Skip to content
PodcastsTechnologyThe Low Down

The Low Down

Low Level
The Low Down
Latest episode

15 episodes

  • The Low Down

    Oops, all vulns! (Citrix NetScaler problems, the FBI ShinyHunters saga cont’d and MORE)

    2026/10/08 | 1h 8 mins.
    Welcome to The Low Down, the best show on the internet for hackers
    Listen on Spotify!
    https://go.lowdownpod.com/spotify
    The Low Down is presented by Maze.
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mazehq/
    X: https://twitter.com/Maze_Security
    Follow Us!
    https://www.instagram.com/lowdown.pod
    Heading to OneCon 2026? SentinelOne’s cybersecurity conference runs October 20–22 at the ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. Use code oc26lowdown for a discount on registration.
    https://www.onecon.io/
    00:00 Coming up
    00:33 Intro and Matt’s SecTor keynote
    02:52 Citrix NetScaler zero-days and disclosure
    09:25 Breaking down the NetScaler exploits
    19:04 Sponsor: Maze
    20:41 Citrix’s response and responsible disclosure
    25:06 Why edge devices are so hard to defend
    30:54 MikroTik RouterOS vulnerabilities
    35:33 Cisco SD-WAN authentication bypass
    38:37 Zimbra command injection
    42:22 ShinyHunters arrest and conflicting claims
    50:42 Reacting to the FBI’s warning
    55:05 Open-weight AI, Anthropic and GLM-5.3
    1:07:35 Wrap-up and OneCon
    Today we're talking about:
    Your NetScaler Warning Came From Reddit
    Finding out about NetScaler zero-days through Reddit is not the enterprise support experience Matt had in mind. Ed walks through watchTowr's command injection and memory overflow writeups, including missing protections in the binary they tested. Then we get into Google's hunting guidance and why a patch alone won't kick an attacker out.
    https://www.reddit.com/r/Citrix/comments/1wqjk9a/netscaler_leak/
    https://labs.watchtowr.com/oh-look-the-foot-gun-went-off-again-citrix-netscaler-preauth-command-injection-cve-2026-88771/
    https://labs.watchtowr.com/here-we-go-again-citrix-netscaler-dtls-preauth-memory-overflow-cve-2026-88772/
    https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/defending-against-active-exploitation-of-citrix-netscaler-adc-and-gateway-appliances
    MikroTik and the User Named -2
    MikroTik joins the pile with an HTTP underflow and a separate SSH authentication chain. The username "-2" showing up in attack logs gets our attention. Ed explains how assumptions between different parts of a system can become an exploit. Matt has been saying "don't roll your own crypto" for his entire career. Apparently we still need the reminder.
    https://github.com/cisagov/CSAF/blob/develop/csaf_files/OT/white/2026/icsa-26-272-06.json
    https://cert.pl/en/posts/2026/09/vulnerabilities-in-mikrotik-routeros-actively-exploited/
    Cisco's Admin API Lets the Wrong People In
    A specially encoded request can give an unauthenticated attacker admin access to Cisco's SD-WAN Manager API. We talk about what that means for a corporate network, and the difference between connections that need to be public and management interfaces that don't. Cisco patched its managed cloud service. If you run an affected instance yourself, the upgrade is still your job.
    https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/csa/cisco-sa-sdwan-webauth-xr8beuuU.html
    Zimbra: An Email Goes In, a Shell Command Comes Out
    A crafted email can trigger command execution through Zimbra's SNMP notification system on affected configurations, without anyone clicking anything. We trace the route from incoming mail to a shell command and look at Microsoft's account of the attacks. Ed has a fairly blunt suggestion for developers: stop handing user input to Bash.
    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/09/30/unauthenticated-command-injection-on-internet-facing-mail-servers-tracking-cve-2026-73570/
    ShinyHunters Meets the FBI's Camera
    Dutch police arrest an alleged ShinyHunters leader, and the FBI looks straight into the camera with a message for whoever's left. We untangle the arrest timeline, conflicting gang statements and the Pokémon branding. Matt brings us back to the PeopleSoft campaign and why following a group's methods is useful even when its PR is impossible to trust.
    https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/dutch-police-arrest-reformed-hacker-in-shiny-hunters-investigation/
    https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/shinyhunters-arrested-092926.mp4/view
    https://www.securityweek.com/shinyhunters-defiant-after-fbi-calls-on-members-to-come-forward/
    https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/shinyhunters-renewed-mass-exploitation-campaign-targeting-oracle-peoplesoft
    If the Attacker Gets AI, So Do I
    Anthropic's GLM-5.3 report sets off a disagreement. If attackers get powerful, freely available models, Matt wants to know why defenders don't get the same advantage. Ed thinks the way our systems are built still favors the attacker. We get into reports of safeguards getting in the way of incident response, the incentives behind calls for regulation, and who we'd trust to write the rules.
    https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of-advanced-cyber-capabilities
    https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
  • The Low Down

