
people patch a merch, some click happens merch is on there as
well. I'm wearing today and some
control. Alt human stuff that you can see
on the mic as well. I'm covered in it.
It's amazing. And if you want our newsletter,
you can sign up for it there via e-mail.
Over 1200 people. Receive our e-mail, our
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Monday morning and covers everything we talk about on the
show. We'll put a link to this story.
We won't go into this anymore because it can get quite
technical, but if you if that's picture interesting, you want to
find out more about Consent Fix version 3.
There'll be a link to that in this week's newsletter, So you.
Can find out. Right.
Awesome. Move on to the next one.
Yeah, so next one we've got Spirit Airlines liquidization
equals zombie infrastructure, open payment systems and $11.48
fishing domains. It's what an interesting and
crazy story, this one. So son Guy Braden has state tech
blog basically talks about sort of looked into the Spirit
Airlines liquidisation and how they ceased operations on May
2nd and they they sort of said that multibillion dollar
corporate tech infrastructure was abandoned in real time.
That's insane. Literally like they just went
home. Yeah, they, yeah, everybody left
the office and didn't turn anything off apparently.
So yes, security researcher discovered that the booking flow
on spirit.com was was it may still be fully functional.
You could search flights, select seats and see your personal
information and even reach the payment screen for flights that
will never exist. They have.
To they have. They have fixed this now.
So at the time this was written that was the case, but now if
you go to spirit.com, it does go to a winding down page with an
announcement. It actually redirects.
To a completely different. Domain.
So yeah, they've kind of patched it, but this was not the case.
At the time of, you know, escalating this.
So yeah, it doesn't says so there was like a booking API
that was selective issuing, issuing valid records,
processing payments against a live payment gateway.
The system did return payment authorization declined rather
than provider unavailable, but it sort of proved that the
payment processor was still connected spirits full telemetry
stack was still running. So the back end was probably
performing deep packet inspection and performance
logging on transactions. But obviously it continues to
say that it was processing data that it really obviously should
have been. And then one of those sort of
lots of things to look out for and it was fishing domains were
popping up around Spirit. So there was Spirit refunds.com
and they're available for 12/12. He defensively registered three
of them they found available and redirected them to the official
page of information. And then it says within like a
pretty short window, maybe like 3 hours, Spirit liquidization
received 43 visits from a wide range of devices and potentially
people we had desperately searching for refund information
on Spirit Airlines. And yeah, continues on to say
that Spirit never sent cancellation emails to account
holders. Flights were never cancelled.
It was still bookable. And yeah, so there's obviously
that left to a window of time where potentially no one was
monitoring what was going on and the people were potentially
booking flights still and entering their personal
information. So yeah, it's quite a crazy
story. Yeah.
They essentially, yeah. A company collapsed and nothing
got turned off, No. It's, it's mad, isn't it?
I think it's the problem is there's so many.
I mean, it was in the news. We heard about it over here.
It was big news. Donald Trump said he was going
to. Buy it and bail them.
Out and then that didn't happen. But it's so many people are left
unknown and want answers and so many people are going to jump on
that bandwagon of like registering when you go to
spirit.com, there's you can still find, you can still find
ways into the website like it's they've done a really bad job of
shutting this down. If you go to spirit.com, it
redirects to spiritrestructuring.com.
Like that could be not legitimate.
And then there's bits about guests and lenders.
But if you actually. Didn't redirect.
Did it not but then if you actually go, if you Google like
spirit booking, you can still kind of find ways into the
flights page. So it is still there's still
elements of this up and running and this they don't exist
anymore like this. They've they've shut up shop,
but here I am still able to go. I want to go from New York.
Let's go from Newark to Aruba. There's search flights.
There's no seats available. OK, so there are parts of it not
working, but you can still browse the infrastructure.
And it's mad that this hasn't just been shut down.
Main web page spirit.com. Put up a holding page.
Put up a. Page saying we've ceased
operations for any queries contact this just don't leave
people in the unknown people. This is the worst part of it
because this is a this is a cyber criminals.
Social engineers dream right now.
Especially if someone, yeah, broke into the system and
hijacked it and people are putting in their genuine
information and payment trying to pay for things, yeah.
I mean the example. Fishing domains as well.
The example for us would be like Ryanair going bust, like Spirit
or the budget airline. So it would be the equivalent of
an EasyJet or a Ryanair going disappearing overnight, but
their website is still being open.
Think about the amount of questions that would leave the
amount of queries they they like.
It's. Yeah, it's crazy.
It's I wonder if there's, I wonder if Spirit had a playbook,
like do companies have playbooks for like what happens if we
liquidate? What?
Like do you have a liquidation playbook?
Before, before you leave, turn the lights off, like a little
sign next to the door. Last one out switches off the
lights. Maybe it should have been last
one out switches off the website.
