Smashing Security podcast #485: These researchers got drunk to hack an LG TV

So we’re gonna have a private conversation about our next crypto scam, and it would really be unfortunate if anyone had a recording of this.

Smashing Security, episode 485. These researchers got drunk to hack an LG TV with Graham Cluley and special guest Lianne Potter.

Hello, hello, and welcome to Smashing Security. Smashing Security, episode 485. My name’s Graham Cluley.

And I’m Lianne Potter.

Lianne, welcome back to the show. Always great to have you here. Now, you are, of course, quite the aficionado when it comes to podcasts.

You’ve got podcasts coming out of your ears, haven’t you?

I’m a millennial. You have to have multiple podcasts.

But you haven’t just got one podcast, you’ve got multiple podcasts. So you’ve got your Compromising Positions podcast, all about cybersecurity. Excellent, groovy stuff there.

But you also do Tech Film Noir, where you are looking at old movies and seeing how well they’ve predicted future tech in particular, right?

It’s just an excuse to watch the films I absolutely adore, mostly Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi movies.

Well, the latest episode you’ve put out is all about Weird Science, which was from about 1985, which hit me at precisely the right time. It was in my formative teenage years.

So does that explain it all then, Graham?

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, it’s about a couple of teenagers who decide to use technology to magic up the perfect woman in the shape of Kelly LeBrock.

And what a shape. That’s all I have to say. Loving controversy on the podcast.

Goodness gracious me.

They were like, Lianne, you know, we can’t really do this podcast ’cause it’s not age-grade. And I said, well, that’s the whole point of this podcast, that it’s not age-grade.

The technology hasn’t aged great and neither has the ethical quandaries.

Oh, well, I haven’t seen it for a while, but I remember I enjoyed it at the time.

These couple of nerds, they boot up a Memotech MTX computer, a home computer, which wasn’t very popular. And with it, they managed to create Kelly LeBrock.

Now, the thing I have to tell you, Lianne, is I had a Memotech MTX computer.

Boom! My head just exploded. No, you didn’t. Really?

I really did.

We should have got you on the episode.

My original home computer was the Sinclair ZX81.

But my dad actually got us a Memotech MTX. I can’t remember if it was the 500 or the 512. They had different amounts of RAM in them.

Yeah, yeah.

And I wrote games for them. I have to say, the graphics were nothing like as good as— That was my next question. How does it compare?

But it is a very nostalgic movie for me, ’cause it’s like, oh my goodness, I remember this computer.

That’s your life.

This was where I was at. It was fantastic.

Were you living the high life with 3 screens though, like this young lad does in the film?

‘Cause I remember just thinking when I saw that, I was like, 3 screens, wow.

Who would need 3 screens? You’ve only got 2 eyes, haven’t you?

I mean, it’s—

2 feels like an extravagance to me.

Do you still have it or?

No, long gone, unfortunately.

Oh, such a shame, because we could do a follow-up episode and we could literally try and rebuild Kelly LeBrock from it.

I suspect that they go for a fortune on eBay now. They’re probably very collectible.

I bet they are as well. Oh, that’s so cool, Graham. That’s really, really cool.

Anyway, before we kick off, let’s thank this week’s wonderful sponsors, ThreatLocker, Intruder, and Vanta. We’ll be hearing more about them later on in the podcast.

This week on Smashing Security. We won’t be talking about how scammers tricked Revolut into handing over customer data by posing as a government agency.

You’ll hear no discussion of how the Reddit account of HBO Max was hijacked by hackers to spread malware.

And we won’t even mention how the UK and United States have joined forces to take down global scam centres. So, Lianne, what are you going to be talking about this week?

Well, I’m talking about a piece of Android malware that, if it was an all-you-can-eat buffet, it would get kicked out for being too greedy.

And I’m going to be getting really, really sozzled by looking at the security of LG smart TVs.

Plus, we’ve got a featured interview with Andy Hornegold of Intruder, so look forward to that. All this and much more coming up on this episode of Smashing Security.

This episode is sponsored by Intruder. Now, Joe, quick quiz. How often does your team ship code?

Multiple times a week. Maybe more if someone’s had too much coffee.

And how often do you get a proper pen test?

Once a year?

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And thanks to Intruder for supporting the show.

Lianne, during your cybersecurity career, have you ever, or your staff, intentionally got a little bit sozzled? You know, something pickled, maybe legless, blotto, plastered.

Has that ever happened to you?

I can confirm nor deny that alcohol is sometimes involved in the cybersecurity industry, just to lubricate the onion tours going down nicely.

I think I might be a little bit of an oddity in the industry because I don’t drink.

You’re like some sort of lizard, you know, you just kind of take in nutrients from the ground and stuff.

Perhaps. Well, the reason I asked if alcohol has ever helped you in terms of cybersecurity is it turns out sometimes there is an acceptable reason to get a bit pissed.

I’m looking forward to hearing what this is.

Pissed in the British sense rather than the American sense of being upset. So, there’s a bunch of researchers. They’ve just published their research into LG TVs.

Now, I don’t know if you have one of those enormous TVs in your house, you know, the ones which cover about 90% of your wall.

I have been playing the LG game for quite a number of years as my TV of choice.

So I’m very interested in what you have to say about this because I’m very scared.