    ShinyHunters’ FBI Breach, OpenAI’s Bug Bounty Drama, and the Rise of ClickFix

    2026/10/04 | 1h 30 mins.
    Welcome to The Low Down, the best show on the internet for hackers
    Listen on Spotify!
    https://go.lowdownpod.com/spotify
    The Low Down is presented by Maze.
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mazehq/
    X: https://twitter.com/Maze_Security
    Follow Us!
    https://www.instagram.com/lowdown.pod
    Today we're talking about:
    ShinyHunters Has a Reputation to Protect
    ShinyHunters says it hacked the FBI to protect its business. Apparently, even an extortion crew needs good PR. We get into why reputation matters to people who make their money threatening companies, and Ed takes a look at the PeopleSoft bugs that may explain the way in. Some of the exposed records reportedly belong to the FBI's own hacking unit.
    https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/etr-active-exploitation-of-oracle-peoplesoft-zero-day-cve-2026-35273/
    https://www.404media.co/fbi-hack-exposed-fbis-own-hacking-unit-remote-operations-shinyhunters/
    https://www.theregister.com/cyber-crime/2026/09/25/shinyhunters-tells-the-reg-we-hacked-the-fbi-to-protect-our-business/5299250
    OpenAI's Very Unwelcome Pull Request
    How far do you go to prove a bug? Hacktron used an employee's Codex account to open a PR in OpenAI's internal repo. Ed thinks that demonstrates the access they already had. Matt sees why the security team wants to know what else they touched. The $6,500 payout got everyone talking. S1r1u5_ says the headache was a disclosure process that sent them to lawyers and eventually a journalist.
    https://www.hacktron.ai/blog/hacking-openai
    https://x.com/S1r1u5_/status/2101296199261429813
    https://x.com/LiveOverflow/status/2101252692635004997
    https://x.com/TalBeerySec/status/2101560506242761097
    https://x.com/alexstamos/status/2101747329699402198
    So What Do You Run This Stuff In?
    Two awkward headlines for anyone running other people's code: containers are getting easier to escape, and KVM has bugs too. Matt wants to know what he's supposed to do with that. Ed explains why sharing a kernel matters, and why moving to a smaller attack surface still buys you something. We also end up worrying about who will understand the machinery underneath all the AI-written code.
    https://depthfirst.com/research/containers-are-no-longer-safe
    About That AI Hacking Story
    Ed has had enough of the headlines. Trying a few web attacks and pulling off the Hugging Face exploit are very different things. Matt's bothered by agents on ordinary research tasks deciding to try breaking into websites. We look at what Transluce actually found: the public records don't show those attempts succeeding. Both have questions about who was watching.
    https://transluce.org/agent-activity
    "But I Would Never Fall for ClickFix"
    Four in five ClickFix payloads intercepted by Push in 2026 came through search engines. You go looking for an answer and get instructions for infecting your own computer. Matt has a pile of data on how the lures are changing. Then there's the placeholder domain in old documentation that someone registered and turned into a fake verification page. But we would never fall for any of this, obviously.
    https://pushsecurity.com/blog/the-state-of-clickfix-by-detection-data
    https://www.manifold.security/blog/third-party-com-placeholder-clickfix
  • The Low Down

    Who’s Reading Your ChatGPT Chats? Flock Camera Secrets and HBO’s Reddit Account Spreads Malware

