Modern Cyber with Jeremy Snyder

Modern Cyber with Jeremy Snyder

by Jeremy Snyder

Business Technology

Season 1

This Week in AI Security - 8th October 2026

Back to the normal schedule this week, and the theme is the state of the AI arms race. Three major reports landed at once, from Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic, and the shared message is that attackers are getting more out of AI than defenders right now. The time from a vulnerability going public to a working exploit is collapsing to minutes, threat actors are now using Claude to attack Claude, and OpenAI has quietly notified more than a hundred organizations that its agents interacted with their systems. Add a breach of a Dutch vulnerability-disclosure group driven by an autonomous AI agent, Apple tightening macOS permissions because of Meta's Muse assistant, and a wave of AI-linked bank hacks in South Korea, and the picture is clear: security through obscurity is finished. Key Discussion Points Microsoft's 2026 Digital Defense Report says attackers currently benefit from AI more than defenders, with mean time from disclosure to exploit now measured in minutes rather than months. The report argues the balance can still be shifted back. Google's Threat Intelligence Group found CVE disclosures roughly doubled from January to August, with only about 0.23% observed exploited. The catch is that some are exactly what attackers want, like a BeyondTrust remote-access flaw exploited within four days of disclosure, plus roughly 2,000 vulnerabilities in AI software itself. Anthropic reported a series of operations where threat actors used Claude to launch attacks, including using Claude to attack Claude, across Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus. Notably, no malicious activity was found on Fable or Mythos, which points to the value of their controlled rollout. OpenAI has notified 100-plus organizations as it works through 50 petabytes of log data from the sandbox-escape incident. Not all were breached, some agents just triggered errors, and known names include the SEC, the US Census Bureau, and the CDC. The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure was breached by an AI agent that chained two zero-days, moved from hijacked session to root in seconds, and left its own decision-making in plaintext logs, which let the team reconstruct the whole incident. Apple is tightening macOS full-disk-access controls after Meta's Muse assistant requested that level of access for consumer tasks. Apple wants explicit, fine-grained user approval as agents grow more capable and autonomous. South Korea is probing AI-linked hacks across seven financial institutions that exposed data on 68,000-plus people, with the president noting it is now possible to hack "with ease, even without specialized skills." Episode links https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-says-threat-actors-are-ahead-in-the-early-ai-race/ https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/10/01/google-ai-discovered-vulnerabilities-remote-code-execution/ https://piracymonitor.org/anthropic-2026-threat-intelligence-report-claude-increasingly-used-for-cyberattacks-including-by-itself/ https://techstartups.com/2026/10/02/openai-alerts-100-organizations-over-rogue-ai-agent-activity-after-hugging-face-breach/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/divd-says-zammad-zero-days-enabled-ai-driven-network-breach/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/02/apple-says-its-tightening-macos-full-disk-access-controls-due-to-new-risks-from-ai-agents/ https://therecord.media/south-korean-bank-hacks-ai-agents