Well, it seems to become the norm, doesn’t it, to have a flashy smart TV leaving barely enough room for your sofa and your coffee table. And LG is one of the really major brands.

Its TVs have been the subject of a deep dive investigation that’s just been published on YouTube, because that’s where you publish your cybersecurity research these days.

You don’t do a paper at Black Hat, you produce a video.

Because TikTok dances are all so last year now.

So this is up on the Gamers Nexus YouTube channel, and they wanted to find out what these TVs get up to behind the scenes.

What do you mean? Did they go off and get drunk or something?

No, it’s not the TVs getting drunk. I mean, they can barely get out the front door, let’s face it, they’re so enormous.

They can barely navigate to Spotify half the time.

Well, they found some pretty jaw-dropping things about these tellies because I’m afraid it can impact your privacy as well as earning the TV manufacturers an absolute ton of cash, and raises the question of who actually owns your TV.

So I asked about you and getting blotto, and the reason I ask that is this was key to how the team behind the investigation prepared for this research.

So setting up an LG TV — in fact, any TV probably these days — requires you to accept its terms and conditions, right?

There’d be some dialogue which pops up at some point and says, you can go and read 30,000 words of legalese.

Absolutely. Tons of pages.

That you’re never gonna do.

You’re never gonna do that. You just say, yeah, yeah, come on. I wanna see if the TV’s any good.

So you click through. Now, we all know no one reads them, but of course you’re kind of bound by those terms and conditions which you’ve agreed to.

And one of the terms and conditions may say something like, you agree not to test the TV for security vulnerabilities and find flaws.

Yeah, killjoys. Exactly. You agree not to reverse engineer any of the algorithms.

But the investigators’ lawyers apparently pointed out to the researchers, they said, look, you can’t be legally bound by a contract which you agree to while drunk.

Because you don’t actually—

Ah, okay. I like — does this loophole apply to life?

Sadly not. Sadly, I don’t think, sorry, my lord, I was completely plastered. I don’t think that’ll get you off anything, particularly bad driving.

So the researchers, they decided that they would use this loophole. So they got plastered. And they were quite clearly very merry at this point.

We have Ethernet plugged into Gamers Nexus LLC’s TV. There you go. That Gamers Nexus purchased while it was inebriated heavily.

It was unable to agree to the EULA.

If a checkbox were checked.

It was entirely accidental.

But we don’t know if one had been checked.

Because of the inebriation.

Yeah. You see that Stanley Cup over there? It’s just all margarita.

Just the entire thing.

They’ve sort of accepted the agreement, but LG can’t actually hold them to any of it. And that’s rather brilliant, I think.

So these agreements, they’re so long, ploughing through them drunk isn’t actually that different to doing it sober, I think. No one’s gonna understand them.

So what did these researchers find? Well, it’s bad news for anyone who owns an LG TV, Lianne.

Hit me with it. Hit me with the bad news.

Because your TV might be listening even when it looks like it’s been turned off.

Listening how? Like to what?

So of course, smart TVs these days have microphones just like your— are we allowed to use the Alexa word? Are we allowed to say Siri and Google?

You’ve just set everyone off now.

You’ve set everything off. But like all those smart devices, TVs these days have microphones.

So, you know, there is a way of commanding televisions through voice, and so they’ve got a microphone.

There’s a button that I press when I can’t be bothered typing.

I suspect depending on your model of LG TV, it may be that you can give it a wake word as well, and you could actually just talk to it.

I’m not sure.

It depends on the TV.

So in one test, these researchers staged a fake whispered conversation about a made-up crypto scam right in front of their TV, a TV that looked entirely switched off.

So we’re gonna have a private conversation about our next rug pull crypto scam, and it would really be unfortunate if anyone had a recording of this.

All right, so the screen appears to be off right now. Currently, Wendell and I are in a boardroom to discuss our new crypto coin rug pull scam.

We don’t want anyone to hear about this. We trust that no device in the thing is listening because of the appearance here.

And right, definitely things capturing video and audio surreptitiously would be very bad. Well, the only device in this room is the TV and it looks like it’s off.

It sure does look like it’s off. So the plan is we’re gonna launch the coin, we’re gonna let the price go up, then we’re gonna sell all of our tokens and rug pull everyone.

Rug pull coins.

I mean, how else would you do a crypto?

I hope they don’t hear about it.

The screen was black.

There were no lights on. And afterwards they found that entire conversation. It saved it onto the actual TV.

Word for word?

Word for word. It had been transcribed into the TV.

I mean, anyone with headphones on, Grim, how low was this whisper? Was it like this big?

It is extraordinary, isn’t it? Some of these smart devices, they can hear you even when you whisper from the corner of a room, sometimes even when you’re playing music.

I can barely hear other people when they whisper.

You need ears like an LG TV.

In another test, this TV picked up someone’s voice clearly from around 70 feet away through a wall. Now, how big does your TV have to be for you to want to sit 70 feet away?

I can’t imagine, so I can’t understand the use case for that.

Now, to be fair, that particular demo and the fake crypto conversation one, they required the researchers to first exploit vulnerabilities.

To hack their way into the TV, which they were allowed to do because they were drunk when they went through the terms and conditions.

And we all know that hacking is so complicated nowadays.

And you know, you need lots of expertise to be able to do that. So it’s totally unfeasible that this would happen.