That's what they needed. Yeah.
The problem is as well though, you're dealing with people now,
but thinking of the people involved in that people's lives,
they've just lost their jobs. They they don't know if they're
going to get paid. I think they don't give a.
Monkeys, you know, they're, they're like, I'm going home.
Like they don't want to. They don't want to.
No, not everyone's. Some people will, but not
everyone, and probably not the people in power will think, you
know, we need to tie up our loose ends.
Before we leave anyway that's. Spirit Airlines.
Yeah, I it's a, it's an interesting one.
And that that angle wasn't picked up like on the news that
I saw. It was just in a researcher's
blog, which is like. OK, that's interesting.
Now we can obviously share the link and the news there for
people that want to read in, yes, detail on the stories.
A lot of research got into it. Yeah, yeah, we'll put that in
the in the newsletter, right? I'll move on to the next one.
Now the next story, Google Chrome silently installs A4 GB
AI model on your device without consent.
So security researcher Alex Hamph discovered that Google
Chrome silently downloads A4 GB AI model Gemini Nano to devices
without notification and without consent.
And this is different because it's potentially happening to
billions of people. Right now, Google Chrome,
world's most popular browser, A4 GB AI model, is coming down.
No prompt, no notification, no consent check box.
And if you find it and delete it, it comes back.
This sounds familiar. We had this with Claude a few
weeks ago. The researcher who caught it was
only running an automated audit. No human ever touched a browser
and the model still appeared. And so the under GPR,
downloading 4 gigabyte of data to someone device, profiling
hardware to decide if it's eligible, and doing all of this
without consent is potentially illegal.
So many people raised the GDPR question around the Claude that
we spoke about a few weeks ago as well, surely, but it's like.
This is the challenge for GDPR, isn't it?
I think these American based companies are flirting with the
edges of legitimacy. But this is a there's a
principle here. So like your browser, which is a
tool we all use to people in the comments on socials will go
should be using this should be using that people use Chrome
like Chrome's just an embedded part of people's lives.
But so millions of us are using it every day and here it is just
downloading some stuff that. A lot of stuff.
That we don't know about. And do you know what's
interesting about this? The model they're downloading
isn't even used for the AI features.
Most people would notice the AI mode button.
In the address bar, which I've not noticed yet, actually sends
queries to Google servers. So it doesn't even do stuff
locally. That 4 gig that this research
has found powers minor writing assistant features that most
people have never enabled. So if you actually use Google's
AI tools like Gemini or anything like that, they're all going off
to Google. They're not happening in this 4.
Gigabyte data set. I don't get why it's so big.
I don't get it. Again, this was reported on
cybernews.com, which, if you haven't got some kind of ad
blocker, isn't the most pleasant site to visit.
But cyber, cyber news have got to make money, right?
There's some ads and pop ups and stuff.
Which is ironic for a cyber news site, but yeah, this is it's an
interesting one. There's lots of details here
again, but just I think browser we trust browsers, browsers
sitting at every computer has a browser.
I've long been an advocate for more people in businesses using
Chromos rather than. Having a full computer, it's
like a think lion. Like do people need a big
windows device that can be hacked?
You know, is would businesses be safer if more people used
Chromos? But.
Who do you trust? Firefox popped up in our
comments last week. Firefox.
We'd love to know what you think about this.
Firefox. Are you downloading A4 GB file
in the background? For your AI services that.
'D be an interesting thing. Yeah, I'll find out.
Hopefully, yeah, just looking into the story a bit, it doesn't
they mentioned that the I did an opt out setting, but that was
months after the downloads started happening.
But I can't find that saying. But I think it's like in a like
you have to go into like, you know, the the cradle flags back
in yeah. So to to do that.
You know when you go into that space in Firefox, it says like
something like Here be Dragons or something like that.
Like you're going, you need to go into, not the nice UI for
settings, but you have to type a special thing into the.
Address bar and then that's where you can break stuff which.
Which if you're comfortable doing is fine, but my mum's not
going to do that. You know, she's not going to
know what she's doing. So you shouldn't have it
shouldn't be in there. Also, you mentioned it's opt out
and we spoke about this just recently, opt out versus opt in.
Why is it opt out? Why is it not opt in like if
they were really user? 1st.
If they really cared about giving users consent to.
Stuff. Make it opt in.
I'm still, I'm still sure you'd get so many people doing it.
I'm sure you would. But yeah, especially if it had a
nice pop up splash screen to say that this is a new feature and
all the benefits. Give me a reason, give me a why
do? Why do you want 4 gig?
Of my hard drive, I don't have lots of hard drive.
Space. We do a lot of video work.
I run out of hard. Drive space all.
The time Why do I want? Why should Chrome take?
Chrome already takes all the RAM now it wants.
All the hard drive space as well, yeah.
It's at some point I can't. I love Chrome, I use Chrome.