    2026/09/26 | 1h 17 mins.
    Welcome to The Low Down, the best show on the internet for hackers
    Listen on Spotify!
    https://go.lowdownpod.com/spotify
    The Low Down is presented by Maze.
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mazehq/
    X: https://twitter.com/Maze_Security
    Follow Us!
    https://www.instagram.com/lowdown.pod
    Today we're talking about:
    The ChatGPT Group Chat
    "I thought me and Sam were homies." Project Lily has us talking about the humans reading ChatGPT conversations, Moxie Marlinspike's take on chat interfaces, and who else is in the room when you're telling a chatbot your problems.
    https://www.404media.co/inside-project-lily-the-humans-reading-your-chatgpt-chats/
    https://confer.to/blog/2025/12/confessions-to-a-data-lake/
    Flock, Meet the Hardware Hackers
    Someone pulled down a Flock camera and copied its storage. Ed wants to separate the physical-access findings from the remote-hacking claims. Also, "Flock bad" is apparently a content strategy now.
    https://www.404media.co/hackers-stole-flocks-camera-software-revealing-how-the-company-tracks-cars-and-people-2/
    Pixel's Very Unhelpful CVE
    A modem vulnerability, signs of targeted exploitation, and very few details. Cue a conversation about basebands, spyware, and the price of a good phone exploit.
    https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-fixes-actively-exploited-android-zero-day-on-pixel-devices/
    https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/pixel/2026/2026-09-01
    Revolut
    "A bank suffered a data breach by not getting hacked." Fake official requests got customer data handed over. Matt gets into the market for stolen government accounts and why a familiar email address isn't enough.
    https://www.securityweek.com/revolut-data-breach-5-months-680-high-profile-accounts-3m-ransom/
    HBO's Reddit Account
    The account was real. Someone else was running the ads. A compromised HBO business account on Reddit becomes a delivery system for a ClickFix malware campaign.
    https://www.hudsonrock.com/blog/hbo-max-ads-on-a-compromised-reddit-account-exposed-a-massive-pasteswitch-clickfix-operation
    Cisco Got Owned by an Email
    An email security gateway. An email-triggered SQL injection. "The call is coming from inside the house."
    https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-esa-inj-2bLVGmhX
    Your MRI Results Are Malware
    Iranian operators using fake medical results and personalized messages to deliver CHOSEN BRICK spyware. This one gets uncomfortably specific.
    https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/news/iranian-cyber-targeting-of-dissidents-activists-and-journalists
    Passkey-Themed Phishing
    That word "themed" is doing a lot of work. We walk through the device-code trick that gets victims to authorize an attacker's access.
    https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/09/09/passkey-themed-social-engineering-leads-identity-cloud-compromise/
    Inflatable PLCs
    CISA wants critical infrastructure operators thinking about cyber decoys. We're into canary tokens. A full deception operation for an already understaffed team takes a little more convincing. Ed has a business idea.
    https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2026-09/using-cyber-decoys-to-strengthen-detection-and-response_508c.pdf
  • The Low Down

    LG Caught Spying in Your Living Room, Miami Crypto King Gets Life, and the AI Apocalypse Debate

    2026/09/18 | 1h 16 mins.
    Welcome to The Low Down, the best show on the internet for hackers

    The Low Down is presented by Maze.

    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mazehq/

    X: https://twitter.com/Maze_Security Follow Us!

    https://www.instagram.com/lowdown.pod

    This week we're diving into the surveillance nightmare coming from your living room, catastrophic phishing campaigns targeting crypto users, and Microsoft's record breaking patch cycle that defenders need to know about.

    Today we're talking about:

    LG's Privacy Nightmare: Your TV is Spying on Everything Gamers Nexus drops a two hour expose revealing LG TVs are actively recording and transcribing all room audio even when listening mode is disabled and the device is powered off. Breaking down how they got root shell access and found plain text transcriptions of private conversations being cached on the device with four gigs of memory ready to phone home. Why the microphone continues recording even when unplugged from the network and what ACR automatic content recognition really means for your privacy.

    The Economics of Smart TV Surveillance LG executives caught on stage at advertising conferences bragging about owning the glass and extending the advertising experience across all devices on your home network. How they're doing network scans to enumerate every Windows PC, phone, and IoT device in your household and correlating that with what you're watching. Why the profit margins on TV advertising are in the 60s with SaaS level multiples while TV hardware prices have bottomed out over the last 20 years.

    The Remote Code Execution Problem Nobody's Talking About Beyond the privacy concerns, LG TVs have multiple unpatched remote code execution vulnerabilities that turn your living room microphone into a potential threat actor playground. Why teachers are panicking about 85 of these devices deployed in classrooms and the student privacy implications. How Chinese threat actors have proven they'll exploit residential devices for proxy networks and credential theft.