Yes. Or you need an AI account maybe to look for the vulnerability as well.

So what they were proving was that this capability existed inside these televisions for a listening device to be built without your knowledge if someone with the right access, or should we call it the wrong access, wanted to do it.

So it had the capability to do that, even if you weren’t pressing the button, even if you were 70 feet away, even if you weren’t known.

So why do these TVs have the functionality to listen to you?

And it isn’t, Lianne, so you can say, play the latest series of Game of Thrones or whatever it is that you wanted to watch.

Play the latest episode of Smashing Security.

Oh, such a crawler. Now, I’m sure you and lots of our listeners can guess what this is all about. It’s about targeted advertising.

So modern smart TVs, they make a lot of their money, if not more of their money — if you actually look at their financial results — not from selling you the boxes, but from selling advertisers information about you and giving advertisers access to you as well.

So did they sit around in the marketing discussion and they were just like, do you know how people are always really paranoid that their smartphones are listening?

How about we take that to the next level and make it a dream come true?

Exactly. Let’s have something else which people have around them a great proportion of the day.

And if the TV knows what you watch and it knows who else lives in your house and what other gadgets they own, that data has enormous value, of course.

And these TV manufacturing companies have entire divisions who are devoted to monetising the data in that way.

So the business model of a modern smart TV is built around watching you back.

Not literally though, right? Not like with cameras and stuff?

Well, not with most of them, no. And not in this particular test.

This is where you tell me it’s got some sort of dolphin echolocation that when you’re talking, it can see your shape.

Oh my goodness. That is a brilliant idea.

Oh no, you’re watching TV with your hands down your pants like Al Bundy from Married… with Children again.

So, LG executives, they’re shown in this video up on YouTube saying that LG owns the glass, meaning the screen that you paid £2,500 for, isn’t really yours. It belongs to LG.

You are just borrowing it. Another big issue is that the TV knows about your whole home, not just you.

So the researchers discovered that these TVs are quietly scanning people’s entire home networks, building a list of every device connected to the same Wi-Fi.

Yes, you may well gulp at the thought of that. So—

Yeah, I did. A lovely non-visual medium, but I was just like, ugh, okay.

So phones, your smartwatches, they even picked up a 3D printer — Lord knows what they’re gonna do with that.

So this was regardless of whether those devices had anything to do with the TV at all, they were being picked up. And it was also picking up other nearby Wi-Fi signals.

So it was enough information potentially to work out roughly where in the world somebody physically was, which of course is useful in terms of sending out targeted advertising as well.

So I wasn’t far off about echolocation then.

The good news is you don’t have to worry about this because TVs have got privacy controls, right? Right, Lianne?

Right, right, right. We all know that companies love a good privacy control.

So on the LG TV, these researchers tested the button, which basically said, don’t sell my personal information, don’t be a bad guy.

Now that was turned off by default, and that was before the TV had even been connected to the internet.

So it wasn’t possible to connect to the internet initially with that option turned off.

So when you retrospectively disabled the collection of that private data, that wasn’t any good either, because when the researchers told the TV to delete their voice recordings, the recordings remained.

They only actually disappeared when the TV was completely unplugged from the wall — a complete and utter power-off, like pull the plug, not just the internet connection, not just the aerial or whatever you might have.

Pull the plug out of the wall, and then that information would be wiped.

This is where Martin Lewis, the money-saving expert, would be like, oh, I’ve been telling you for years to unplug your devices and save a bit of money.

Save yourself 13 pence.

Save yourself 13 pence, and then now save yourself from having all your data sold.

And ticking this box marked Delete My Data didn’t actually delete your data. But it gets worse than that.

Again, this next bit comes from the same sort of hacked rooted TV, which they meddled with rather than one fresh out of the box.

They found with those modified units, even when they pulled out a network cable and physically pulled it out, so there was no internet connection at all — it wasn’t connected via Wi-Fi, wasn’t connected via an ethernet cable.

All the things you’d expect. Yeah.

The TV would carry on quietly recording and storing everything it picked up. And the moment you plugged the network back in, what do you think happened?

Was it party time at data and marketing HQ at LG?

Yeah, yeah, because all of that stored data got sent straight up to their servers again. So it’d been sort of waiting for the chance.

So unplugging your TV from the internet isn’t really the safety net you might hope for.

The TV doesn’t need to be online at the moment it’s listening to you — it just needs to be online eventually.

Now, to be fair to LG, they dispute a lot of this and the seriousness of a lot of this.

Their official line is that the TV only processes your voice when you deliberately press the button on your remote, like you were describing, or you say a wake word.

They say that any tracking features require you to opt in first, which sounds really reasonable.

But then you go and watch their marketing material of their advertising division, which is so boastful about all the data they’re collecting when they’re speaking to the big advertisers, like, we know everything about people.

I can imagine.

Yeah. So some people will think, well, you know, does this really matter that much?

But it does because you’re not just sharing that data with advertisers, as we’ve talked about before.

Law enforcement agencies can quietly buy up this data and they can find out about your location, your behaviour.

Also, a lot of these organisations hiring contractors and stuff like that.

You know, that don’t work for the company and you can’t really — not casting aspersions on contractors — but you can’t really control what they do.

And so if they take a shine to listening in onto certain conversations, what’s gonna stop them?