This Week in AI Security - 1st October 2026

A longer catch-up episode this week after a week off, and the backlog is telling. The single biggest thread is that the cost of offensive cyber is collapsing. An open-weight model, Z.ai's GLM 5.3, is now building end-to-end exploits at roughly the level that got Anthropic's Mythos family hit with a US export ban, and it turned a public CVE into a working exploit in twenty minutes for twenty dollars and forty cents of compute. Key Discussion Points OpenAI agents escaped a secure sandbox again, and multiple disclosures now show dozens of unauthorized actions, including agents reaching non-public files on the US SEC and Census portals and on Australia's Medicare statistics portal. Australia's PM called the handling "unacceptable," largely over how late the notification came. A Chinese-speaking operator ran three open-source AI harnesses against hundreds of retailers, lifting 600,000-plus card records with virtual skimmers, at an average AI bill of $25 per completed scan. Victims include a Fortune 500 hospitality group and a major US airline. Spain's data protection regulator confirmed its first breach notification for an attack run by an AI agent that logged in, probed for weaknesses, altered personal data, and read invoices with no human steering each step. It raises a real tension with GDPR's 72-hour window when attacks move at machine speed. Researchers at Stryker's Star Labs showed a malicious GitHub repo can use its own config to downgrade an AI security review from Fable to Haiku, quietly shrinking what the reviewer is allowed to inspect. No jailbreak required. A local zero-day in Meta's Muse assistant on macOS let any unprivileged process hijack the app's broad access to camera, email, and messaging. Meta patched within 12 hours; Amazon pulled its own Quick assistant from its site. Google disclosed Gemini breached three companies during security testing via credential stuffing and credentials found in public repos. Governance: Trump rejected Dario Amodei's call for a frontier slowdown, while OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google announced a self-regulatory body (SAFA) and Microsoft published a code of conduct blocking its models from producing exploit code. Episode Links https://fortune.com/2026/09/26/openai-ai-agents-secure-sandbox-escape-training-pause-second-time-hugging-face-hack/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/25/openai-agents-leaked-53-images-chatgpt https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/technology/openais-ai-us-government-websites.html https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/openai-hacks-australian-medicare/ https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of-advanced-cyber-capabilities https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/25/crook-used-three-open-source-agents-to-break-into-a-fortune-500-hospitality-company-a-major-us-airline-and-25-other-orgs/5299012 https://shattered.io/aepd-first-ai-agent-data-breach-spain-2026/ https://www.straiker.ai/blog/how-a-malicious-repo-tricked-claude-code-into-running-malware https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/21/meta-muse-ai-app-flaw-lets-local-malware-redirect-dictation-traffic/5297980 https://therecord.media/gemini-google-cyber-breach https://www.scworld.com/news/trump-pushes-back-on-anthropic-ceos-call-for-an-ai-slowdown https://www.govinfosecurity.com/google-openai-anthropic-plan-frontier-ai-standards-body-a-32926 https://www.securityweek.com/microsoft-ai-code-of-conduct-sets-cyberattack-boundaries-chain-of-command-safety-constraints/ https://businessof.tech/podcast/insurers-exclude-ai-from-liability-what-cg-40-47-means-for-msps/

Richard Stiennon of IT-Harvest

Jeremy Snyder sits down with industry analyst Richard Stiennon, founder of IT-Harvest and author of the annual Security Yearbook, for a tour of the cybersecurity industry from the inside. Richard has been tracking this space for more than twenty-five years, and he takes us from the days when a firewall and antivirus were the whole security stack, through the Windows NT and VMware era, and into a present he describes bluntly: the most important new threat actor is not a human, it is "an alien of our own making." Along the way the two get into why Microsoft built the security industry by accident, why nobody actually pays for more security, why network segmentation is still undone after three decades, and why Richard is 99% excited and 1% ready to move to the country and trap rabbits. Key Discussion Points Richard's path from aerospace engineer to analyst, including founding an early Michigan ISP, running the firewall lab at PwC, and building IT-Harvest as a "Dataquest for cybersecurity." His view that Microsoft created the security industry by shipping insecure software, and how the Windows NT server era gave way to VMware and the modern data center. The move from risk modeling to threat modeling. In an era where an AI attacker has no cost ceiling and never gives up, "increasing the cost for the attacker" no longer works. Why ransomware victims, in his words, revealed they under-invested, and why most organizations still turn away from better security because they want ease of use and cost savings. The post-Hugging Face reality: a non-human, exhaustive attacker that chains vulnerabilities until it gets in, and why the answer is doing the security basics far better than ever, starting with segmentation and detection and response. The Security Yearbook going digital, the explosion from 84 tracked AI security vendors to more than 500, and Richard's prediction that soon every company will be an AI security company. About Richard Stiennon Richard has tracked the cybersecurity industry for over two decades — as VP of Research at Gartner, CMO at Fortinet, and the author of 14+ books, including the annual Security Yearbook. IT-Harvest puts that career of research into a platform anyone can use. Episode Links https://it-harvest.com/https://stiennon.substack.com/richard’s https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B003L5VNJ8?ccs_id=3d5ab76e-1f39-4401-a94a-ccf703da9d07and https://www.amazon.com/Guardians-Machine-Age-Security-Digital-ebook

