Smashing Security podcast #467: How ShinyHunters hacked the world’s biggest universities

There’s nothing wrong with your teeth, Danny.

Oh, that’s because I’ve had them fixed since.

Because of the YouTube comments?

Partially because of that and partially because one of my top teeth is a fake anyway. I was a clumsy teenager, basically.

Long story short, that rubbed against bottom teeth and— Oh, it’s all too gruesome now.

I don’t want to know anymore. This is too grisly.

I’ve got them all straightened out. So if you see me asking you to donate bitcoin and my teeth are, let’s say, classically British, it might Smashing Security, episode 467.

How shiny hunters hack the world’s biggest universities with Graham Cluley and special guest Danny Palmer. Hello, hello, and welcome to Smashing Security, episode 467.

My name’s Graham Cluley.

And I’m Danny Palmer.

Danny, welcome back to the show. Always a pleasure to have you here. You are a cybersecurity expert. Security journalist, of course. What’s been keeping you busy lately?

Well, I’m still with Infosecurity Magazine at the moment in my temporary role as deputy editor, where I’m filling in while the main deputy editor is on paternity leave.

So right now things are ramping up for Infosecurity Europe, which is in about a month’s time. And yeah, it’s getting really, really busy.

Turns out putting on a conference is a very hefty task.

Well, the thing is with Infosecurity Europe, it is a big cybersecurity event, isn’t it? With thousands of people attending.

Oh yes, it’s at the Excel Center. It’s such a huge thing. It’s a massive part of the sort of Docklands. It’s always a very interesting time to go there.

There are loads of people to meet, loads of talks to see, networking, that sort of thing. And yeah, interesting keynotes this year from various people.

I’ll be seeing it from the other side of the fence this time, as it were.

So I’ll be there at the Infosecurity Magazine stand rather than just pottering around and doing what I want to do myself.

Will they still be making you write articles while you’re there, as well as you being a booth babe?

I think that’s part of the plan. Yeah. In between some presenting stuff, So yeah, it’s gonna be a super busy time.

So on the Excel in the first week of June next month, I think currently the sign-up is still free. You don’t have to pay anything.

I think if you sign up after about middle of May, you have to pay the grand total of about £49 to sign up. I think it is these days.

Sign up now. I’m going to be there. I’m looking forward to it. Should be a lot of fun.

Yes, you are hosting one of the stages and it’s a— I’ve seen you do this plenty of times, Graham. You’re really good at this sort of thing. It turns out.

I’m doing some hosting on the keynote session. I’m getting to give a keynote as well, actually, all about how AI might blackmail your company.

So if you’re intrigued about that, come along and find out more. Well, before we kick off, let’s thank this week’s wonderful sponsors: Elastic, CoreView, and Vanta.

We’ll be hearing more about them later on the show.

This week on Smashing Security, we won’t be talking about the water company that failed to notice for almost two years that it had been hit by the Clop ransomware gang and how it’s now been fined almost £1 million.

You’ll hear no discussion of how a US bank has reported itself to regulators after uploading large amounts of nonpublic information about its customers to an unauthorized AI application.

And we won’t even mention how hackers are abusing Google Ads and Claude AI to push malware onto Macs. So Danny, what are you going to be talking about this week?

I’m going to be talking about a scam that has tricked a lot of people using a mixture of financial advice, deepfakes, and abuse of social media.

And I’m going to be talking about, well, 30 million students, 275 million records, and one massive security patch that failed to keep the hackers out.

Plus, don’t miss our featured interview with Mike Nichols of Elastic Security on why the SOC isn’t dying, attackers and defenders are both deploying AI agents, and how the real security crisis is no longer human users, it’s the bots acting on their behalf.

All this and much more coming up in this episode of Smashing Security. This week’s episode is supported by Vanta. Joe, what’s your 2 AM security worry?

Honestly, whether I remembered to hit the record button.

No, no, no. What’s your proper security worry? Like, do I have the right controls in place? Are my vendors secure? Nope.

I’m still worried we might not actually be recording.

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That’s vanta.com/smashing. And listeners, you can get $1,000 off.

And thanks to Vanta for supporting the show.

Joe, you did hit record, didn’t you? Me? Yeah, it was your job.

I thought it was you.

So Danny, Danny, picture the scene. It is the afternoon of Thursday, May 7th. You are not an infosecurity journalist. You are a student at the University of Pennsylvania.

And you’ve not slept properly for about 11 days, which frankly is a bit like being a cybersecurity journalist, I think.

Yeah, it’s a bit like being a student, except with a lot more work, it turns out.

Well, in this case, because you’re a student at the University of Pennsylvania, you haven’t slept because you’ve got your finals and you’re running on Red Bull and panic and pizza, and you log into Canvas, and Canvas is the learning platform that basically every American university and a huge chunk of K-12 schools are running on.

30 million users. There’s 8,000 institutions relying on this service. But Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Georgetown, Duke, Virginia Tech, they all rely on Canvas.

And you log in to grab your study notes or to check your grades or to submit the assignments you finally started at 3 o’clock this morning.

And instead of your normal dashboard, what you see is a black screen rimmed in ominous red.

Sounds bad.

It sounds bad, doesn’t it? And there’s a message which reads, “Shiny Hunters rooting your systems since 19 winky face.” Oh, the nice jovial winky face.

A semicolon and a closed bracket.

What we did before emojis were a thing.

Yeah, exactly. And this is a message which 300 million students have waiting for them mid-finals, as if those students even know what an emote icon is, right?

For them, it’s all emojis. It’s all rhubarbs or aubergines or—

It’s so strange to think about it because back when I was at university 20-odd years ago, when we were handing in papers, we were still handing them in printed out.

I was at university at that point where it was just on the cusp of becoming digital in sort of the mid-noughties. But from what it sounds like, a lot of it is now online.

With what it sounds like a bit of a monopoly on this platform of how universities do things, which seem to have turned out not very good, it seems.

Not so good that everyone had their eggs in the same basket, really.