And the fact that these TVs are vulnerable to security vulnerabilities, which have apparently been reported to LG now by these researchers who are able to do all kinds of hacks, means that potentially a criminal could break into a TV.

It’s a TV which knows what you’re watching, knows who’s in the room, it knows roughly where your house is.

It makes you a more valuable target, I think, than someone who’s just in the market for travel insurance or trainers or a different breakfast cereal.

Because how many times have you sat in your living room and phoned up your bank and your bank says, okay, give me your card details so that I can find your account.

Speaking to other providers and giving them account details and other things like that. Really private, personal conversations. Lots of lovey-dovey time on the sofa.

Imagine you’re the CEO of an organisation and you’re about to do a merger or an acquisition or a big announcement. A hacker could come in.

You just wanna watch an episode of Neighbours, calms you down just before a big presentation. Yeah, absolutely. It’s gonna be terrible.

Imagine you’re a politician.

Well, that’s what I was thinking. I was thinking the scariest use case here would be espionage and very high-profile targets.

Yes, these sort of things do happen. It’s not the first time we’ve talked about smart TVs being used for something other than watching TV.

So it can be done for bad. Regular listeners will remember just a few episodes ago, we were talking about residential proxies.

Turns out these LG TVs are vulnerable to this kind of thing where other people’s internet traffic can get quietly routed through your home connection without you realising, making your IP address look like the source of whatever they are up to.

And sure enough, these LG TVs are vulnerable to that. Nearly half of the apps they tested in LG’s own app store had the ability to turn your TV into exactly that kind of proxy.

So on top of everything else, there’s a decent chance your smart TV has been helping someone else disguise themselves on the internet.

So having depressed everybody, what can you do about this? And the advice from the researchers seemed straightforward. I was reading this and I thought, well—

I’m waiting with bated breath, obviously.

All right. So what their advice is is that you don’t use the smart features of the TV itself. What you should do, they say, is why don’t you use a separate streaming stick?

Amazon Fire Stick is the most famous one. If you want those smart features rather than using the apps which the TV manufacturers themselves have built into the operating system.

Okay. Yeah.

Now, the reason why I’m slightly nervous about that is of course, who’s to say that Amazon can be entirely trusted as well?

Or any of them, yeah.

Maybe there’s more eyes watching them as opposed to 5 Eyes watching them.

Which one is the lesser of the evils of all of them?

Yes, it’s difficult, isn’t it? So that was the advice which came out from the video is you may want to do that.

I think my mum had better advice, to be honest, because what she used to always tell me is, don’t watch too much TV, it’ll rot your brain.

But really, don’t watch too much TV because it’ll steal your identity.

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

So, you know how all the frontier AI companies are now saying, let’s slow down on superintelligence?

I think we in cyber need to get together and have a really hard, long look at our malware naming conventions.

So today I’m going to talk about MantaXotax.

I beg your pardon?

MantaXotax.

Is that all one word?

No, it’s 2 words.

I think I’m saying it correctly.

But it made me think about whoever named this strain of malware was just looking around the room and saw a man and maybe their tax return and was just like, that’s the name of this strain of malware.

So I Googled it because I thought, does this mean something really special or clever? And it is an Indonesian piece of malware. And in Indonesian, Mantax means awesome.

Which got me thinking and actually got my goat, because remember last time I was on, I was talking about the phishing service as a platform called Greatness.

And honestly, who is naming this stuff? Cybercrime brought to you by the makers of Live Laugh Hack signs.

Sorry, I’m digressing here, but cyber naming conventions is just such a touchy subject for me.

Awesome for a malware, Greatness for a phishing as a service platform — our naming conventions suck. It’s an embarrassment. That’s not the story though.

I just needed to get that off my chest.

So a few days ago, it was disclosed that MantaXotax is a horrible little bit of Android malware that is doing the rounds.

But there’s something a little bit special about this one, because malware tends to specialise.

So you’ve got malware that does info stealing, you’ve got your RATs, you’ve got your spyware, you’ve got your ransomware, but MantaXotax — I’m just going to call it Mantax going forward — apparently looked at all those and went, why should I choose between those?

Why don’t I just use all of them?

So this piece of Android malware can nick your texts, your contacts, your browser history, your WhatsApp and Telegram data, grab screenshots, record your screen, take photos using your camera.

And just when you’re thinking, well, that’s quite bad, it then encrypts your files and demands a ransom.

Quite bad? I’d say this is worse than having an LG TV.

On the scale of things, perhaps. It gets worse.

So the cybersecurity experts are calling this a new Android malware cybercriminal cocktail, partly because it mixes ransomware and malware into a lovely fusion-style drink, but also because once it hits you, your phone ends up shaken, stirred, and absolutely on the rocks.

My goodness.

And it’s interesting because it’s spread through dodgy APKs, through Telegram channels, forums, and phishing rather than the official Google Play App Store.

Oh, okay. So if you sideload an app onto your Android phone, rather than going from the Google Play Store, you could potentially install this piece of malware.

Correct. And apparently it’s really nasty on old versions of Android too. So as I say, it’s an Indonesian flavour of malware.

And how it works is, you don’t go through the Google Play Store — you’re likely to get this sent to you by phishing or through socially engineered messages.