But I have to admit, you get to a point, don't you, where
enough's kind of enough in sometimes.
Anyway, we'll put details to that and a link to the story in
the newsletter. And if so, if you want to find
out more about Chrome's secret. Little AI stash on your on your
computer. Go to riskycreative.com and sign
up. Right.
OK, next one's yours. Cool, yeah this one.
Instagram has dropped end to end encryptions on DMS. So Meta have
removed end to end to end encryption from Instagram Direct
messages on May the 8th. The feature was optional since
2023. Message adoption was just too
low to justify keeping it. I mean, I personally didn't know
that was a thing. I don't use Instagram DMS in
that way anyway, but. Again, opt in.
Yeah. Why was it opt in?
It should. Have been on by default and then
opt out. Yeah, that's, that's, yeah, this
is how there's things that should be opt in that thinks
that shouldn't be right. Yeah.
Now we've gone Mac rumours, story talks about it.
And yeah, Mexicans now access all of Instagram's DMS,
including text, images, videos and voice notes.
And they're directing users who want encrypted messaging to use
WhatsApp instead. And they've, yeah, previously
promoted to encryption under the slogan of The Future is Private
all the way back in 2019. There is a let me just show you
Joe Tidy did a write up. On the BBC about this.
And there is a screenshot of. Stood in front of a massive
screen. Pointing up to a.
Sign that says the future is private at a keynote and it's
like. If it moves.
To. Privacy on Instagram now?
Not anymore, it isn't. Yeah.
So I mean, for anybody using Instagram, you maybe want to.
And yet if you're concerned about your conversations being
not private anymore, yeah, move to WhatsApp or some other
encrypted messaging. Yeah, it's probably about if I
am, it's an audience, I guess that Instagram users maybe,
maybe they wouldn't want to use WhatsApp.
I mean, you can't, I mean you just share like if you're using
Instagram posts and Reels and stuff, obviously you can share
those via WhatsApp. But it's where the licence
experience having to go between apps.
It's different though. Different audiences, like we
have people message us on Instagram, comments about the
posts we make. They're not going to WhatsApp.
Me because I'm not giving them my e-mail address or my phone
number. Do you know what I mean?
So. It is a different.
Audience like the arguments for this, the arguments for I I read
a couple of things someone said they want to see your messages
so they can train their AI on your conversations, which they
can't do if they're encrypted, but also.
Because. FBI, you know it the.
You know, crime, the enforcement agencies want to be able to
access these messages. So rather than dealing with any
of that difficulty. Like it's in, it's in their
interest as a business to not encrypt these messages.
And yeah, the. Way they they didn't even
announce that this was turning off they just change the terms
and conditions is like really awful yeah it's.
Out of curiosity looked about like if TikTok uses it and they
don't have Internet encryption and this sort of mentions that
potentially and does their ability to prevent harmful
content scams and potentially can protect children easier.
Yeah, anyone in general, I mean, that is.
That is a thing like where we post on Instagram and Tiktok the
creator care mode that they have in the comments, which I
imagine. Carries through to the actual
messages as well. Is.
Actually. Quite good, like you don't see.
I've actually got no idea if anyone says anything bad about
us because I've never seen I've been in this dream state where
everyone's only talking positively.
Maybe they do, but create a caremode hiding it from me,
which I'm happy with like I'm not.
I don't need to look under. The carpet, it's fine.
It's I don't need. To look under the bed, no one
needs to see that. So yeah, I get that as well.
The problem is making it optic. Yeah, IT people need to know
that this has been turned off and need to know that their
messages may be accessed by X. Or Y, and that's something that
I think more transparency needs to be done on.
Like just sent just put. A little notification once every
couple of weeks. In someone's messages, if they
use messages that says, meta has access to your messages and may
share them with their. Eyes or something?
Yeah, don't go sending intimate pictures via messages on
Instagram encrypted messaging. Platforms are available.
I think that's what that boils down to.
Yeah, I do. I mean.
Just quickly, I do wonder if you had it enabled if it's now told
you that it's gone. Probably not.
Maybe not, probably not. No.
Next one, yeah. Next.
One anthropic. I love saying that word.
It's such a good word to say. Anthropic CEO Anthropic CEO
warns of moment of danger as Mythos exposes thousands of
software vulnerabilities. So this is Anthropic is
obviously clawed and this is, I think this is quite big, but
it's a bit terrifying as well when you think about the bigger
picture. So Anthropic CEO Dario Amodi has
said there's a 6 to 12 month window to patch 10s of thousands
of software vulnerabilities found by Mythos AI, which is
Anthropic clawed Mythos. Mythos is the massive
vulnerability scanning engine that they locked down, they were
strict in access to because it was just going to wreak too much
havoc. So they gave access to only a
limited number of trusted partners because basically it
was too good at finding broken stuff.