I mean, this is by some margin, apparently, the largest educational data breach in the history of educational data breaches. And there’ve been a few.

So Shiny Hunters, we always talk about Shiny Hunters.

Yeah, those guys again.

I was thinking the other day, why are they called Shiny Hunters? Do you know why they’re called Shiny Hunters, Danny?

I actually have no idea.

I thought you might know because apparently it’s all to do with Pokémon. Because apparently you’re going around looking for different Pokémon to collect.

Apparently the shiny Pokémon are the rarer Pokémon.

Is this when they were in sticker books back in the day? I don’t know.

Or is it Pokémon Go when it’s all going up and down the street finding them? I’m not sure. Listeners, let us know.

Oh, I’ve not played Pokémon Go in about 10 years. Again, a lot of these hacker groups seem to take stuff from the gaming world. Do you remember the Shadow Brokers?

That is the name of a shady information sharing network in the sci-fi RPG Mass Effect. So yeah, a lot of them seem to get names from these sort of things as well.

It’s almost as if there’s a certain type of person that is engaged in this sort of activity.

Well, Shiny Hunters claim they’ve nicked 3.65 terabytes of data.

Around 275 million records from nearly 9,000 institutions, not only across the United States, but the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, et cetera, et cetera, including allegedly every single Ivy League university.

And it’s not just student IDs and email addresses, but there are also apparently several billions of private messages between students and teachers, which was sent via the system.

Now, I was wondering, well, what kind of messages might students have been sending their teachers and professors?

And remembering back to when I would communicate during university times, you know, I imagine there’s a fair percentage of them which are “my dog ate my homework.”

Can I have an extension of a week? Or no, this has happened. Something deleted my data. My great-aunt Agatha, she’s deceased. For the second time.

And so my assignment hasn’t been finished.

So what actually happened? Well, on April 29th, Instructure, that is Canvas’s parent company, they spotted someone poking about.

So they revoked the access, they called in forensics, digital forensics, and on May 1st, they put out one of those carefully worded statements.

I’ve seen plenty of those over the years. So was it a sophisticated attack, perchance?

Well, put your cynical mind to this one. They said a cybersecurity incident perpetrated by a criminal threat actor. And I love it when they say incident.

Threat actor’s also a good one as well. No one outside of cybersecurity uses it.

If you went to the pub and said to your friends, “I was hacked by a threat actor,” they wouldn’t know what you’re talking about.

So what they mean is they’ve been owned, right? Yes, they’ve been compromised badly by a hacker, but don’t panic, they say, because they say the incident has been contained.

Oh, good. And two days later, they let the affected schools know about it, and they confirmed, yeah, names, emails, student ID messages got out.

Shinyhunters demanded a ransom, they gave a deadline of May 6th, basically, the usual story, which is pay up or we’re gonna leak it.

Yeah, it’s become all too familiar these days.

They don’t just ransom your stuff, they also will blackmail you as well, you know, because they are efficient, I guess, if you can say that.

Well, May the 6th, of course, came and went, and Instructure didn’t pay.

And instead, what they did was they announced that they had deployed what they call— this is a technical term, Danny.

I know you’re a technical cybersecurity journalist, just to brace yourself for this one. They deployed what they call security patches, apparently. Have you heard of such things?

Apparently this is what they did.

I believe I’ve heard of a security patch. Yeah, I believe they do something to your computer to make it better from things.

But I’m not sure if that’s the response to a ransomware incident.

Yeah. So, oh, the murderer is not on the loose. You’ve got him jailed and you look over your shoulder and you’ve got an empty cell behind you.

Yeah. If your contained instance comes back 6 days later and bites you on the bottom, you haven’t in fact contained it at all.

If you give anyone in the world an account on your production system with no verification, this free for teachers thing, just ticking a box and yeah, I’m a teacher.

What you actually had was a free for anyone with a web browser, free for anyone, which includes that small proportion of people who might be interested in scurrying off with terabytes of your data.

It’s a bit sad really, isn’t it? Because that resource is there to, you know, provide help to people.

Well, yeah, because it’s been abused by a very tiny percentage of people, it’s now closed to everyone. This is why we can’t have nice things.

That’s what people say, isn’t it, about this sort of thing? That’s right.

It’s often been the way. So if you are going to offer a service like that, you’ve got to make sure it’s absolutely secure.

And of course, if a ransomware gang gives you a deadline and you respond with security patches, make sure those patches are really doing all of the job necessary to make sure that those hackers can’t get back in, because in this case they kept on coming back.

Now, time for a quick word from our friends at CoreView. Joe, quick question for you. How confident are you in your Microsoft 365 security posture?

Graham, I don’t even have a Microsoft 365 tenant.

Oh, for goodness’ sake, Joe, it’s for our sponsor. Just play along with me, right? Picture the scene. It’s Monday morning.

You’ve got your coffee, you’re wearing your second best hoodie.

You’re feeling pretty good about your Microsoft 365 setup because you checked Purview, you tightened conditional access, and frankly, you deserve a biscuit.

Biscuits? Okay, I’m in.

I’ll play along with you. Thank goodness for that.

So, and then someone forwards you a breach report about a company that did all of that too. So how did they get hacked?

Turns out some quiet little permission that crept wider over three years. A policy exception that nobody had reviewed, the kind of thing that’s invisible until it isn’t.

And this is exactly the stuff that CoreView’s free Microsoft 365 security posture check tool is designed to sniff out.

It’s the drift, the exceptions, the little permissions you stopped looking at because, well, you assumed they were fine. And the spoiler is that they’re often not.

It’s free, it runs locally on your own machine, it does not send your tenant data back to CoreView or anyone else for that matter.

And if you like a hand setting it up, their team will happily walk you through it.

So all you’ve got to do is visit smashingsecurity.com/coreview to download your free copy of the tool, and even you will be able to answer the question, how secure is your Microsoft 365 tenant?

And thanks to CoreView for supporting the show.

Danny, what’s your story for us this week?