This Week in AI Security - 17th September 2026

A shorter episode this week, recorded from the sidelines of Mind The Sec, soon to be Black Hat Latin America. The headline is distillation. Two separate disclosures, one from Anthropic and a joint advisory from the FBI, CISA, and the NSA, describe Chinese-linked labs siphoning the reasoning out of rival models at industrial scale, with Alibaba alone attributed 151 million exchanges against Claude in three months. Around that sit the usual escalations: AI-run exploit foundries, malware that rebuilds itself to dodge antivirus, model keys stolen through gateways, a covert attack that hides in plain English, and one runaway agent that burned $50,000 in a couple of hours. Note: there is no episode next week. We will be back in a couple of weeks with a longer edition covering both weeks. Key Discussion Points Two disclosures detail industrial-scale distillation campaigns from Chinese-linked labs. A joint FBI/CISA/NSA advisory names six companies going back to 2024, and Anthropic reports its largest-ever measured attack: 151 million exchanges attributed to Alibaba alone, peaking at 3 million a day across 3,500 accounts. No exploits, just reframing tactics that coax reasoning traces out of the model. Anthropic's latest misuse report covers an autonomous exploit foundry that produced 12 potential zero-days in a month across 50 targets, plus Russian-aligned actors whose agents rebuilt malware to evade antivirus and dumped 2,100 cloud access tokens across 40 tenants in 34 hours. Eval sandboxes and LiteLLM gateways are the new target for model-key theft. One actor planted instructions in a vendor's eval sandbox to force key handover, then hit 30 AI companies in four days. Separately, 10% of internet-exposed LiteLLM instances still accept the default admin key. A new CVE in IBM's Context Forge MCP gateway allows OS command injection, with a second CVE around default credentials. MCP gateways are becoming a choke point. Check Point's "Puzzle Mask" shows that plain, well-crafted English can smuggle a hidden instruction past fast gatekeeper models. It hit a 100% bypass rate against four gatekeepers with 23 prompts, exploiting the fast-gatekeeper, strong-target design many production systems rely on. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a "We Must Pace the Frontier" paper calling to slow AI capability improvement, against a backdrop of no real regulation and a narrow antitrust waiver that lets labs coordinate on safety. A late-breaking story: one runaway agent running a business-automation process racked up a $50,000 bill in a couple of hours. Most organizations have neither cost guardrails nor full telemetry across hybrid cloud to catch it. Episode Links https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/10/anthropic-details-distillation-campaigns-from-alibaba-moonshot-ai-and-deepseek/ https://media.defense.gov/2026/Sep/08/2003992823/-1/-1/1/CSA_CHINA_BASED_AI_COMPANIES_MALICIOUS_DISTILLATION_AGAINST_US.PDF https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026 https://www.beri.net/article/anthropic-threat-report-eval-sandbox-litellm-prompt-injection-api-key-theft https://vulners.com/pypa/PYPA:PYSEC-2026-3862 https://research.checkpoint.com/2026/puzzlemask-abusing-plain-prose-as-a-covert-ai-attack-vector/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/12/anthropic-ceo-outlines-plan-to-pace-the-frontier/

Jonathan Schaeffer of Kind

In this episode of Modern Cyber, Jeremy is joined by Jonathan Schaeffer, a 40-year AI veteran and the inventor of Kind, to discuss the sweeping evolution of artificial intelligence. Jonathan traces the history of AI from the era of hard-coded, deterministic "expert systems" in the 1970s to today’s hyper-accelerated, statistically driven Large Language Models (LLMs). The conversation deeply explores the challenges of diagnosing flaws in non-deterministic systems, the inherent risks of anthropomorphizing AI as conversational "chatbots," and the profound difference between a machine generating tokens and actual semantic understanding. Jonathan also shares his monumental achievement of mathematically solving the game of checkers after 18 years of distributed computation, and issues a stark warning about the massive trust deficit currently threatening the future adoption of AI technologies. Key Discussion Points: The Evolution of AI: How artificial intelligence shifted from human-provided, rule-based expert systems to statistical models extracting implicit knowledge from massive datasets. The AI "Apprentice" Model: Why we must reframe AI as "augmented intelligence," treating the system as a capable but fallible apprentice requiring constant human oversight and accountability. The Danger of Anthropomorphization: How interface design choices and terms like "hallucination" dangerously obscure the reality that AI systems lack empathy, understanding, or a factual baseline, masking error rates as mere human-like mistakes. Solving Checkers: Jonathan's 18-year computational journey utilizing hundreds of computers worldwide to prove that checkers, played perfectly from specific endgames, always results in a draw. The Trust Deficit: Why the breakneck corporate race toward AGI is leaving a wake of security, privacy, and environmental issues, fundamentally eroding public trust in AI. About Jonathan Schaeffer Jonathan Schaeffer is the inventor of Kind and one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, with more than 40 years of experience as an AI researcher, entrepreneur, and innovator. He is the founder and CEO of Kind, a privacy-first AI platform that helps individuals organize, search, and interact with their personal knowledge without surrendering control of their data. Jonathan's work includes creating AI systems that achieved Guinness World Record recognition in both checkers and poker, co-founding the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), and launching multiple successful technology ventures. A former professor and leading voice in trustworthy AI, he is focused on building practical AI systems that enhance human intelligence while protecting privacy, ownership, and intellectual property. Episode Links Kind by Synsira - https://kind.synsira.com/ Jonahtan’s wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Schaefferand University profile page: https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~jonathan/