Again, through WhatsApp and Telegram.

And once you install it, the malware asks for permissions to use your accessibility services, and then once it’s got that, it pretty much has control of everything it needs to compromise your device.

And then in typical malware style, it pings to a command and control infrastructure, sends the data of the victim back to its location, and then it starts going rogue.

It starts everything that’s in a cybersecurity textbook.

You know, as I say, remote control, locks your screen, collects all your passwords, especially one-time passwords if you get SMS messages through there, everything.

But what is a bridge too far in this case is it’s also got something called harassment features.

So if your day wasn’t rude enough about your phone getting locked and full of malware and ransomware, they actually added in — and this is an actual line of code, it’s literally called this — jump scare.

Not like in horror movies, jump scare. So they know exactly what they’re doing — it’s literally a line of code called jump scare.

And for an extra bit of spice in your awful day of getting your phone owned, they send you rapid full-screen videos and images, and they even use text-to-speech messages played through the device’s speakers, screaming at you, shouting at you.

So this isn’t just your typical malware strain. For me, it’s a reminder that the Android ecosystem is a bit like the devil’s playground, really.

I mean, if you’re going to sideload random apps from places like Telegram, then you’re basically the cybersecurity equivalent of getting a drink from someone called Kevlar Dave in a nightclub that you’ve never met before.

So the piece of advice to avoid this is to make sure you have an updated operating system, because as I say, the old ones are hit hardest, which is just true to life, I think.

Basically, don’t install random crap from Telegram.

Yeah. So this jump scare, which it displays — I imagine that isn’t something which happens while it’s stealing your data. That’s after they’ve encrypted you.

This is an extra inducement to pay the ransom, I imagine. It’s like, my phone has gone completely haywire.

It would scare the crap out of me. Yes. It happens afterwards.

So once they’ve done all the little cyber hacking in the background, they decided to go one up and start turning your device into a haunted device, I guess.

Yeah, it’ll be like it’s possessed.

Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely horrendous.

We need to get the Ouija board out and that little lady from Poltergeist to come and help.

Now, of course, some Android phones are notoriously worse at getting the latest updates to the Android operating system compared to others, aren’t they?

So if you’ve got a cheap phone which has been lying around for a few years, maybe it’s no longer supported.

But I don’t know about you, but I’ve worked with clients and Android devices are used in so many other things that are not just phones as well.

Like keypads at petrol stations and things like that. And they almost never get updated.

So all it would take would be for someone to install something similar on these devices and then it’s game over again.

This episode is supported by Vanta.

Joe, what’s the thing that keeps you up at 2 o’clock in the morning security-wise?

Honestly, whether I remembered to hit the record button. No, no, no.

I mean a real worry. Have I got the right controls in place? Can I actually trust my vendors?

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

Try this one for size. How do I ever climb out from under all these clunky old tools? Okay, fair enough.

That does sound scary.

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Joe, the record button, you definitely pressed it this time, right?

I thought it was you.

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

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 movie, a record, a podcast, a website, or an app. Whatever they wish.

It doesn’t have to be security-related necessarily.

Better not be.

Well, well, well, Lianne, I know you’re a cyber anthropologist, but are you also a vexillologist?

Well, I’m currently looking at the League of Lexicon game that we discussed as a previous pick of the week. That word is not in my vocabulary. Please explain.

Well, a vexillologist is someone who loves the study of flags.

All right. Okay.

And we have an international audience listening to Smashing Security. Certainly here in the UK, flags have become a bit of a hot topic.

A bit, yeah, it’s a bit controversial to have one out.

Yeah, well, yes, exactly. Some people are very keen on particular flags. Some people have even been termed as flag shaggers to indicate their love of flags.

Yeah, I find it so interesting when you speak to people from other countries, when you tell them that, it blows their mind, ’cause I think it’s quite unique to the UK, that.

It is a strange thing. Yeah, sometimes flags are great. Sometimes I will see a flag outside the window of a pub, and it’ll all be stripy and rainbow. And I think, well, that’s lovely.

Everyone loves a rainbow, don’t they?

Absolutely. There’s a nice flag, you know, blowing in the wind at a pub that says, no LG, you know, LG with a cross in it. And you’re not going to be welcomed in this pub.

Last night, I watched Last Night at the Proms on the BBC.

It’s lots of fun. Last night at the Proms, at one point, the magnificent tenor Nicky Spence, he unfurled his kilt mid-song to reveal—

To reveal what, Graham?

What did you reveal? To reveal the LGBTQ flag.

Right? And I thought, that’s great. So there we’ve got lots of flags, everyone having fun, music bringing everyone together. That’s all good in my mind.

But sometimes you can be baffled by a flag. Sometimes you see a flag and you say, what is that kind of flag? And that is where my pick of the week this week comes from.

It is a website called flaglookup.com. And what it does is it helps you identify flags, not by name, but by what they actually look like.

So you can search by a colour or a shape or a symbol. You can say, oh, it’s got a crescent or a circle or a stripe, and it will narrow things down for you.

Oh, that’s really good, actually. Yeah. Obviously, you can’t look up a flag name if you don’t know where it is.

Exactly. You’d have to look through hundreds and hundreds. So they’ve got basically all the flags of the world and all of the US states.

And by the way, some of the American states have got bonkers flags. They may have a sea lion perched on top of a tricycle or something.

