Risky Business Features

In this podcast episode, Brad Arkin joins James Wilson to chat about the Trump administration’s call to let private entities conduct cyber operations against criminal groups.

Brad’s firsthand experience responding to cyber incidents alongside US law enforcement gives him a unique perspective on how government and private sector relationships work, and how this program could improve the ability of both sides to tackle cybercrime.

James and Brad also explore who might participate in these campaigns and whether the government will be able to effectively oversee them.



Show notes

In this podcast episode, James Wilson chats with Brian Krebs about the investigation that led him from recycled cybercrime handles and old forum records to the true identity of TeamPCP’s alleged leader in Perth.

TeamPCP is the hacker group that has gone berserk in the software supply chain over the last year or so, stealing credentials to compromise developers, their software packages, and their repositories.

In this interview Brian talks about his Signal conversations with the group’s ringleader, the strange Cybercats community surrounding TeamPCP, and the passive DNS breakthrough that helped him unmask what he thinks are the ringleader’s true identities.



Show notes



Two Alleged ‘TeamPCP’ Hackers Arrested in Australia – Krebs on Security

In this podcast episode, James Wilson chats with PortSwigger’s Director of Research James Kettle about using an LLM to develop genuinely new attack techniques.

Kettle has built what he calls the HTTP Terminator, an autonomous research system that generates and tests tens of thousands of potentially new HTTP desync techniques. The Terminator, which makes use of Kettle’s own research methodology, has already come up with new desync methods that James hadn’t thought of before.

Kettle and Wilson discuss how to develop and evaluate machine-generated ideas without drowning in false positives, and why the most powerful part of the process is the discovery cascade, where one unexpected result becomes the seed for another.

The upshot is AI can conduct genuinely novel security research, but don’t expect to one-shot your way to an army of robot hackers.



Show notes



Can AI do novel security research? Meet the HTTP Terminator | PortSwigger Research


HTTP/1.1 must die: the desync endgame

In this podcast episode James Wilson chats with Tinfoil co-founder Tanya Verma about how you can run a powerful LLM in the cloud without the inference provider seeing your prompts.

Tanya talks James through how private inference works, from trusted execution environments and hardware attestation, to TLS termination and GPU isolation. Customers can verify the exact code and model processing their data, while Tinfoil and its infrastructure providers remain locked out.

That’s clever engineering… but who really needs it? Is private inference only useful if you’re doing something bad, or will it become a privacy baseline like TLS? James and Tanya discuss the costs and trade-offs, and how open weights make private inference more transparent and trustworthy.



Show notes

The US government is flirting with the idea of regulating most open weight models out of existence. What would that mean for everyone who’s currently using them?

Policymakers who just look at the benchmarks and token costs might think frontier and open weight AI models are all interchangeable. That they can just banhammer them without causing any disruption. That’s far from the truth.

In this solo podcast, James Wilson looks beyond the US vs China AI race rhetoric and instead games out what the real world consequences of the US government slapping bans on AI models could be.



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