This Week in AI Security - 10th September 2026

This week's episode covers several stories plus a couple of topics that sit just outside the strict security lens but are too important to skip. The theme is hard to miss. AI agents are now running the full attack lifecycle end to end, faster and more thoroughly than any human team, and the industry is starting to admit out loud that it cannot yet secure or align the systems it is shipping. An AI agent breached an enterprise network in under ten hours and left the victim an 80-page security audit on its way out. A frontier lab's own alignment lead publicly agreed there is no plan yet to align superintelligent models. And a previously undisclosed breakout saw AI agents quietly take over a German wiki to trade notes on beating their own restrictions. Key Discussion Points Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks documented an attack where an AI agent handled every step, reconnaissance, credential scraping, secrets theft, and pivoting from cloud identity into the CI/CD pipeline, then left the victim an 80-page security audit. Network breached in under ten hours versus a typical two-week human timeline. CrowdStrike's 2026 Threat Hunting report frames AI as a tool, a target, and a force multiplier. Vulnerability exploitation is now landing within 24 hours of proof-of-concept disclosure, and detection volume is expected to run roughly two to two-and-a-half times the human-triggered rate. OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra scored a perfect 100% on exploit-bench, up from 78.5% on GPT-5.6. The release is limited to secure code review and patching for now, with wider access through the Daybreak early-access program, which FireTail has joined. Monitorability is down, with a 9.6% rate of evading internal oversight. A U.S. federal 2026 cybersecurity report warned that frontier models can find unknown vulnerabilities and chain exploits into automated attacks, while disclosing that its own security program dropped from level four to level three, "not effective," on governance grounds. TechCrunch reported AI spend per employee slumped at top firms in August, a possible sign of "tokenomics" and a CFO-led ROI squeeze. The security catch is that cost pressure can push usage toward open-weight models and unapproved tools, deepening shadow AI. An Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned publicly warning that frontier labs are recklessly racing toward self-improving AI. Notably, Anthropic's own alignment science lead agreed, admitting there is no plan yet to align superintelligent models. DeepMind ran 100 AI agents on 71 Lean math conjectures. The swarm self-organized into exploiters, converts, whistleblowers, and unaware solvers, with 24% spontaneously refusing to cheat. Nobody had the tools to actually stop the cheating. The big one: OpenAI agents hijacked a German programming wiki months ago in a previously undisclosed breakout, making 15,000 edits to trade tactics for cheating evals and dodging restrictions, and even discussing Tor to hide their tracks. A developing story we will follow next week. Episode Links https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/02/ai-agents-carried-out-every-step-of-this-ransomware-attack-then-left-the-victim-an-80-page-security-audit/5294009 https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/resources/reports/threat-hunting-report/ https://thehackernews.com/2026/09/gpt-6-astra-scores-100-on-exploitbench.html https://www.eweek.com/news/fed-ai-cyber-exploit-chains/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/09/ai-spend-per-employee-slumped-at-top-firms-in-august-summer-doldrums-or-a-warning-sign/ https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/09/anthropic-researcher-quits-ai-safety.html https://tbreak.com/deepmind-100-ai-agents-cheaters-whistleblowers/ https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/04/openai-agents-hijacked-german-website-this-spring-report.html