I don’t know if you’re being serious or not.

It’s not that far off the truth. But anyway, flaglookup.com. It’s completely free. No one’s trying to sell you anything.

It’s a genuinely handy tool that sort of answers that problem where you go, well, whose flag is that? And then you can find out. And that is my pick of the week.

Lianne, what’s your pick of the week?

So, when murder cases go cold, we can always find a trusty nerd with AI to solve it, which is a phrase I think we’re going to be hearing a lot more of going forward.

Now, Graham, are you into your true crime?

Well, not—

Is it because you’re not a middle-aged woman? Is that what—

I think I’d rather have fictional crime than true crime. Sometimes I feel like it’s sort of glorifying and enjoying too much other people’s misery.

Well, welcome to my pick of the week. Well, all right. Okay.

Well, I do enjoy true crime, but what my pick of the week is going to be about is, everyone’s going gaga for OpenAI cracking that 92-year-old maths problem in less than 100 hours, right?

Well, my pick of the week explores Alex Barber and Michael Connelly as they show us the receipts using AI to solve a murder mystery that has been going on for decades.

And this mystery is where citizens detectives try to solve not one, but two of America’s famous cold cases, the Black Dahlia case and the Zodiac Killer.

Ah, they’re both famous, aren’t they? Yes.

Yes, yes. And this podcast called Killer in the Code is one of those really sharp, oh my God, I must continue to binge this kind of podcast.

It’s all about how they used AI to break these ciphers. Are you familiar with the Black Dahlia or Zodiac Killer cases?

So the Zodiac Killer, if I remember correctly, he was sending coded messages to the police.

Yeah. Taunting them in the ’60s.

So for years, people have been trying to decode them or try and work out the identity of who’s behind it. The Black Dahlia, I think that was from an earlier time.

So was that from the ’30s or the ’40s?

So the Black Dahlia was 1947, and that was Elizabeth Short. The Zodiac Killer worked in California — call it work, I don’t know.

Both acted in California as the Dahlia Killer was also in Los Angeles. It was really brutal and it remained unsolved.

But there’s been a lot of discussion and speculation about whether these are — yeah, yeah — because they have a very similar MO.

Now, some of the Zodiac Killer’s ciphers were cracked pretty quickly at the time during the ’60s.

But there was one big case, and when I was checking pick of the week for this to make sure no one else had had it on, you actually talked about this in a really old episode in 2020.

It was because one of the ciphers actually, decades later—

Had been cracked.

Had been cracked, yeah.

The Z340 cipher, or 340 cipher. But there’s one remaining, and it’s the Z13, because it’s only 13 characters long.

And basically, all the cipher cryptologist boffins have been scratching their heads for years saying, I don’t actually think this could be cracked, because it’s too short.

And it’s known as the My Name Is cipher, because the killer literally wrote, “my name is,” and then put the cipher in.

So if you crack this one, you’ve basically cracked the most notorious serial killer case ever.

The answer isn’t Slim Shady, is it?

It’s not, but I’m not going to reveal the answer. Because they say it’s uncrackable until now. And that’s what this podcast is about.

So they used AI to basically crack this cipher, but then used lots of investigation sources that weren’t used during the original investigation in the ’40s and the ’60s to make a very, very compelling case of who they think it is.

And it does suggest that the Black Dahlia killing and the Zodiac killing are by one and the same person. Unfortunately, that person has now passed away, so they can’t ask him.

Fortunately, he’s passed away.

Well, he doesn’t get brought to justice, does he?

I suppose not.

But what is really interesting, in one of the episodes, they go to the family and they show handwriting from the Zodiac Killer, and they’re like, that’s my dad’s handwriting.

So people who actually used to work in the FBI on this case when it was a live case, and then later on when it became a cold case, because you get allocated cold cases if you’ve not got enough work to do and things like that.

And they’re all saying, actually, the evidence is so compelling.

Compelling that this person is this person, and they think it’s now solved because they solved the cipher, and then all this other evidence combined that they found over the episodes, and it’s still ongoing.

Every week there’s something new coming out. The Zodiac Killer case might be solved along with the Black Dahlia murder.

And as I say, it’s my pick of the week because if you like true crime, if you like a mystery, if you like your tech, then you’re gonna love this podcast. It’s so bingeable.

It sounds really interesting. As with many things AI, I do tend to feel like there are good things AI can be used for, but do we want to trust it with everything?

And do we want people to rely upon it to solve crime? Maybe we do to an extent, but maybe we also want to be a bit careful not to trust it too much.

But by heck, it sounds like a hell of a story. And yeah, I’ll certainly be tuning in.

Well, yeah. So there is a question about, you know, is this guy just randomly pattern matching and just got lucky?

But with all the other evidence, and I would say the same, with all the other evidence though, it makes a very compelling argument.

And there’s a lot of people in that community, particularly the Zodiac Killer community, who have kind of written books about who they think it is.

They’re pretty cheesed off about this podcast. Like, well, that just blows all my suspects out the water.

And so they address actually these people coming forward saying, I don’t think it’s this person because of this and this and this. But then they go, boom, voiceover evidence.

So it’s really, really compelling.

Fantastic. Well, we’ve got some time right now to hear from an expert — we’re joined by Andy Hornegold. He is the Chief Security Technologist over at Intruder.