So Graham, who would you turn to if you wanted financial advice? Oh, your bank. Maybe some LinkedIn bros, all about the hustle. They seem to be all the rage these days.

No, no, no one like that.

No, no goodness. Or maybe you turn to a high-profile economist. Now, one of those in your— I was about to say Filofax, but I don’t think those are a thing anymore.

Yes, I know a lot of high-flying economists. Yes. Okay, I’ll contact one of them.

Well, many people seem to have thought that last option was a really good idea. I mean, doesn’t it make sense? Who knows more about managing money than an economist?

It is literally in the job title.

Conveniently, one of them who is regularly seen in the media, on television, online, in newspaper articles, was promoting themselves in an advertising campaign on Facebook, on social media, offering you expert insights on how to make money on the stock market.

It all sounds rather good. I’ve never invested in stocks, but if you wanted advice on how to do it, I imagine, yeah, the place you’d go to would be a financial expert.

Because of course, why would you take advice through secondhand television spots or their articles in the newspaper when you can get direct tips from the experts themselves? Yes.

I mean, they’re there in your WhatsApp. They’ve asked you to join their exclusive WhatsApp channel to receive these updates.

Well, yeah, I think you might have twigged here that this isn’t all quite what it seems. It’s a big old scam.

Which has been detailed by researchers and fraud analysts at cybersecurity company Group-IB. For starters, this financial expert isn’t even involved in the scheme at all.

I mean, we’re all shocked. I know. So this is a well-known legitimate financial expert.

Yes. And his name is being used to promote the scam. So is there some deepfakery going on?

There is, yes.

So the researchers don’t name who it is, but as part of this scam, there are deepfakes being used in promotional videos saying, hi, I am so-and-so, and I have these great financial tips for you.

I mean, if they’ve been on TV and radio and things a lot, you can quite easily create a deepfake these days. So it’s drawn people in.

Right now, Graham, some ne’er-do-well listening to this could be thinking about creating scams based on the voices or likenesses of you or I.

They’d probably claim to be offering some sort of cybersecurity advice in exchange for bitcoin or something.

How sad would that be?

Just imagine being the person who has to piece together our voices and our faces to make us look as though we’re not stumbling over our words, that we’re actually able to communicate effectively.

I know the feeling. Yeah, it is a scary thought, isn’t it?

If only people knew just how much editing we had to do on this podcast so we sounded half competent.

I tell you what, back when I was at ZDNet, I used to do video series there. Yeah, deepfakes weren’t a big thing then, but used to comments on YouTube.

Americans would always comment on my teeth. Way to stereotype us, guys.

But there’s nothing wrong with your teeth, Danny.

Oh, that’s because I’ve had them fixed since.

Because of the YouTube comments?

Partially because of that, and partially because one of my top teeth is a fake anyway. I was a clumsy teenager, basically. Long story short, that rubbed against bottom teeth and—

Oh, it’s all too gruesome now. I don’t want to know anymore. This is too grisly.

I’ve got them all straightened out. So if you see me asking you to donate bitcoin and my teeth are, let’s say, classically British, it might be a deepfake.

Anyway, these adverts— which often remained active for only a few hours on social media platforms like Facebook— promised high-quality stock recommendations to anyone who went to click through to this advert, and those who did were encouraged to join a private WhatsApp group, which they were told was run by this financial expert.

I’m sure that’s all they want to do, financial experts, give away their advice in their personal time to randoms on the internet to add their phone number to.

They weren’t gonna be helping the people joining this group. They just wanted to make money themselves.

So once part of the group, users received instructions on what stocks to buy, and this was all on the legitimate trading platform, which is not named.

So they were in the WhatsApp group, they were told to use—

Oh, can I say Group IB? For goodness’ sake, give us some names. We want to know who this finance expert is. I mean, there is one finance expert who’s very famous in the UK.

I know, I know which one you mean.

And I know he has been deepfaked before, but now I’m curious. And now they won’t tell us the platform either.

No. Well, if it helps, this all took place in Australia. So we might not be as familiar as that, though it did rope in American victims as well.

But they’re using this legitimate trading platform, they’re using these social media posts, two separate platforms, add in WhatsApp as a third separate platform, and say buy the stock and wait for instructions on when to sell it.

With the idea that when you sell it, it’ll be worth more and you can go, okay, great, I’ve made some money on the stock market.

On first look, this appears to be great financial advice. The group was full of people posting about how they’d made money from this because their stock prices went up.

These people didn’t exist.

They were fake profiles run by the ringleaders of the campaign who were in this WhatsApp group just to generate trust in the system and perhaps maybe helpfully drown out comments of anyone who might be suspicious that this might be a big old fake.

They tell people to buy these stocks of these companies. That drives the stock price up.

But then when it has reached much higher value, the attackers sell their stock at the peak for a significant profit and crash the entire stock.

So the investors essentially lose everything they put in while the scammers can walk off with thousands or potentially even millions, depending on how many people they’ve roped into these scams.

Yeah, of course, it’s a financial scam and you can’t have financial scams without involving cryptocurrency and bitcoin these days.

I was worried this was coming. Okay, cryptocurrency.

It’s the same group of scammers use similar messages with targeted advertising, potentially with deepfakes, phishing scams, romance scams to direct users towards what they said, inverted commas, as an investment plan offering large daily returns on a platform.

But no, the platform only accepts payments being made by cryptocurrency. So I presume Bitcoin. Are people not using the Melania coin?

They’re not, they’re not embracing that as—

I’ve not, I’ve not heard the chatter on the interwebs about that being the big thing, unfortunately. But users are directed to a convincing-looking website.

It looks like major online financial platforms, complete with live feeds of financial information, but they’re ultimately fake investment platforms.

So the users who’ve been redirected to these, they are first of all invited to enter their details to pass compliance check to verify their identity.

Which I guess if you’re scammers, you’re going to take that and store that away for a rainy day.

Because legitimate cryptocurrency exchanges, they’re legally obliged, aren’t they, to ask for identifying information in case you are laundering money, for instance.