So they've said there's a 6 to 12 month window to patch all the
bad stuff it's found before Chinese AI catches up.
So for example, an earlier Anthropic model found roughly 20
vulnerabilities in Firefox. Mythos found nearly 300 with
the. Total across all.
Software now in the 10s of thousands and over 99% of these
remain unpatched. Mythos has been restricted to 40
partner organisations including Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, JP
Morgan, Palo Alto under what they call Project Glass Wing.
So Mythos was able to chain 40 day vulnerabilities into a
single browser exploit that escaped both but will escaped
all kinds of protection. So they say that similar
capabilities that essentially you could do the work of Mythos
by chaining together a load of. AI models and being really
clever, but Mythos makes it really easy so.
The state. Of this is the Federal Reserve
Chair and the Treasury Secretary in America have convened bank
CEOs to discuss the implications like straight away.
Is the money safe? That's like that's obviously the
number. One thing for the people in
power, because money is power and power is money, but this is
massive. I think organisations, these
tooling, this tells us why patching is so important and I
think we need, we're going to need to tell our people that
because over the next year there's going to be a load of
patches coming down the pipe, so many systems that haven't been
patched before. And some key.
There's going to be infrastructure, hardware and
software that's going to need patching that maybe you haven't
got patching Windows for. That's going to mean rebooting
systems that haven't been rebooted for years.
And years and people are going to.
Go. What happens if we reboot that
and someone's going to go. I don't know.
It might start up again, it might not.
And this goes far and. Wide like we think about we.
Think about the windows. Systems in the business we used
to work at, there was a time they didn't have a patching
window and then all of that got brought in and then we can think
about like you used to look after some really old CCTV
systems that were running Microsoft XP.
Like 6-7 years ago you know that they should have long been
retired. And this.
Is the type of. Stuff this is going to try and
mop up. It's yeah, it's quite.
Scary to think about mythos. Found a 27 year old
vulnerability in open BSD which is one of the most security
hardened operating systems on the planet.
And and my notes. Here is basically saying if if
you know if decades of expert human review misses that.
Then we kind. Of need AI on the defensive side
as well before they get it on the attacking.
Side yeah, and it's going to. Happen at a.
Nation state level, someone's going to say this in the
comments. In a nation state level, we're
already there, right? Because what they've got behind
closed doors, it's probably 567 generations ahead of what we've
got publicly. What's?
Publicly disclosed is probably. A carefully PR D mission.
So China, whoever, China, Russia, Korea, you know, let's
not discriminate anyone, OK? We have listeners around the
world more than ever, which is amazing.
But. Nation.
States are already going to have access to some of these powerful
tools, you know. People in the East will be.
Poking at people at the West. People in the West will be
poking at people in the East. So patch.
Patch. Patch.
Patch, patch, patch, patch. Yeah, it.
Does make you wonder with the partner organisations who have
access to it, is it locked down to their environment and like
linked to their software or can it be used on like in any way?
Like I said there, I'd hope that it's locked down in some form to
only work on Google, only works on their software.
Who knows? You know, you know.
Who's just become the biggest targets in the world?
Cybersecurity attackers? Anyone who's got access to
project last week? They they are.
Now you know. Yeah, companies like AWS,
Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, Crowdstrike.
Google, JP Morgan Chase, Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA,
Palo Alto, they are all now like.
Being poked at. In ways that they've not been
poked before because if someone get access, gets access to them,
it's amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a
really nice. Video actually, when you go to
anthropic.com, Glasswing, there's some details about
Mythos and it's a really nice website that kind of explains
explains it all. It's clear it's crystal and kind
of goes through it. It is fairly technical, but if
you want to dive. In that go to anthropic dot
forward slash glasswing and it's yeah, explains a little bit
about it, right let's. Move on to the next one.
Cool. Yeah.
And. Next one, we've got open AI
that's a trusted contact feature to Jack GPT after self harm
lawsuits. So this is a feature that lets
adult users nominate someone who they may want to be notified if
the system detects signs of serious self harm risk.
Gets a bunch of information on on how it works, but it also
says that notifications are reviewed by a small team of
trained humans before being sent with a target review time of
under one hour. So that's almost sounds like
ironically something that an AI could potentially do instead of
a small team of humans. It says that no transcripts or
conversation details are shared with Trusted Contacts.
I guess it's a scan notification that this person's in a
vulnerable position. But yet follows a wave of
lawsuits from families that allege that tractability
encouraged or assisted self harm.
Some critics have argued yet that this feature creates
privacy concerns around who interprets mental States and
escalates sensitive, sensitive information to untrained third
parties. Goes on The vibe and AI reported
that less than 0.1% of its weekly users showed signs of
mental health emergencies. Says quite a sort of tricky
situation. This one, I mean, people use
chat pity for therapy and health, but I feel that that was
something that was sort of they turned off like it matters like.