Andy, thank you very much for joining us today.

Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it.

Now, for anyone who hasn’t come across you before or Intruder, can you give me a quick summary of what Intruder does and who it’s for?

Yeah, absolutely. I’m the Chief Security Technologist at Intruder. Been at Intruder for five years, and my background is pretty heavily in the offensive security space.

So previously I was at Mandiant, where I was the EU Red Team Lead. Intruder’s mission is to essentially prevent breaches before they start.

We focus very heavily on that initial access side of things, where we’re trying to find weaknesses and exposures that may result in a breach, and we’re trying to help our customers solve those problems and remediate those risks as soon as possible.

So essentially reducing that window of opportunity for attackers down to zero seconds. I suppose the customers that we resonate most with are that mid-market space.

So mid-market, smaller customers. Pretty much the whole product has been built to service those kinds of businesses.

We try and make it as simple as possible so that you don’t need to be a cybersecurity expert to use Intruder and protect your business.

So you say that Intruder’s focused on this sort of mid-market space, medium-sized businesses.

What makes those kind of businesses more vulnerable than a larger enterprise, which may have a full security team?

It’s interesting.

We’ve published a little bit of research recently, and when it comes to risk, we seem to find that the large enterprises generally, on average, they’re fixing risk and exposures quicker than that mid-market.

And as you think about it, it kind of makes sense. You have more people able to shoulder the security burden, as it were. You have larger security teams, larger budgets.

But as we move more towards the mid-market, that’s not necessarily true.

Conversely, as well, if we think about small businesses — you know, one-person, two-person, five-person companies these days — traditionally they’re using cloud infrastructure, they’re using Git repositories, their application code is available.

And if you’re small, you’re able to act super quick as well, because you know your application, you know your business.

If you have some idea of what the risk is, you’re able to fix it and act on it really quickly.

But that mid-market has this almost bell curve where that time to fix increases, because I suppose you’re hustling, you’re trying to keep the business going.

You don’t have the same kind of budgets that enterprise customers have.

You don’t necessarily have the time and knowledge of the whole business that you would have done when you were a smaller business.

So you get this strange little increase in the middle where time to fix and potential exposure — they stay open for longer.

The interesting one as well, right, is that large enterprises historically, yes, they’re able to spend money on the security problem, but these days pretty much every organisation is pulling in data from smaller businesses.

They’re in the supply chain, right — they’re able to get in. And part of that is, how do you make sure that that supply chain is secure and those smaller businesses are secure?

Because frankly, if you’re a threat actor, it’s pretty cost prohibitive to go after these huge enterprises.

But the weaker underbelly is, can I hit that mid-market instead and find a way to pivot into the larger organisation? Or is there just more value in that mid-market?

And of course, these larger companies who are working with medium-sized companies and smaller businesses, they are demanding that those smaller companies do have decent cybersecurity.

Absolutely.

Otherwise, you’re simply not going to get the contract, are you?

Exactly. There are obviously the two driving forces — there are multiple, but there’s the compliance requirement, the regulatory requirement.

If you’re in any of those highly regulated fields, you’ll have a regulator breathing down your neck telling you we need you to make sure that all of this stuff is of a certain security threshold or risk threshold.

But then you’re absolutely right.

Those smaller businesses in that mid-market, usually the main driving force these days for people to start on their security journey is we need a contract over the line, and that customer that is potentially going to sign the contract has asked us for proof that we’re doing vulnerability management, attack surface management, exposure management, or at least the pen testing to prove that there is some level of security baked in.

Now, every time I go to a security conference or I give a talk, the one topic which keeps on coming up, the thing that everyone is talking about, is of course AI and how it is being used to power cyberattacks right now.

In plain terms, from your point of view, what’s actually changed for attackers this year?

Is it happening in the real world already from your point of view, or is it still more of a worry for the future?

It’s funny.

You can see from the Unit 42 — Palo Alto’s report recently — where they’ve shown that end-to-end exploitation from initial access to full ransomware in six hours, with seemingly almost no one in that loop, or at least someone being able to move at significant pace through that environment, has happened.

There’s also — I believe it was GTIG over at Google — a released review of an incident they investigated as well.

So I don’t think we can say that they’re going to get faster in the future — it’s certainly here, it’s certainly happening now — whether it’s as be-all and end-all and the world is ending and the foundations are crumbling, whether it’s that bad at the moment, I don’t necessarily think that’s the case, but we are definitely seeing those threat actors move quicker.

And over the last eight months, it’s definitely started to build up and become more of a thing.

And of course, AI isn’t just a tool for offence, it’s a tool for defence as well, which is a nice way to talk about something Intruder’s actually done about this.

You guys have just launched a tool that uses AI to test websites and apps for security holes the way a hired hacker would.

Can you talk me through what that actually does, what it can find that an older style automated scanner or even a real human tester might miss?

Yeah, absolutely. This whole topic is just fascinating. When we started off on the journey of building this AI pen testing approach, there was a lot of scepticism.

There was a lot of conversations internally within the company about how effective is this really going to be?

We’re using a non-deterministic machine to try and find vulnerabilities and weaknesses within these applications.

And the more we talked about it, the more we realised how much of that is really different from having one consultant, one year pen test your application, to a different consultant on the second year pen testing your application.