Yeah, just to make sure you aren’t some sort of scammer. But I hadn’t, I hadn’t tweaked this before.

Of course, a scam cryptocurrency site, which is getting you to log in, it both looks more convincing by asking you for those details, but of course they can also abuse that information which you have given.

Oh, this is horrendous. Yeah, I mean, you can imagine sort of the amount of financial information you have to give to a bank or cryptocurrency platform is a lot.

So yeah, on the top of the cryptocurrency scam, there is this element as well.

So they are told to make their deposit into the platform, a platform which suggests that any investment they make has very quick returns.

So it was just, you know, you’ll make a return on this, you know, every single day almost.

And it even allows the users to make small withdrawals of the cryptocurrency they’ve put in, in order to, I guess, have that legitimate air about it.

But if they say, oh, okay, wow, okay, I put in 10 Bitcoin, it now says it’s worth 15 Bitcoin, I want to take that out.

Ooh, the site suggests, no, we can’t do that right now, I’m afraid.

It claims that the users need to do things like fill out these forms to pay tax, or there’s additional charges you need to pay, or there’s the classic technical error, which means you can’t do anything right now.

Doing some maintenance at the moment, so you can’t withdraw your cash right.

“Come back tomorrow.” Yeah, unfortunately the crypto scammers have been ransomwared and they can’t do anything about it.

But ultimately it keeps going around in circles and doesn’t allow the user to withdraw their money.

Despite all this effort put into making this legitimate-looking site, it’s a short-term thing, and the investment platform, Virtuconage, simply disappears.

You go to log in one day and it just isn’t there.

Essentially, the attackers have come in, taken the cryptocurrency they’ve been paid, and they run off to start the whole process again.

Of course, being scammers, this isn’t the only thing they do.

As well as stealing their cryptocurrency, as well as stealing personal details, they could also been seen to pose as a recovery firm, inverted commas, to help people get their money back.

Oh no. And this just involved scamming them for more money before disappearing again.

So you could have been scammed 3 times over at this point, which is, again, it’s cybercriminals just preying on people who are unaware about things.

That’s so sad, isn’t it? People have lost potentially their life savings and they think, what am I going to do? I’m feeling desperate.

And then bing, up pops someone who says, we can help you. And in fact, they are just the scammers in a different guise.

Yeah, I mean, the scammers behind this seem to have really thought out this operation.

But what about the Facebooks of this world? I mean, that’s where the ads were in the first place.

Why aren’t Facebook and Instagram and the others, why aren’t they doing more to prevent these scammy ads from appearing?

These ones which are taking other people’s images, other people’s profiles are being used to trick people into making dangerous investments.

That’s the ultimate question, isn’t it? I mean, part of the reason these scams are so successful is because they’re spread across so many different platforms.

But you know, yeah, as you point out, a large part of this is through the same ecosystem. No, Meta control Facebook and WhatsApp.

I’m sure they probably do take down some of these pages that get identified.

Elon Musk is putting rockets on the moon or he’s putting data centres into orbit. There are some very bright people who work there. Clearly, there’s an awful lot of cash.

Why can’t they spend some of their billions protecting the social media spaces which they own as well?

It’s bizarre, isn’t it?

I guess in Twitter’s defence, I mean, oh, X or whatever they like to be called these days. They did at least introduce that blue tick system.

So whenever you saw the blue tick, you knew this was likely to be absolute nonsense, which was being posted up there.

Originally, it was meant to show verified users, of course, but after a while you learned, oh no, those are the people I shouldn’t pay any attention to.

Yeah, it is getting unfortunately more and more difficult to figure out what is real and what is not, which is kind of scary in a lot of ways.

But this is the future we’ve apparently chosen. I’m afraid it is.

Time for a quick word from one of our sponsors today, Elastic.

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And thanks to Elastic for supporting the show.

And welcome back. If you join us, our favorite part of the show, the part of the show that we like to call Pick of the Pick of the Week.

Pick of the Week is the part of the show where everyone chooses something they like.

Could be a funny story, a book that they’ve read, a TV show, a record, a podcast, a website, or an app, whatever they wish. Doesn’t have to be security related necessarily.

Well, my Pick of the Week this week is not security related. My Pick of the Week this week is about a French academic called Florian Montaglier.

Sounds fancy already. It does, doesn’t it?

Lovely name. He is professor of letters at a— I don’t know which letters, I imagine all of them— at a university in Besançon. For two decades he’s been there.

And he is seemingly one of the world’s most ambitious self-promoters. Because in 2016, Florian won the gold medal of philology. Are you familiar with philology?

No, I can’t say. Is it Phil Collins?

It’s not the study of the drummer from Genesis. No, it is the study of language through examination of historical texts.

I mean, that sounds very fancy and very legitimate.

Doesn’t it? Yes. So imagine saying Beowulf, for instance, if you’re reading that, how language has changed. Sounds fascinating, really. Anyway. Epic of Gilgamesh. Yes.

So, winning the gold medal of philology is quite a big deal.

I didn’t know it was an Olympic sport.

I’m not sure it’s Olympics, but anyway, it’s a prestigious international honour.

And the ceremony where he was invested with this award was held at the French National Assembly, and government ministers turned up, Nobel laureates showed up, local papers reported he was in the running for the linguistics equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and he got it.

Got the gold medal for philology. Now, there’s only one tiny problem with this.

What is that?

He made the entire thing up. The gold medal of philology, invented by Florent. The International Society of Philology that awarded it to him was invented by Florent.

The University of Philology and Education in Lewes, Delaware, where he claimed to have got his PhD, doesn’t exist.

When I think of linguistics, I think of Delaware.

He even ordered the medal himself from a jeweller for €250. Is it real gold?

Is that the important thing? Or is it poor quality copper?

Well, maybe the jeweller has scammed him. I don’t know. €250. You’d hope there’d be some gold in it. The society claims to have also presented this honorary medal to Noam Chomsky.

Oh, that is a very prestigious name to give an award to.