No Oh it's OK less than nought .1% show signs of self harm or
like. That doesn't matter.
When you've got billions of users, yeah, like nought .1%.
Still a pretty significant number, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah. I've got Trusted Contacts
available on mine and they've said it's a new feature rolling
out. I haven't been notified about it
at all. So.
But it says having. A trusted contact can make it
easier to get support from someone who knows you well in
the future if you discuss suicide.
With ChatGPT in a way that indicates serious safety
concern, we may automatically notify your Trusted Contacts so
they can check in with you. It's not the best.
Way to dress it up. Is it in the future if you
discuss ending your we've ChatGPT in a way that indicates
serious safety concern? I'm sorry, there's there's a
better wording, more sensitive. Like if anyone is thinking about
doing that, one of the last things you do, I think is
admitting that you're thinking about doing that.
Yeah, the. AI should be able to pick up if
you're if you're if you're going down a dark path.
Surely they can pick it up before like asking me.
Oh, if you do discuss. This.
Yeah. Well, maybe as well I.
Can sort of maybe not discuss how to do things.
It seems to be possible, at least at one point it was
possible maybe to find out a lot of information in a bad sort of
way. And I mean, you could know where
the user is, it could put point them to various places for help,
right? Does this not feel like lip?
Service does this not oh it's all.
Right. We've done, we've done this.
It's fine. We've sorted this out.
Yeah, it's it feels like this is.
Very much just providing. Yeah, we're, we're dealing with
this. It reminds me of.
Was it a meta thing, a safety feature that we looked at Baul
back and it was pretty poorly integrated and very basic.
This is to. This is to.
Keep keep people like if people complain, oh, we've had the
lawsuits, right? Yeah.
Yeah, completely. I've also just seen Open AI.
ChatGPT has now got parental controls as well, and parents
and teens can link accounts, giving parents tools to adjust
certain features, set limits and add safeguards.
There's other thing as well, right?
If you're not logged in to ChatGPT, this isn't going to
work. You can use it using logging in.
I think so. I mean, maybe.
Not for maybe like says you've got like a certain amount of
usage, but I mean, it's not just tragic petite, right?
You can Gemini, you can or Google Google AI searches now
you can just do anonymous, anonymous thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
I do all of this. The fact it's just been added at
the bottom of the settings window that I don't think I've
ever been in, you know, it doesn't even nudge me.
I've just looked. I haven't got MFA configured.
I think I authenticate through. Google, but I don't have MFA.
Configured as well, and I haven't been prompted for that.
It's like they should be prompting for these basic
things. So yeah, yeah, nice try.
Open AI, but I'm not convinced it's good.
I think you're just trying to keep the wolf from the door in
some ways. Yeah, the next one and.
This is kind of hilarious, but also a bit scary.
Student hacks Taiwan high speed rail by exploiting a 19 year old
radio system. So a 23 year old with consumer
electronics he bought in he bought online managed to stop a
National Rail network carrying 80 million passengers a year.
The the Tetra radio system that the entire Taiwan high speed
rail network relies on hadn't had its encryption keys changed
19. Years 1919 years that's not a
failure of technology that's like a failure of support
maintenance of governance and them not thinking of that the.
Student's defence So the student's defence was said it
was accidental and I mean. That's kind of not completely
convincing. He bought specialised equipment,
decoded the system's parameters, programmed.
Them into handheld radios and transmitted fake emergency
signals at 11:23 PMI mean, that's a lot of.
Accidents to happen in a row, but this was a.
Student, right? Just imagine it's like the plot
of a movie, like it's a die hard movie.
Yeah, we're going to. We're going to bring the whole
train system to a halt, you know, just to do.
This is exactly like Ocean's 11 or something like that, only you
don't. Need some whiz kid at a computer
chewing gum to do it? You can get a 23 year old.
University student who probably is a whiz kid and he might have
been chewing gum. But just imagine what could have
happened with this. So, and this is the thing, it's.
An old system, right? 19 years old, probably put in,
probably maintained for a while, Maybe there's still one guy.
Like I've known one guy who has one responsibility and he's the
only guy in the business that can do that kind of thing.
You know, there's in, in businesses, you have these
legacy technologies that have hung around that work that have
never come to the top of the list when it comes to being
replaced because they just function and the business.
Relies on them, and they're baked in.
And this is exactly the. Type of thing that mythos will
take. Advantage of going back to the
earlier conversation around anthropic mythos, it's it's
scary and especially if you. Can do it.
With stuff you can just. Buy online consumer electronics
Sneakers. That's what this reminds me of
sneakers, the old Robert Redford film, which is still one of my
favourite hacking films. It's it's from the 90s, but it
still holds up today. It's still relevant social
engineering and stuff like this. Yeah, yeah.
So that's crazy. From an awareness.
