Application Security Weekly (Audio)

All sorts of cybersecurity disciplines are adopting agents to help humans save time and automate routine activities. Sai Kiran Uppu describes his work on creating a platform for agents to analyze external threat intel, examine internal systems, and present triage decisions to operators. This type of work is especially useful to orgs that deal with petabytes of data and thousands of systems. And, as Kiran notes, it's important to keep that scale from blowing up your budget or turning triage into a procession of false positives.
Ideally, this kind of threat intel that's paying attention to attack trends and searching internal systems for evidence of compromise also turns into proactive defenses. We talk about some of the ways to engage developers to improve security visibility into their services and harden their designs against common attacks.
After that discussion we're running two sponsored interviews from Black Hat.
AI Pentesting and the Future of Cybersecurity: Black Hat interview with Chris Wallis, Founder and CEO of Intruder
This segment discusses how AI addresses the long-standing gap between traditional pentesting and automated vulnerability scanning. Intruder CEO and founder Chris Wallis dives into the nuances of AI-enabled security and how these offerings will impact mid-market security teams.
Segment Resources:
https://www.intruder.io/platform/ai-pentesting
https://www.intruder.io/blog/ai-pentesting-the-depth-of-a-pentest-on-demand
https://www.intruder.io/blog/ai-web-app-pentesting-test-on-every-major-release
Intruder's continuous exposure management platform helps security, IT, and engineering teams stop breaches before they start. For more information about Intruder's products and services, please visit https://securityweekly.com/intruderbh.
How Menlo Security Is Securing AI Agents from Prompt Injection: Black Hat Interview with Ramin Farassat, Chief Product Officer of Menlo
Enterprises are deploying AI agents like Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Claude Code faster than they can secure them, and attackers are exploiting that gap through prompt injection. Hidden instructions get buried in web pages, files, and even images that a human would never notice but an AI agent reads and acts on. Menlo Security is building Menlo Agent Runtime Security (MARS) to close that gap, running every agent session in an isolated cloud that sanitizes content before an agent can act on it. Ramin Farassat, Menlo Security's Chief Product Officer, will discuss why the exposure lives in the connectors and integrations around the model rather than the model itself, and how security teams can put controls on the agent attack surface without blocking agentic AI outright.
Segment Resources:
https://www.menlosecurity.com/product/ai-agent-security
MARS is now available today, please visit https://securityweekly.com/menlobh
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Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-396

Finding flaws has always been a focus of appsec. And now with open source projects and open weight models orgs have modern tools to review code and conduct pentests. Rishi Sharma describes the motivation behind creating a platform of LLM-driven security tools and the effective ways to keep the tools in scope, on budget, and for engineering teams. We talk about how prompts influence LLM activity, as well as the external constraints to keep the LLMs on task.
And even if finding flaws is a major focus of appsec, its goal should be delivering secure software and systems. We touch on some of the ways to keep bugs from creeping back into software and why it's more important to care about vuln classes than vuln counts.
Episode Resources:
https://projectdiscovery.io/research/ai-coding-impact-report
https://projectdiscovery.io/blog/oh-my-rogue-agent
Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes!
Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-395

There's already an increase in volume of security flaws found by LLMs. And orgs are already turning to LLMs to write code. So, what happens when orgs lean on LLMs to create patches for those security flaws? Keith Hoodlet gives an exclusive early look at his team's recent research into the success, quality, and failures of LLM-generated security patches. Notably, they saw scenarios across a spectrum from robust, effective patches to patches that changed the software's behavior to patches that introduced new vulns to patches that didn't even fix the original vuln while also introducing a new vuln.
The research considers factors like quality and correctness of prompts, complexity of the target software, programming language, and expertise required to understand what a robust patch should look like. If you're going to spend tokens on fixing security flaws, you want a feedback loop that fixes them correctly -- not an infinite loop of new flaws creeping in with every LLM iteration.
Watch for this research, its toolset, and data to be released on Thursday August 6th during Black Hat.
Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes!
Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-394

Orgs need to be able to use agents, MCPs, and LLMs in ways that don't lead to unexpected actions and undesirable outcomes. The OWASP Agent Security Regression Harness project is an approach for defining customizable scenarios and testing whether those systems fail against known security threats. Mert Saltimaz talks about the background of the project, how orgs can use it as they bring more LLMs into their environment, and how the project intends to grow. Importantly, we also talk about the security controls and designs that orgs can build around the systems and data that models interact with in addition to evaluating the security of the agents and agent harnesses themselves.
Segment Resources:
https://github.com/OWASP/Agent-Security-Regression-Harness
https://youtu.be/6DWs5EwbFQ0?si=r0IJ_F0SZnkPzzYg -- "What Trading Systems Taught Me About Breaking (And Defending) Infrastructure"
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Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-393

Appsec often frames usability and security as at odds with each other. Apple's software has famously emphasized the importance of usability while also creating a solid security foundation. Patrick Wardle talks about how he's seen malware shift from Windows to macOS, how Apple's aggressive stance on deprecation benefits security, and the areas of the OS where he still sees plenty of opportunity for more security research. We discuss how developers make defensible design choices, why privacy needs security, and some security principles that any app developer should keep in mind regardless of their programming language or operating system.
Resources:
https://objective-see.org/blog/blog_0x86.html
https://objective-see.org/products/lulu.html
https://objectivebythesea.org/v9/index.html
Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes!
Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-392