However, Chomsky says he has no recollection of ever receiving any such award. He’s probably received loads of awards, he’s probably just forgotten.

Yeah, he’s probably just forgotten about it, dropped it down the back of the sofa.

Yeah, it’s on his— on the shelf in his bathroom, he’s just forgotten about it.

Anyway, all of this nonsense was uncovered by a bunch of Romanian journalists who have written a lengthy write-up exposing the fraud, and their article is the one which I’m going to link to in the show notes.

Florin Montecler is now accused of suspected forgery, use of forged documents, impersonation, and fraud generally. He denies any criminality.

Apparently, his view is that the medal isn’t a forgery because he says a forgery implies that there is a genuine medal.

But as the genuine Medal of Philology doesn’t exist, his medal can’t be a forgery.

So anyone basically can go and order online a Best Podcast in the Universe Award, give it to yourself, and hold your own little ceremony quietly at home, or invite people from the aristocracy or the world of politics and journalists, give out a few drinks, few vol-au-vents, and off you go.

That is so bizarre.

That’s my weekend sorted. So you’ll be hearing from me next week. I’ll have my gold medal of podcasting, which I will have given myself.

Anyway, that story is my pick of the week because it rather tickled me. But seriously, it is a great piece of research that the Romanian journalist did to uncover all of that.

So well worth checking it all out.

I’ll go and create the Danny Palmer Award in the field of excellence being Danny Palmer Award now. Unfortunately for me, I have a bog-standard common name.

So there’s at least a few others in the running. Danny, what’s your pick of the week? So my pick of the week is a book called A Very Short History of Life on Earth by Henry Gee.

That’s G-E-E. It’s not just a single letter surname like some sort of cool person.

But yeah, he is a paleontologist and a science writer, and it does exactly what it says on the tin, really.

In about 220 pages, it’s a history of the Earth of life on it from when it was first formed until today. And until, well, even posits on a future scenario, which I’ll end this on.

Does humanity only appear in the last paragraph or so of the book?

It’s not quite that. Yeah, it’s definitely the last chapter humans are only here. The timescales are immense.

I mean, you go, it starts off with sort of the, I mean, essentially the formation of the Earth, which is obviously billions of billions of years ago, and life only started really as I’ve learned in this, cell life forms about a billion years ago.

But there’s a lot of sort of coincidence in it as well.

It’s like, no, we’re only here because the Earth formed in the place it did in the solar system, survived a collision of another planet, which became our moon, which the gravity of that involved things happening to create life.

Something I hadn’t thought about really is at one point evolution decided, okay, this is the front end of a cell and this is the back end of a cell. Right.

Which was apparently was a massive turning point for life.

I’ll put it this way, an entry and an exit for those sorts of things, which then sort of literally made us move forward because we had a direction of travel now. Yes.

It’s not all mouth-based. It goes through to the invention of the jaw. There’s a few mass extinctions along the way.

It’s only about, yeah, two-thirds of the way through the book you actually get to the dinosaurs, which just shows the scale of times it’s showing you.

I mean, it’s not something I learned from this book, but something I enjoy is in terms of the scales of time, we as humans are closer to Tyrannosaurus rex than Stegosaurus ever was, because that Stegosaurus existed 130-odd million years ago.

Oh wow. And there’s more time between that and Tyrannosaurus rex, 65 million years ago, than there is between Tyrannosaurus rex and us.

That’s extraordinary, isn’t it? To think about that.

Yeah, it’s amazing. This book has got so much into such a little tiny thing. Yeah.

You go through to the end of the dinosaurs and how mammals evolved through to basically how apes and Homo erectus, Neanderthals, all evolved and that sort of thing.

And you basically end up with not just us, we know, with basically the end of the book is us evolving and creating civilization, which is— this sounds all very good, probably is for us in the short term, but the book then goes on to posit how basically humans are all going to be extinct in about a million years.

So I guess we might enjoy the time as we’ve got it. It’s an interesting book.

It’s quite existential as well, because you got that thing about humanity probably ceasing to exist at some point, and be it due to climate concerns, some sort of ice age, or another catastrophic extinction event.

Quite an existential read. Some of that might come from the fact that I’m turning 40 this month, so I’m thinking about, thinking a lot about age and that sort of thing.

We worry about all the problems in the world. This book basically suggests that in the end, none of it will actually matter.

So that’s A Very Short History of Life on Earth by Henry Gee, which is your pick of the week.

Highly recommend it. Brilliant.

Well, we’ve got a bit of time right now to chat to another guest on today’s show. Mike Nichols is the general manager of security at Elastic. Hello, Mike.

Welcome to the show. Hello, thanks for having me.

Lovely to have you here. Now, Mike, Elastic sits right in the middle of huge volumes of security data, doesn’t it?

So you are seeing what’s actually happening inside organizations, not just what people are talking about.

And one of the loudest things being said at the moment is that security operation centers are on the way out and that AI’s gonna replace them.

Oh geez, and this is gonna be out of a job.

So what do you say to that? I’m actually very excited about AI, not because I think it’ll reduce our teams.

I think it’ll actually make us finally successful ’cause we’ve been battling the same problem for at least 25 years that I’ve been doing this.

You know, the buzzwords you’ve all heard before, right? Alert fatigue, retention challenges, skills gap, all the problems that we talk about. We’ve kind of dabbled in technologies.

Maybe machine learning will help. All that did was create more alerts.

You know, maybe automation and these playbooks will help and they were brittle and broke and created more work there.

I think AI finally is a capability that will allow us to accelerate and still not surpass, but at least catch up a bit to where the adversaries already are.

So the SOC isn’t dying. One thing I keep hearing is that AI is gonna dig us out of this alert fatigue, this sort of hole that security teams have been stuck in for years.

Are we just speeding up the alert overload problem instead of fixing it? Is more AI creating more alerts?

It can be if it’s maybe used improperly, sort of Spider-Man, you know, great power, great responsibility challenge where AI definitely can be used as just a pure raw detection mechanism.