From a human perspective. These news stories.
Are really good to present to the people in your organisation
because they'll get you thinking about stuff that you haven't
thought of. It might be like, oh, we've got
a really old radio system that we haven't touched for years.
Oh. Yeah, maybe we should look in
there without. Imagine if that happened to us,
You know, that's it and it. Yeah, well, you said one of.
Those things that only one person, or maybe that person's
left and this is unsupported thing.
But that's crazy that yeah, Taiwan's system relied on that.
I knew a business. Once that had their phone system
ran on a computer that was at an employee's home that sat under a
desk at home and it was like a really old system.
I also knew a company once that their whole kind of online
shopping operation ran from a spreadsheet on a desk that had a
post it note on it that said. Don't turn off.
But these were a long. Time ago and businesses evolved
since then. You know, every business will
have these somewhere under a desk or something.
Yeah, right. Move on to the next one.
Last one, I think the next one is to this week.
Yeah, to this. 1. Yeah, it's.
Kind of like a similar one to our last episode Around the
Toaster with Internet connected features.
Who needs an Internet? Connected toaster, sorry.
So you can. Now we've got a YABO robot
lawnmower which has hard coded passwords.
Brilliant. Because yeah, that doors and can
be trolled be controlled remotely by anyone.
So this is security researcher Andreas Macris just covered
critical vulnerabilities in every YABO robot lawnmower
worldwide. And that's roughly 11 similar as
well to the the robot vacuum cleaner.
Yeah, it says that every YABO runs a full Linux instance with
the same hard coded root password that resets of every
firmware update. Which, yeah, allows an attacker
to remotely control the mouse blades movement access on board
cameras, still Wi-Fi passwords and read the GPS coordinates as
well as the owner e-mail address.
And also as you. Mentioned in the start of the
episode, Prevent the emergency stop button from being used.
Yeah, there's a lot to this one. The other telemetry is also
rooted free Byte Dance Systems, which is obviously Tik Tok's
parent company. And this is a $5000 which weighs
over 200 lbs and has blades capable of causing serious
injuries. So it's a bit different.
To a robot vacuum that you can probably just pick up and, you
know, yeah, if this is. I'm just looking at them.
These are hefty units. It doesn't look like a.
Kind of futuristic sci-fi thing there.
And there's a. Let's say a nice.
GIF of it running someone over as well.
Quickly. Just bring that up on the
screen. You see that?
Oh, that's brilliant. So it's possible to.
Run someone over. Yeah, this is quite a it's kind
of a movie part in a way, like an AI uprising of it's got cheap
horror. Film written all over it, hasn't
it? Like Oh my God, the mower.
And then? It's like and then someone
running away from it and just constantly this mower's
following. Yeah, it's.
Got it's scary moving all over it.
But when it's yeah, not. Even just the physical damage
you could do, right? This can obviously get the
cheapest coordinates still. Yeah, you can get the Wi-Fi
password and there's obviously, yeah, 11,000 devices in the
world that could be affected by it.
It's an interesting. One Yabo's telemetry is routed
through Byte Dance. And byte.
Dance is obviously Tik Tok's parent company and there's in
America they had the whole uproar about Byte Dance getting
all of the algorithm from yeah, here is the same company getting
access to GPS locations and. I wonder if these things cameras
as well. So you can because I have can.
Drive it somewhere. Yeah.
Cut some grass. Yeah.
But then if this. Goes through byte dances,
servers. What else goes through Byte
Dance that's like this in so many ways?
You're you're infiltrated by many different things, yeah.
Yeah, that's quite a. Yeah, wild story.
It's quite intricate. You can get AI mean it's.
Amazing. You're both do like a they don't
eat leaf. A robot leaf blower and a robot.
Snow blower and see. That one, yeah, it's.
Like completely much. I kind of want one.
But don't want one. Do you know what I mean?
Like this is. This is I'm not going to get one
that. Yeah, they've.
Got Yeah, yeah, I mean it's a lot of sort of previous risk and
failings I guess in how they've set this up.
And then their back end with the the root bars have been hard
coded and the same on all of them.
And as this great research obviously goes all into the
details there. And I think so it says that
they've reached out to their company and said that they're
solved there by design, even though it can obviously be used
in. Sort of.
Potentially harmful ways. I'm really fed up.
With the excuse for many of these things being there by
design, we had this last week with Microsoft keeping all their
passwords in plain text. Even though like no other
Chromium based browser does, it's Microsoft saying it's by
design. I think that's a really poor
excuse. Like, Oh yeah, it's by.
Design like when someone finds a security issue or a physical
security issue. That shouldn't be.
Acceptable saying it's by design.
It's like what? Your design is really bad.
Yeah, it does go on actually to say.