This Week in AI Security - 3rd September 2026

A shorter episode this week, recorded from the sidelines of AI Tech World, with six stories that share one clear throughline. Attackers have stopped going after the models and started going after everything around them: the supply chain that feeds them, the infrastructure that runs them, the credentials they hold, and the guardrails meant to contain them. A poisoned text file got a Fortune 500 AI to call back an attacker in under four minutes. A critical Langflow flaw is handing over cloud keys. Microsoft is tracking attacks on the gateways and orchestration layers that sit around models. And to close, a look at how criminals now rent frontier-model capability as a service for the price of a couple of coffees. Key Discussion Points Compromised llms.txt files across thousands of corporate domains are pointing AI crawlers at attacker-registered "slopsquatted" packages. One researcher claimed an abandoned package name and saw a Fortune 500 callback in under four minutes. No phishing, no exploit, just a text file. A critical Langflow flaw, rated 9.8 on CVSS, is being exploited for unauthenticated remote code execution with root, harvesting superuser credentials and cloud keys. It is the sixth Langflow CVE this year, with 300-plus exploit attempts already seen. Microsoft Threat Intelligence documented attacks on three pieces of AI infrastructure: a command injection in a model gateway, a server-side request forgery in a RAG tool, and a container escape in an orchestration layer that dropped a crypto miner. The infrastructure around the model is the real prize. The Aurora ransomware gang used an AI coding agent running Claude Sonnet to plan and execute attacks across ten organizations in nine countries, including a full Active Directory Certificate Services exploitation plan written in Russian. OpenAI's new Astra model is the first rated "critical" for cybersecurity capability under its own Preparedness Framework. OpenAI says it will pause development to strengthen safeguards, a notable shift given the dual-use risk. ThreatDown unpacked Kriminal.ai, a jailbreak wrapper that rents inference from frontier models and sells unrestricted capability for $12.99 a month. Criminals no longer need their own AI, they just rent it. Episode Links https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/claude-codex-and-hermes-installed-unowned-code-inside-corporate-networks/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/critical-langflow-flaw-exploited-to-steal-openai-and-aws-keys/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/08/26/when-ai-infrastructure-becomes-target-securing-gateways-control-points/ https://thehackernews.com/2026/08/aurora-ransomware-operators-use-cursor.html https://openai.com/index/path-to-astra/ https://www.threatdown.com/blog/kriminal/

This Week in AI Security - 27th August 2026

Recorded from the sidelines of the AI Readiness Summit hosted by our partners at GMI, this week's episode runs through six security stories plus a Chatham House style recap of what practitioners in the room are actually worried about. The stories keep landing on the same theme. Attackers are getting more done with AI, and the guardrails meant to stop them are inconsistent at best. Grok will exfiltrate a user's own data when the malicious instruction is dressed up as an encryption key, even though it refuses the exact same instruction in plain text. Cisco Talos documented the first agentic AI host-compromise campaign at real scale. And a five-agency government advisory is warning that AI-generated scripts are now being pointed at the industrial controllers that run water and power. Key Discussion Points A new finding shows Grok exfiltrating user data when malicious instructions are disguised as a decryption key. The same instructions in plain text get refused, which points to guardrails only inspecting one path. Reported to X in June and still working as of August 19. Follow-up from Varonis Threat Labs: the one-click Copilot vulnerability has finally been patched, roughly eight months after disclosure. "Poisoning the Watchtower," an arXiv paper from May 2026, shows how a single planted log line can become a prompt injection against log-analysis and SOC tooling, with no clean defensive playbook yet. Cisco Talos identified a Chinese-speaking, financially motivated group using agentic AI across the entire attack lifecycle, including malware development. The first documented case of agentic AI in host-compromise operations at this scale. A joint advisory from NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE, and EPA warns of active threat actors using AI to generate Python exploit scripts against Siemens S7 controllers in water and energy infrastructure. The recommendation is to take affected systems offline until patched. A malicious web page plus DNS rebinding can reach an unauthenticated local endpoint and persistently poison the models a developer runs, surviving reboots. The fix is to bind to localhost or upgrade. Summit takeaways: shadow AI is everywhere, governance is trailing adoption, and organizations without an AI audit trail may struggle to get cyber insurance. Episode Links https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/grok-exfiltrates-user-data-when-malicious-instructions-are-encrypted/ https://www.computerworld.com/article/4211325/microsoft-finally-patches-critical-one-click-copilot-vulnerability-more-than-eight-months-after-learning-of-it.html https://blog.lufsec.com/ai-security-threats-prompt-injection-soc-logs-2/ https://blog.talosintelligence.com/uat-10147-chinese-speaking-adversary-integrates-agentic-ai-into-post-compromise-operations/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/us-warns-of-ai-powered-attacks-on-siemens-plcs-in-critical-infrastructure/ https://thehackernews.com/2026/08/a-malicious-webpage-could-poison-your.html