And I think sometimes that’s a bit of bringing a sort of a sledgehammer to a thumbtack, right?

Sometimes you don’t need to use an LLM to find some things, but AI can, of course, create more detections. I mean, it’s creating things in all other industries.

Funny kind of anecdote is, you know, for recruiting, right?

I try to open a rec and my recruiters now actually have to slow how fast they open recs because they get flooded with bots that are applying now, right?

They’re not even real humans and we have to sift through that noise as well. So I think AI is flooding for sure and it can create more alerts.

But I think what’s important about a security operations center is I wouldn’t say dying.

I think I would call it reshaping or restructuring because what we push a lot for is this to not think of alerts as each one being individually actionable anymore.

Think of them more like interesting events, and then you want to run a secondary analysis on those with these autonomous agents to then surface what matters to the human.

So if you actually look at the classic model of a security operations center, it’s always been structured like a pyramid or like a triangle.

We had this massive base of these Tier 1 analysts, you know, junior analysts.

They were new into the business, tasked with very little responsibility, pretty much just triage the alerts all day.

When you find a challenge, you build a package and then you would elevate that up to the next tier. Well, now a lot of that boring work can be automated.

That’s where we believe AI really has a huge play, is taking a lot of that work out and simplifying it.

And then you can elevate those Tier 1 analysts to do more of that Tier 2, Tier 3 work where they can actually look at that evidence package, look at the developed kind of summary from an AI agent and make their analytical decision based on what they know about the business.

And so it actually, I think, allows our teams to get much more focused on what’s the business or the mission of the company, what’s the threat adversaries that are targeting that company, and less about sort of the vendor experts of a malware triage all day long.

So you are feeling quite positive about things when it comes to AI. Obviously the bad guys are using AI as well though, aren’t they?

Because they’ve got their hands on the same tools as us. Have you seen any particular clever uses of AI by attackers?

Oh boy, clever and frightening. Yeah, right. Maybe a little kind of history. So a company that joined into Elastic in 2019 was called Endgame.

Endgame was really focused on sort of nation-state, government-focused attacks based in Washington, DC. We had a strong kind of focus in the US government.

These very, very targeted sophisticated attacks.

You know, cubicle farms of adversaries would spend millions of dollars and hundreds of people hours to build that one extremely important exploit that would take advantage of a system for compromise.

And so what happened is CISOs around the world kind of understood that they typically weren’t going to be patient zero of those types of sophisticated attacks.

They had to worry about the commodities, you know, phishing, ransomware, but these very, very targeted attacks that we’d see in the news, usually they’d see somebody else get hit by that.

And then, you know, in their ISACs they’re part of, or, you know, they could actually learn about it or the products would add detections for it and they’d be secure.

Smashing security, right? Unfortunately now, because adversaries don’t have a legal regulation problem or a risk problem, so they put AI in use instantly, right?

They didn’t worry about PII. And so they said, hey, look, let’s just turn it on.

And they really developed an amazing pipeline of things like, you know, I think it’s 4.5 times better click-through rates of phishing-based attacks now that are built through LLMs because all the hallmarks of finding that don’t exist anymore, right?

You don’t see typos, you don’t see weird grammatical errors. They’re also very targeted. But scarier than that, the ramp in discovery of CVEs.

We’ve seen, you know, CVEs are, you know, common vulnerabilities and exposures, these, you know, things that are where the software vulnerabilities are then lead to exploits.

Every month is a record-breaking Patch Tuesday month from Microsoft of, hey, here’s a bunch more things that were discovered because it’s so much easier now to weaponize an AI model to go and help find and discover these vulnerabilities.

And even scarier than that, to then convert them, the high cost of building the exploits is much, much lower now.

We actually see these vulnerabilities get turned into exploits almost automatically by these models as well.

So what that means is now the cost of developing an attack is extremely low and the sophistication of developing an attack is low, which means that now cybercriminals and other groups that typically didn’t have that kind of sophistication of a nation state have that power now.

And that makes every CISO now have to worry about being patient zero.

So I’m scared of adversarial AI, but I do feel hopeful that defensive AI is our secret weapon to help battle the incumbent that’s coming from that.

But as we all know, we’ve got to be careful with AI, haven’t we? We’ve had to have the right guardrails in place. We have to play by the rules.

The attackers, they don’t care about that so much. They don’t care if their AI goes rogue or if their bit of vibe coding goes wrong. They don’t have compliance departments.

It feels a bit of an unfair fight. How’s that gonna play out over the next couple of years? Are things gonna get even worse? Are we gonna be able to keep up?

Yeah, I think without being too dire, typically when these new technologies come out, they get worse before they get better.

So if you look at when machine learning became pretty rampant in the adversarial side, you know, maybe the 2010s era, we saw this idea of polymorphic malware where we used to have antiviruses that had signatures that could identify these malicious files and they were all pretty commoditized.

And then all of a sudden adversaries used machine learning to craft and change those signatures every time a file was downloaded to make it polymorphic.

And all of a sudden it was beating all those systems and we had to come out with a brand new technology.

We started implementing machine learning detections and preventions on the endpoint itself, but that took time, right?

So the adversary had an advantage for some period of time before we caught back up. And I think that’s where we are right now.

We’re in the world of where the adversary has an advantage.

I mean, you could see we have these massive supply chain attacks happening pretty much every couple months newsworthy attacks coming out.

And I think we’re going to keep seeing that until we get better at things like AI red teaming, you know, using AI on the defensive side.

We’ve had some success there of putting our researchers, giving them AI access to kind of empower them to find these problems before adversaries do.

And it helped us with things like the Axia supply chain attack. Again, I have faith because I see this and I have hope that we will catch back up.

But to your point, I think probably get a little bit worse before it gets better.

And I think this year, public sector, in the US especially, is usually a little bit slower to adopt newer technologies.

The new White House cybersecurity policy, it speaks about AI everywhere, right? One of the core pillars is AI as a defender.

So if the government’s there, I think that that’s a good sign that the rest of the industry is pushing forward and leveraging AI.

