Three Buddy Problem

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

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 111: OpenAI finally published a technical Hugging Face post-mortem, and Costin's verdict is blunt. He reads it as a document written for policymakers rather than for the blue teams who have to survive a thousand-agent swarm.

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

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

Timestamps:

0:00 Introductory banter

1:11 TLPBlack, incident response, and why it starts at the router

4:11 CaptiveCrunch and Juanito's travel router kit

7:59 Costin's VPN/hotel WiFi stack

12:36 State of Statecraft, LABScon, and Offensive AI Con

17:16 OpenAI's Hugging Face post-mortem technical report

21:43 A swarm of a thousand agents

27:35 Who was OpenAI’s report written for?

33:05 Fail2ban, canaries, and catching agents in your logs

40:34 NVIDIA buys Hugging Face for $12.9 billion

44:42 The open weights fight and rooting for China

52:47 Nemotron, DGX Spark, and the RAM price spiral

1:03:26 Open letter on collective AI-powered cyber defense

1:30:21 Lumen's Quartermaster and the FBI ORB takedown

1:59:05 Backdoored ZBT routers, Chinese phones, and the TeamPCP arrests

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

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

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

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

Timestamps:

0:00 Introductory banter; LabsCon speakers announced

9:06 A naval drone reaches the Neptun Deep gas platform

17:38 OpenAI pauses RL training: what "slowing the pace of scaling" costs

24:34 Guardrails vs refusals vs alignment.

33:54 Irregular, formerly Pattern Labs: $80M, $450M valuation, one job

46:11 JAGS on why security needs a new batch of startups right now

1:06:52 EncroChat revealed: a GitHub-sourced implant, IOCs

1:15:12 Law enforcement malware vs intelligence malware

1:21:07 T-Mobile, Salt Typhoon, and cutting the cable with a pair of scissors

1:32:06 Captive Crunch: hotel Wi-Fi, OAuth token theft, and the MSP supply chain

1:47:00 ICE RELIC, UNC6293, and the trouble with subcluster naming

2:00:39 UFO corner: David Grusch, Dr. Phil, and the Skywatcher Project

2:05:44 Shout outs, the Costin Challenge

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

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

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

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

Timestamps:

0:00 Introductory banter

0:58 State of Statecraft, and a late CFP window

3:24 The White House offensive hacking memo

6:37 "Hack back" is the wrong frame for what's being authorized

11:20 Ransomware cases sitting on the shelf

17:01 The million-dollar bond and who can realistically play

22:29 Where DPRK crypto theft falls under the new definitions

28:15 Would TLP Black take a contract?

36:55 Gen Digital's 12 KB backdoor hiding its C2 in desktop.ini whitespace

46:57 Passive DNS, registration patterns, and pivoting on a dead domain

57:32 Feeding a one-off find back into detection engineering

1:02:14 Metador, Mafalda, and the mercenaries who love telcos

1:17:07 Armored Likho and what "Western APT" really means

1:28:16 The IOC market, private reporting, and CTI’s matching problem

1:58:10 Google's culture problem, the weekly model churn, and Patch Tuesday math

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

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 108: OpenAI got on the Black Hat stage and walked through how its own agent swarm hacked Hugging Face. We discuss and struggle to decide whether to clap or panic.

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

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

Timestamps:

0:00 Introductory banter - Black Hat went full RSA

1:11 TLP Black sponsor read

3:58 A deflated, AI-pilled show floor

8:31 AI stunt hacking and AI slop

16:20 The OpenAI–Hugging Face talk

21:00 Not all the same incident: OpenAI vs. Meta, Anthropic, and Irregular

25:49 Swarms of agents, Artifactory message boards, and the defense gap

32:26 Offense vs. defense: what's really in the training data?

41:22 Guardrails, KYC, and "too dangerous to release"

48:07 JAGS's unpublished Opus 5 benchmark — grinding to 25% and stuck

59:30 AISI, recklessness, and the OpenAI Frontier Risk Council

1:06:27 Stronger models everywhere: Qwen, Sol, Astra, rushing off the cliff

1:18:32 APT29 / "Dark Hotel" reborn + travel OPSEC

1:39:56 China's Palo Alto review, spy-agency rankings, Iran/water FUD

1:57:28 Liechtenstein AML hack, JAGS's promotion, mental health

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

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

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

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

Timestamps:

0:00 Sponsor - Thinkst Canary

1:34 Greg Lesnewich introduces the Proofpoint threat-hunting team

5:23 Inside the NSA ‘Laundry Bear’ advisory

7:15 What does "half-click" mean?

9:58 Laundry Bear's Zimbra exploit: DNS exfil and app-specific password persistence

12:59 Ferrari model numbers, F1 UNC names, and ESET's Operation RoundPress

17:05 Targeting Ukraine, US universities, and magnetic fusion research

19:34 How threat hunters actually build intuition

32:35 Systems thinking, Donella Meadows, and Costin's laptop under the dinner table

54:48 The dopamine hit of a real find and the deleted "never mind" messages

1:00:42 Magnets of threats: under 1% of customers ever see an APT

1:25:21 Getting detections into the product, and coordinating a release with NSA

1:53:22 Anthropic and OpenAI models breaking out of the eval sandbox

2:17:45 The case for killing the CFAA and bricking vulnerable devices

2:43:44 AI in the lab, malware paleontology, Google's new names, and AngrySpark