So this part, this probably explains why it goes to buy
dances service. So they this research piece goes
on to say that the Arbo said that its corporate headquarters
is needed in New York. It's Kickstarter website has a
photo of a nice office block with the Arbo logo across the
front of it about Google Maps suggest it's just a small
building that they sort of bought in America and claimed
it's their their location. And they've gone to say that
Yabo is another name for hanging out in tech, which is based in
Shenzhen, China. So it claims to be a sort of
U.S. company, but it's actually a Chinese company, which is
obviously why they're using, but that's the servers there.
There's another article that goes on to say that you have a
promise to fix some of these issues, but I can't read it
because it's payroll. But yeah, yeah, this is one of
those things, right? Just another Internet of Things
device that's vulnerable. Do you remember we?
Spoke episodes ago about there being a about all IoT devices
having to meet a certain standard.
That clearly. Hasn't come into force yet.
All this ways around it that is so needed for things like this.
And maybe not even maybe then it needs to be there for software
as well, I mean. Yeah, Microsoft.
Edge is Microsoft running on Microsoft.
So like they're going to like we can do what we want, but
something like this like it should.
I'm sure we covered. That old devices would have to
have unique passwords and stuff like this.
This would fail that, surely. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it makes you. Sort of wonder, and maybe this
is just in America, but the fact that they can operate and sell
the device to consumers, but no one's checking that they're
genuine in that way. And as yeah, like I said,
there's no checklist for the safety of their their devices
for the Internet connection sort of aspect of it.
Yeah, that's it. It's pretty poor, pretty poor
details of that. We'll put links to all that
research and everything in the newsletter, which get risky
creative.com or search for the awareness angle on LinkedIn.
Right, that's this week's news. So let's get on with some
security socials. OK, so I had a few things to
share this week. The first one is similar to
something you shared a few weeks ago.
A few weeks ago you shared about free Wi-Fi on a plane in a QR
code, right? Well.
This is Instagram and you can see here someone's it's a
McDonald's, there's a sign McDonald's branded that says
free Wi-Fi and there's a Wi-Fi QR code underneath it and.
There's a guy that comes. Up to it puts it up, someone
goes up and scans it and there's the same monkey giving the
middle finger as you scan it and this poor guy is looking around
like what What's happened? What's happened?
Yeah, just be careful with. I mean, that's a fun little
video, right? Share it with your workforce.
Explain why they need to be careful scanning QR codes.
Yeah, the next one I wanted to share this week was something I
saw on. LinkedIn.
So this was something from Joseph Cox, who is the Co
founder and journalist at 404 media, which was, you know, one
of our. Kind of favourite.
Favourite media Cybersecurity news sites 404.
Media is quite good. So recently I opened up
Microsoft Teams and was greeted with a deep faked version of my
own face. Here's how we got the Chinese
language software from being marketed to scammers and which
can be used on WhatsApp, Zoom or other platforms.
So let me just play a little bit of this live.
Real time deep fake version of myself.
Be clear once again, this guy in the Microsoft Teams call is not
actually me. It's my own face on someone
else's body, this guy's. It was all there.
My deepfake even pinched his cheek, covered his nose, and
stroked his chin, all without the illusion breaking.
It's all thanks to a gaming laptop and a sought after
cutting edge piece of deepfake software that I got access to
after weeks of back and forth with the Chinese language
scammers spelling the tool with how Qin AI.
Oh my God. So yeah, it.
Goes on. Basically we spoke a few weeks
ago about the guy asking the person he was interviewing to
put three fingers over his face and the guy refused.
You can do that with this. I mean it's.
They've gone into. It, I mean, it did look slow, it
did look low quality, very soft tones on the face.
It looked like there was a philtre applied.
So it's only going to get better though.
And yeah, maybe you can't believe everything you see on
camera. Anymore.
Yeah. Especially look.
They've got somewhat trained. I I guess the average person
maybe wouldn't see those signs too easily.
And I guess it's about the education side of things that
need to come in. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it's. It's worrying times, this stuff,
so this stuff is available, it's out there.
There's a whole article on. Four O 4 media about it that
explains more details about the software and what they saw, but
you need to be a paid member to. Access it, which is a shame.
I feel like I feel. Like they shouldn't have a
paywall on an article like that but I get why they have because
it probably generates a lot of income but it's a shame that
they've paywalled back. I'll move.
On to the next one and the next one was a post I saw on Reddit
on no stupid questions. There are sometimes stupid
questions or no stupid questions, but this one didn't
feel like a stupid question and you can see here.
Why haven't hackers deleted student loans?
Why hasn't? A.
Benevolent hacker gotten into certain websites and deleted
student loans. Is it their ironclad
cybersecurity? Are the risks too high?
Is it just not profitable so it wouldn't be worth it?
If a hacker could delete my mortgage that'd be amazing.
Do you think each loan servicer just has a massive spreadsheet
on file shares somewhere called debt Ledger?