Now what we have to do is avoid the buzzword bingo and the vendor FUD of, you know, putting AI in front of everything and not knowing what it truly means to have transparent and trustworthy AI within an organization.

But at least I think we’re getting better now at seeing more companies trying to go down the path of implementing it properly.

And one of the big changes which is happening is agentic AI, get an AI which actually does things rather than creates videos of cats skateboarding or something. Exactly.

Yeah, AI which logs in and does work running around inside your network with their own permissions, potentially these sort of non-human accounts. Yes.

It’s a struggle enough dealing with humans, isn’t it? I mean, if we’ve got AI helpers which are acting on their own as well, what happens if one of those gets hijacked?

I think we’re still learning as an industry, right?

I think this idea of non-human entities that need to fit into what we call entity analytics or what was called user and entity behavioral analytics, we’re still not perfect at tracking that, right?

You had this idea of tracking malicious use of credentials, right? Malicious insiders, which really could be just compromised credentials.

Even there, we’re still as an industry getting better at finding them, not producing a huge amount of false positives because humans are not typically predictable.

When you add to that predictions of these agents going from the thousands to millions to billions in the next 5 to 10 years, that’s an exponentially higher volume than the humans that we were having to manage and control within the organization.

So I think that is definitely a concern and ensuring that we have secure code by design from the outset, ensuring that we are limiting controls at the beginning of the implementation of the agent and not thinking about it afterwards saying, oh, we’ll buy a product that will protect us later.

We have to be in the development process of these AI systems, implementing guardrails, implementing controls as the agents themselves are being built, not trying to layer something on afterwards.

But you’re right, there already is a brand new attack surface here, which is this idea of harnessing and leveraging these agents to enact attacks on your behalf.

And even if the AI isn’t acting maliciously, it may innocently make mistakes.

If you have an AI helper which is assisting you during a security incident, it might make mistakes just like a human.

That’s exactly right.

But how would a human check what it’s doing? Sometimes the AI isn’t very good at explaining itself.

That’s key. We, in our just conversations with customers and users is full transparency, right?

Explaining all the reasoning steps and allowing you to understand how it made a decision.

And even better, it has to have a human on the loop type of activity, meaning before anything destructive happens in the organization that a human is able to review is crucial.

If you were a SOC manager today and you hired a junior analyst, you don’t give them full control to go kill a process and delete a host off the network.

They already have checks and balances in place to ensure that that human is properly trained and properly implementing the processes and procedures.

In the same way we view that happening with agents, there’s going to be a set of autonomy you’re okay with, and there’ll be a set of things that are too far beyond the fold of risk.

You know, they’re not making expert decisions and they have to have a review cycle above them.

They’re still saving you a phenomenal amount of time because they’re doing a lot of that work.

Yeah. So let’s talk now about how organizations can actually start to get a grip on all of this.

I’ve been reading some of your content and one thing which stuck out to me was everyone seems to be obsessing at the moment over which AI model to use, but that’s not really the bit that matters, is it?

It’s not so much about the AI model, it’s the data behind it. What does that actually mean in practice for a security team?

You’re exactly right about the AI model being a top question, but ultimately to your point, it’s like diminishing returns at this point.

There’s lots of companies that have been started up that are trying to build SLMs or small language models that do bespoke specific actions.

Then now there’s also the conversation around token savings, because of course the more we use AI, the more we realize there’s a cost to it.

And so then they’re, oh, do we need to use a different type of model for the first analysis that’s less expensive and then a secondary model for the deeper analysis?

Those are all good questions, but to your point, to me, those are the questions maybe 10 on the list. And question 1 is, what is the model going to do in the first place?

One of the things I would always lead with to a CISO is, you shouldn’t buy my product if your process isn’t working.

No product will solve a broken process or a lack of a process within a security operations center.

You have to first ensure that you know your business, your mission, when you find a problem, how do you remediate? How do you triage? What are the steps to take?

Because without that information, the AI is not going to make it up. It has to start from somewhere.

It’ll have global knowledge, of course, but having that bespoke knowledge to your organization is really critical because not every company triages the same way.

You need that context of what’s in your organization. So that’s what I think the first piece is, make sure you define those processes.

And of course, we help people get through these and help to elevate those and pull them into the system. And then you’re right about the second one as well, which is visibility.

It’s even more so now, we talked about exponential data growth with the SaaS explosion when COVID was underway and people were migrating to the cloud quickly.

SaaS data became exponential. Well, now with LLMs, you have another massive new source of data we didn’t expect, which is all the logs of that system.

And as you mentioned earlier, what are those non-human entities doing? That’s now a whole other corpus of things to track and monitor.

So we have to figure out the data problem and how can we create and manage and store information at scale in an affordable way where we aren’t making risk-based decisions based on budget, which is unfortunately what many SIEM vendors have forced companies to do over the years was say, hey, ignore that data because you can’t afford it.

Especially now targeting and understanding an organization is so much easier with AI. They’ll know what is and is not properly being analyzed.

And that’s what they’ll hide, they’ll hide within those gaps.

So it’s the data behind it, which is important and its context, which is important too. So you’re general manager of security at Elastic.

What’s your company doing differently in this space?

Within my team, what I do is I run the security business, which is sort of the out-of-the-box security capabilities built on top of Elastic.

But the company itself is born from Elasticsearch. It is a developer platform loved by people all over the world. And so there’s sort of two pieces to it.

The first is what are we doing as a business to help people build, develop, monitor, and manage these apps.

The benefit I get is all the cool stuff we innovate there, I get to utilize.

So on that side, we launched an agent builder, which can be tailored around what it can access, what can it not access.

This thing’s allowed to go to, for example, VirusTotal for information, but don’t go to Reddit.

And then the really cool benefit that we have within the agent builder, we have a very easy skills framework that allows these things to be automatically triggered by each other.

Give you an example what I mean by that.

In security, we take advantage of this by doing things running a false positive skill that goes constantly over your alerts and identifies things that are most likely not real-world problems, removes them from the corpus, and then it takes the remaining pieces and then runs that through a secondary skill.