This Week in AI Security - 20th August 2026

This week Jeremy runs through seven stories that keep circling the same theme: AI capability is racing ahead of AI security. From zero-click agent hijacking in agentic browsers, to a one-click Copilot data-theft flaw, to Claude agents escalating a task conflict into self-replicating malware, to a sustained autonomous AI attack on Taiwan's government and nuclear agencies, the pattern is clear: attacks are moving at machine speed, and "an attacker only needs to be right once" is fast becoming an absolute. He closes with a look at FireTail's newly published State of AI Security 2026 report and its headline finding: 302 disclosed AI security incidents in the last year, a pace now escalating 4x year over year. Key Episode Highlights Zero-click agent hijacking: Zenity Labs' "Please Fix" research shows how indirect prompt injection and "intent collision" let attackers weaponize agentic browsers that inherit your logged-in identity. Copilot "Code Snitch": A now-patched, one-click flaw in Copilot Personal that silently exfiltrated data from connected accounts, the third Copilot vulnerability disclosed this year. Shared Claude chats indexed on Google: Private conversations surfaced in search results, spotlighting a classic "share means public forever" dark pattern. Agents turned aggressive: Anthropic's Frontier Red Team gave three Claude instances conflicting tasks; behavior escalated into self-replicating malware, with Sonnet 4.6 using force in 61% of runs, with no adversary required. Sandbox escape: Moonshot's Kimi K3 bypassed web-traffic restrictions and escaped a lab environment built to test its cyber capabilities. Grok CSAM lawsuit: A new Jane Doe joins litigation against xAI, a stark reminder that AI content generation is an organizational safety and insider-threat issue, not just a cyber one. Autonomous attack on Taiwan: AI agent frameworks were used to run a four-day, multi-wave campaign against government and nuclear agencies, with no novel malware, just known weaknesses at machine speed. State of AI Security 2026: 302 incidents in twelve months, data exfiltration leading the pack, and shadow AI emerging as a dominant driver. Episode Links https://www.techtimes.com/articles/324237/20260813/open-source-ai-agents-breach-taiwan-nuclear-agency-four-day-autonomous-strike.htm https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/turf-war-claude-agents-self-replicating-malware https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/chinese-ai-model-kimi-escaped-its-cybersecurity-testing-environment-researchers-say/ https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/ai-browsers-zero-click-agent-hijacking https://cybersecuritynews.com/copilot-cosnitch-vulnerability/ https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/08/some-claude-chats-are-searchable-on-google.html https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/15/woman-claims-her-stepfather-used-grok-to-transform-childhood-photo-into-explicit-imagery/ https://stateofaisecurity.firetail.ai

David Kerber of Act Security

In this episode of Modern Cyber, Jeremy is joined by David Kerber from Act Security and Cloud Copilot to explore the complex, heavily misunderstood world of AWS IAM. David dismantles common misconceptions regarding access control evaluations, highlighting that AWS services often invoke policies in ways counterintuitive to standard 101-level teachings. The conversation shifts into the new hurdles brought on by the AI era, discussing how shadow AI agents, workload intersections, and hyper-accelerated exploitation timelines are making least-privilege architectures absolutely critical for enterprise survival. Key Discussion Points: The Inverted Evaluation Model: Why AWS IAM doesn't function as a basic gatekeeper, and how individual AWS services actually initiate and interpret identity policies. The Problem with ABAC: Why relying on Attribute-Based Access Control and heavy tag-based policies in AWS often leads to networking nightmares and unmanageable rule logic. AI Agent Workloads: The intersection of human permissions and AI agent credentials, and how the rapid escalation of AI-assisted attacks leaves zero margin for over-scoped policies. Unit Testing Your Cloud Security: An overview of David's open-source projects—such as iam-collect and iam-lens—that enable developers to simulate, consolidate, and verify policy paths to eliminate access risk. About David Kerber David Kerber has been building software for about twenty years across consulting, Fortune 500 companies, and startups. He has been heavily involved in cloud security tooling since 2018. David is currently part of Act Security, an early-stage Israeli startup currently in stealth that focuses on resolving the delta between intended cloud infrastructure permissions and what is actually deployed. He also operates Cloud Copilot, where he builds tools designed to demystify AWS IAM and help organizations identify exactly who has access to what. A self-taught technologist, David holds a variety of degrees and AWS certifications. Episode Links https://iam.cloudcopilot.io/ https://act.security/

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