Please don't delete XLS as their only record some of the
comments. Because delete in a database
entry doesn't delete the legally binding promissory note you
sign. The debt exists on paper in.
Contracts and in court records. So it's quite.
I mean this is. Quite an interesting it does
make you wonder if people in organisations, the people we try
to protect would have questions like that and maybe that's a
question that we should be answering.
You know, maybe if we do newsletters, we should have a no
stupid questions that we can feed from stuff like that.
Yeah, I think it's not easy to delete like they say.
It's not as if you that's just written down in one Ledger and
not. Anywhere else, it's it's kind of
everywhere, yeah. I had a.
The other one I wanted to share this week was a post I saw from.
It was on LinkedIn again and. Let me just load.
It up. This is from.
Jessica Bayless So Jessica basically says it felt fitting.
I got my first recruitment scam e-mail on Saturday.
Look, I teach people to recognise scams.
She does our job right? She did.
She's a cyber policy and human risk leader.
I teach. People to.
Recognise scams and I couldn't help but feel the rise in the
hope, the excitement that maybe, just maybe, this is a lead that
could result in a job. But that's what they want you to
feel, so you let your guard down.
It's exactly the point. That she's making and if we look
at this e-mail, we can see here. They've tapped into.
I saw your profile and it clicked your experience.
In cybersecurity, communication policy development is perfect
match for the team I have in mind.
Your ability to translate technical security concepts into
clear communication and drive behavioural change is exactly
what they're looking for in a leader.
To shape their awareness in human risk programmes.
The compensation for this role is very tasty, plus a bonus.
If you're open to a move, reach out to the recruiting team at
and feel free to CC me so they know I'm the one that's sent you
like that feels there's so many triggers there.
There's so many like you're. The perfect match you are the
person we've been looking for you are you're going to solve
all of our problems we want you and we're going to pay you a
really nice sum of money to come to us please come to us e-mail
and mention me as well like the amount of validation and it's
yeah in. Itself is.
Like I think. You can see.
I reckon that's been written. There's a nice M-IN there and
it's overflowing with enthusiasm.
So it's got all the hallmarks have been written by AI as well,
I think, Yeah. Yeah.
So these are. Probably just done at scale.
That's the scary thing. There's probably not a human
behind that that's delivered that.
It's probably a system. That's been.
Written. You know they're sending these.
Out en masse? Yeah.
Imagine. That yeah, Gmail account you can
just set up, right? Yeah.
Do you? I remember now.
When I when I went open to work on LinkedIn, within seconds I
had someone message me. Within seconds there was there
was a Oh. I see you're open to work, blah
blah blah. And it's like, yeah, how no
human recruiter is that quick. They need to validate.
You they need to check, yeah. Kind of makes you think that.
In a way, if maybe Linkedin's set up that that's possible to
be easily monitored or scraped in some way you mean?
LinkedIn isn't. Absolutely.
I'm shooketh that you'd even suggest that LinkedIn might be
used for nefarious purposes. My Lord, LinkedIn is a safe
sanctuary for everyone. I'm going to get cancelled by
LinkedIn now. Yeah, I had.
There was one last thing I just wanted to mention and then we'll
call it a day. We obviously post our content on
TikTok and on Instagram and we've had some traffic do really
well. We get loads of comments now and
stuff like that, which is amazing.
I got a come on on TikTok which I thought was really
interesting. And it was by a user.
Called Grey for Fury and this was us talking about last week
we spoke about how all most half of UK businesses have been hit
by a cyber attack 85% of breaches last year were caused
by phishing grey fury's comment on here says it's because
security teams silo themselves from.
Normal. IT and think they can resolve
this via technology and not engaging with users, though I
find that really interesting because I'm not sure it's
security teams. I wonder what side of the fence
Grey Fury sat on right. Because he might.
Be sat in an IT team that feels like security, if siloed
themselves, someone in that security team may feel like
they've been siloed by IT. Yeah, and I know I've sat in a
security team that has been outside of outside of IT because
strategically it was decided that was probably the best
choice. So they were kind of operating
independently, but then you're not working.
Yeah. The key thing that Grey Fury
makes there, though, is engaging not just with users, but with
individuals in different teams. And everyone is what?
That's what. It's engagement isn't.
It that's what we all need to work on and focus on, yeah.
Yeah. Right.
Let's call it a day then, shall we?
That's it for this week. Yeah, I think so.
Cool. OK, don't forget you can find
us@riskycreative.com. You can find us on LinkedIn at
the Awareness Angle. You can search for the
newsletter. Newsletter comes out every
Monday. Instagram at Risky Creative.
YouTube at Risky Creative. TikTok at infosecond.
I probably need to change that at some point at infosec and on
TikTok and yeah, follow like subscribe and come back next
week. Cool.
All right, I'll see you next week.
Go catch ya. See you later.
Bye.