2026-10-27 15:59:09
As the news from last week has settled down, it would seem this headline was pretty spot on. The foretold apocalypse didn't eventuate, and there were no internet-destroying outages. In fact, it took days before I could find a single story of PHP2Shell being reliably attributed back to a breach. And I don't think we can say the relatively benign outcome was only achieved because we did take it so seriously either; there's a massive trove of sites out there that have been left to rot and would have every opportunity to be pwned by a bug of this magnitude that was readily exploitable, yet here we are. Which is good 🙂
2026-10-19 14:47:58
I have this sense that we've passed the point where "vibe coding" is a derogatory term. I have no empirical evidence for this; it's more a feeling that those weaponising the term have now accepted the inevitability and are just getting with the program. Or they've reskilled into other industries because, let's face it: you can't be a productive, competitive developer today without AI. I saw this comment from Linus Torvalds today which I thought really nailed it:
‼️ Linus Torvalds called rules against AI coding tools "UTTERLY STUPID" on the Linux kernel mailing list. He says people he respects and calls intelligent do not shy away from using new tools. https://t.co/HaQ8H4BrVc
— International Cyber Digest (@IntCyberDigest) October 17, 2026
He's always had a way with words 🙂 Anyway, here's what we're doing:
2026-10-13 18:47:27
I remember the name of that AI doco now - The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. I was watching it on the long-haul flight home the other day, and what I found particularly engrossing was the polar-opposite opinions from a bunch of people: "it's gonna kill us all" versus "it's gonna make us all rich", and so on. But to some extent, I can understand the gap between opinions when we're all just speculating about the future. I have much less understanding for why people infatuate with hyping AI as a data breach monster when the evidence to date is quite the opposite. In fact, I've enjoyed sharing example after example of recent breaches perpetrated by kids with a telephone (vishing), while pointing out I haven't seen a single one orchestrated by AI.
Speaking of AI, a big thanks to this week's sponsor who's doing gtreat things in the agent observability space, Origin. The machines may not be dumping data that lands in HIBP (yet), but they do go off-script and Origin will help trace back precisely what happened when it all goes wrong.
2026-10-04 19:52:23
I'm in Denmark! Well, just, I'm now at Copenhagen airport ready to begin the long trek home, with the final event at GOTO now done and going just perfectly. This week, there are two ShinyHunters arrests in the news: Pepijn in the Netherlands and then Saif in Jordon. It's an inevitable outcome, of course, and as I say this week, it was also the most likely one. Time will tell how many more join their ranks, but the seriousness of the crimes, the length of time they were perpetrated over, and the motivations behind them will certainly see substantial custodial sentences.
In other news, this week I'm properly introducing a new sponsor for the blog: Origin. One of our next AI frontiers is understanding what agents have actually done (and we've all seen news of where they're been a bit too, well, "creative" in executing their tasks), and Origin's solution gives you visiblity into just that. Check them out, and a big thanks to them for their ongoing support.
2026-09-28 15:24:49
How's that view?! With NDC Oslo now done, it's a little bit of sightseeing before heading to Denmark for GOTO in Copenhagen for Scott's and my "Cyber-broken" talk. In the meantime, this week is mostly about the ShinyHunters trajectory targeting both Cl0p and the FBI, which does feel a little like a crescendo in their activities. Time will tell, but poking the feds in this way doesn't seem great for your longevity.
In my disorganised travel state, I also forgot to touch on a brand new sponsor for this week and the weeks to come: Origin. They build tooling to monitor what your AI agents are doing, which is obviously pretty timely given the current climate. They're running a free CISO briefing on 1 Oct, so go check that out if you think maybe your agents might need some oversight.
2026-09-23 13:18:34
Heads up: the first 7 mins is a bit quiet until we worked out the external mic was misbehaving - sorry! But get through that and have a listen to Scott's experiences with how Report URI is identifying malware-infected machines within orgs, all due to CSP reporting. It's a super cool use of the technology, and I'm sure there's an awesome potential for it that neither of us has really thought about yet. Plus, the crazy rate of malicious browser extensions he's picking up with help from "Rory", his local OpenClaw instance.