    Trezor's Catastrophic Phishing Campaign Trezor customers hit with one of the nastiest phishing campaigns of the year where the call was literally coming from inside the house. Breaking down how their official email provider was breached with valid TLS certificates and domain signing making the phishing email appear completely legitimate. Why this was perfectly timed after the cold card STM 32 entropy vulnerability had everyone primed to believe their hardware wallets were compromised.
  • The Low Down

    153 Million Driver's Licenses Stolen, Nigerian Sextortion Rings, and Team PCP's OPSEC Failure

    2026/09/10 | 1h 16 mins.
    Welcome to The Low Down, the best show on the internet for hackers The Low Down is presented by Maze. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mazehq/ X: https://twitter.com/Maze_Security Follow Us! https://www.instagram.com/lowdown.pod This week we're diving into massive identity verification breaches, the arrest of Team PCP supply chain attackers, and the certified pre owned router epidemic that's turning your home network into a botnet. Today we're talking about: ID Scan Breach: 153 Million Driver's Licenses Leaked Breaking down the massive data breach exposing 153 million driver's licenses, 10 million identification cards, 3 million travel documents, and 579,000 medical cards from ID scan dot net. How Brian Krebs traced his own leaked license back to a Hertz rental car transaction and marijuana dispensary visits at DEF CON. Why third party identity verification services create single points of failure when companies like Target, FedEx, GameStop, and hotels all use the same scanning infrastructure. The Identity Verification Debate: Privacy vs Security Examining the cultural backdrop of identity verification laws spreading across Europe and the UK's push to de anonymize internet activity in the name of protecting children. Why Discord now requires ID verification for adult content servers and Pornhub refuses to comply by shutting off access to entire states. The fundamental problem of companies being entrusted with sensitive documents they aren't equipped to secure and how driver's licenses are becoming the new social security numbers in account recovery flows. McKesson Healthcare Breach: 284 Million Patient Records Stolen Shiny Hunters claims responsibility for compromising McKesson, the pharmaceutical giant responsible for a third of all US drug transactions with 403 billion in annual revenue. Deep dive into Shiny Hunters' sophisticated MO combining social engineering over phone and text, fake company Okta logins using Evil Nginx proxies, and specialized teams ready to exfiltrate OAuth tokens at machine speed across geographically distributed locations. Team PCP Arrested: The Supply Chain Attackers Roll Up Australian authorities arrest the Team PCP threat actors behind massive NPM supply chain attacks including the Mini Shaihalud worm, LightLLM compromise, and Trivi security tool breach. How Flare's OSINT investigation traced the DeadcatX3 alias across GitHub, HackerOne, Hugging Face, and eBay to reveal real identity Ruben Thompson through catastrophic OPSEC failures. Why some in the security community are defending Team PCP as hackers of old exposing systemic flaws rather than profiting from stolen credentials. The Hacker Culture Divide: Altruism vs Cybercrime Exploring the thinning veil between career cybersecurity and hacker culture as the Free Team PCP movement emerges. Examining whether Team PCP was following the old school ethos of hacking to expose vulnerabilities without profiting versus crossing into criminal territory. Why they slurped up AWS credentials, Kubernetes secrets, and crypto wallet keys but never used them beyond NPM and GitHub propagation. The philosophical question of whether demonstrating supply chain fragility justifies the method. Meter AI Safety Org Compromised: The Irony of Expertise The nonprofit AI safety organization called in to analyze the Hugging Face OpenAI incident suffers their own breach with 600,000 dollars in API usage stolen. Why calling in Meter instead of actual incident response firms like Unit 42, CrowdStrike, or Mandiant represents the sidelining of cybersecurity expertise in AI safety conversations. Breaking down the vibe coded app with fail open vulnerability that silently disabled authentication and exposed agent orchestration dashboards to the public internet. NVIDIA Acquires Hugging Face: The 13 Billion Dollar Question NVIDIA purchases Hugging Face for 13 billion dollars as founders walk away with 3 billion each. Revisiting the conspiracy theory about potential collusion between OpenAI and Hugging Face to reposition OpenAI as the premier cyber model provider. The surge protector plugged into itself problem of Jensen Wong, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle passing the same 100 million between multi trillion dollar valuations. Info Stealers Target Claude API Tokens Popular info stealer malware including Vidar, Luma C2, Steal C, and Redline add new functionality specifically for hijacking Claude sessions to rack up API usage bills. Why stealing AI tokens is more creative than crypto mining and represents a new monetization model for compromised systems. Nigerian Sextortion Rings: From Scams to Suicides 404 Media investigation follows cyber sleuths who flew to Nigeria to track down sextortion scammers targeting teenage victims with compromising photos leading to extortion and suicide. How the same tactics used by threat actor groups like The Comm and Shiny Hunters to recruit young males into cybercrime through blackmail. Breaking down
More Technology podcasts
About The Low Down
the internet's best podcast about hacking

Listen to The Low Down, The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis and many other podcasts from around the world with the radio.net app

Get the free radio.net app

  • Stations and podcasts to bookmark
  • Stream via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth
  • Supports Carplay & Android Auto
  • Many other app features
The Low Down: Podcasts in Family