So it triggers automatically a secondary skill we call attack discovery.

I talk about it almost a serendipity moment where it uses not kind of atomic indicators like IOCs, hashes and domains. Instead, it uses behaviors.

It follows things the MITRE ATT&CK framework and looks for where behaviors are linked based on certain attack profiles.

So it was hey, I saw an execution attempt and an exfil attempt, and both of those are related to this adversary.

So this is most likely an attack underway and it’ll kind of bubble that up to the analyst. And then that can trigger another skill to do threat hunting and on and on.

And the idea is we want the analyst to just get a final product.

It’s queued up and ready to go because we have workflows where you can say, hey, you know, hit a button and now we’ll fix it.

You, of course, could choose to let it fix it, but we are, again, we’re very strong believers of human on the loop so that you can say, hey, pause here, let a human analyze.

That I think is critical.

And we can only do that because of agent builder, it’s very easy for an organization to then go into the agent builder and continue to tune and develop their own areas around that.

And the other key piece is just the nature of our business. You know, Elastic is a community open source-based company. We knew we had to meet our customers where they are.

And a big part of that for me, one of my largest verticals is the global public sector. And many of them can’t connect to cloud.

Either they’re unable to ’cause they’re in the ocean on a ship somewhere, or they’re not able to based on risk. They’re in highly secured environments. Performance.

And so we had to build AI in a way that was able to be used even if it was a disconnected model on-premise, an agnostic approach.

And so the path we chose was to use a choose-your-own-model. Of course, we deliver one if you want it, but it’s an agnostic approach where you can literally choose any model. Right.

You know, the belief for us is cloud-first, not cloud-only, right? How can we make sure that our customers are supported no matter where they go?

So Mike, just before we let you go, let’s say someone listening right now is running a small security team.

They’ve heard everything that you’ve been talking about and maybe they’re feeling a bit panicked, a bit daunted by it, what’s the first thing that Elastic would help them tackle?

One of the first things that I think is great about us is that you don’t even have to talk to a salesperson.

No offense to anybody out there from sales, but a lot of time if you’re a small company and you try to get enterprise support, you call in and they’re like, oh, you know, you’re not tall enough to ride this ride and they don’t even respond, right?

You can go to our cloud, cloud.elastic.co. You can deploy an entire product and you could pay with a credit card per month if you want.

We believe that we have to have enterprise-class software for everyone.

And I think secondly, the thing that I’m really excited about, and we actually just launched the first MCP application for security, which is the difference between the typical MCP servers and an MCP app is an app you actually can include, you know, visualization elements.

So when you’re in, let’s say Claude and you’re typing, hey, help me, it gives you chat back, but it also can give you an interactive UI, which is what a lot of people are used to.

We’ve actually built that directly into the product as well.

If you haven’t done security before, if you’re scared of all the, you know, pages you’ve seen and other solutions that look a little bit heavy, go to chat and say, hey, I want to stop the recent Axios supply chain attack, and it’ll turn on the rules for you, get you operational and running.

But the reason we think that’s so critical is because a challenge of the industry is that we sort of forced English as the natural language of security everywhere.

Every product is sort of defaulted to English, and many people don’t think in English. They think in their natural language and have to translate.

Well, with chat, we have multi-language models. You can go in there and type in your language and it’ll go and actually solve the problem.

So this idea of removing that translation barrier, right, is so critical.

It’s been absolutely fascinating speaking to you today, Mike. Thank you very much for coming on the show.

If anyone wants to try out for free, there is a free trial of Elastic Security, the Agentic Securi.spp-controls button { -webkit-appearance: none; appearance: none; }
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.spp-full-transcript[open] .spp-full-transcript-arrow { transform: rotate(180deg); }

.spp-full-transcript-body { padding: 8px 0 16px; }

.spp-ft-block { padding: 10px 18px; border-left: 4px solid transparent; }
.spp-ft-meta { display: flex; align-items: baseline; gap: 10px; margin-bottom: 4px; }
.spp-ft-speaker { font-size: .8rem; font-weight: 700; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: .06em; color: var(–spp-accent); }
.spp-ft-time { background: none; border: none; padding: 0; font-family: var(–spp-font-mono); font-size: .78rem; color: var(–spp-muted); cursor: pointer; transition: color .15s; }
.spp-ft-time:hover { color: var(–spp-accent); text-decoration: underline; }
.spp-ft-text { font-size: .95rem; line-height: 1.7; color: var(–spp-muted); margin: 0; }

.spp-subscribe { padding: 10px 18px; border-top: 1px solid #3A3A3A; background: var(–spp-bg); }
.spp-subscribe #podcast-listen-on,
.spp-subscribe #podcast-listen-on p,
.spp-subscribe #podcast-listen-on strong,
.spp-subscribe #podcast-listen-on a { font-size: 1.2rem !important; margin: 0 !important; }

.spp-with-transcript .plyr { display: none !important; }
.spp-with-transcript .spp-audio { display: none !important; }

@media (max-width: 650px) {
.spp-progress-wrap { order: 0; width: auto; flex: 1; min-width: 0; padding: 0; border-bottom: none; margin: 0; }
.spp-progress-bar { height: 36px; }
.spp-controls { padding: 8px 12px 10px; gap: 8px; }
.spp-volume-wrap { display: none; }
.spp-speed-btn { display: none; }
.spp-controls-spacer { display: none; }
.spp-artwork { width: 70px; height: 70px; }
}
]]>

Host:

Graham Cluley:

 @grahamcluley.com

 @
 / grahamcluley

Guest:

Danny Palmer:
 / dannypalmerwriter‬

Episode links:

Sponsored by:

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• CoreView – How secure is your Microsoft 365 tenant? Find out with CoreView’s free Microsoft 365 Tenant Security Scanner.

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Thanks:

Theme tune: “Vinyl Memories” by Mikael Manvelyan.
Assorted sound effects: AudioBlocks.

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