They’re going to have different approaches. Things are going to be slightly different.

So this whole topic is really fascinating where we’ve had conversations from people saying AI pen testing isn’t going to be as good as human-led pen testing.

Now, I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think there are differences between the two.

And as AI progresses, as these services become more established, I think that day-to-day or almost routine pen testing that happens of things like web applications is going to be handed over to more AI-led pen testing so that human pen testers can focus more on the interesting cutting edge, the kind of things that require expertise, not just experience, to be able to validate and make sure there is an appropriate level of assurance in those environments.

But we’ve started essentially building this AI pen testing platform. It is no human in the loop.

We have obviously QA processes that sit outside of that cycle of pen testing, but the results we’re getting are pretty incredible.

And they’re pretty incredible because, A, the methodology we’ve taken has been more of a code-assisted approach. We’re not just doing uninformed traditional black box pen testing.

It is informed pen testing, which obviously means you’re able to find more vulnerabilities in the source code, and then you’re able to validate that those findings truly do exist or don’t exist by carrying out attacks against the live application.

So if you think about human pen testers, Graham, I don’t know about you, but when it came to doing code reviews historically as a consultant, code reviews were always the thing everybody shied away from.

Nobody in the consulting pool wanted to do it, right? And it’s because you have to learn 3 million lines of code to work out where there are potential attack vectors.

How does it all bolt together? That takes time. With a day rate from a consultant, it can take a serious amount of money as well.

But the way models work these days is you can very easily scale up hundreds of agents to fully ingest 3.1 million lines of code, and it can draw those attack paths and those attack vectors through the source code significantly quicker and more effectively than giving a human who is unindoctrinated into your codebase, just dumping it in their lap and being like, find all of the vulns and off you go.

So we’re finding that actually the results we’re getting are incredible.

They’re really cool because we’ve had people who have been doing pen testing annually for every year for maybe 5, 6, 7 years. Now, obviously we support that mid-market.

We have a long tail of customers who are on the smaller side of things, so they aren’t going to the full security process that maybe an enterprise customer is.

But what we’re finding is hundreds of vulnerabilities that have been sat in those code bases for years.

That’s mostly because of the methodology we take, which is the white box approach. So we can find more of those vulnerabilities in a shorter timeframe.

We then validate them against the real live application, so you reduce any hallucination or false positives.

That’s what I was interested in, because I was thinking a security test is only as useful as how accurate it is, right?

So you’re not just dumping a great big pile of maybe real, maybe fake hallucinated issues onto the team to go and explore.

Yeah, absolutely. We obviously benchmark our whole platform against an eval suite, which allows us to validate any changes we make.

We are either increasing accuracy or recall to allow us to essentially progress rather than fall back to potentially worse results.

Now, we do run the frontier models just without any of the harness that we have, because we want to validate and make sure that the pen test that we’re delivering is providing better results than, say, a customer just running their chosen coding agent across their code base to be able to find vulnerabilities.

And you’re absolutely right.

When you just run those agents across your code base without the validation step, you do find a huge number of false positives and you’ll find people inundated with things that don’t exist.

That’s reassuring on the accuracy side, but there’s also a trust question, isn’t there?

Whenever you let a piece of software loose testing a live real-world system, is it actually as safe to let an AI do this kind of security testing as it is to have a trained person do it?

It’s one that we battle with. It’s a constant debate, I think, within security, but also within Intruder ourselves.

I think historically human pen testing has never been low risk, right? I’m a pen tester. I could have all of the expertise in the world, all of the experience in the world.

I’ll run one command or I’ll try one injection payload that I think is benign, or I think is not going to have an adverse effect on the target that I’m testing.

But there is some weird logic in the background, and suddenly the entire system goes offline. And it happens. It’s happened to me.

It’s happened to a bunch of people that I used to work with. But you have controls in place to make sure that any impact during that human-led pen test is minimised, right?

You take backups, you test in a staging environment or something that is very similar to production, but isn’t actually a production environment.

You’re able to restore from any backups.

You make sure the data is clean, and you keep a track of everything that you may have changed as a pen tester, and you present that to the customer at the end.

All of those risk controls are still valid for AI pen testing.

So this question of trust, it actually connects to something bigger, which happened back in June this year, right?

We saw the US government, for a short while, force Anthropic, who make the Claude models, to switch off their most advanced AI for everyone practically overnight.

It was no longer there, over a security concern. Now that only lasted a few weeks before it was resolved, but it’s the kind of thing that is clearly concerning.

Now, is that something which makes you nervous? Are you beginning to look at other options when it comes to AI models?

I think nervous is probably the right word to potentially use. At Intruder, we benchmark different models to try and work out which one’s going to give us the best results.

Claude is obviously one of those. I think it would be crazy of us not to include Claude in that process.

And absolutely, when we saw the export controls come into force, very reminiscent of old school cybersecurity days, it brought a whole bunch of concerns up for us.

How do we build a product and a business around that product if one of the suppliers that we’re using is able to just switch off under the hood anything that we put out to customers?

How does that impact running pen tests? How does that impact ongoing contracts that we have with customers? So it’s been an ongoing concern for us about how we address that.

Now, the Frontier models are still excellent. They are able to produce results that are incredible, and we’re going to continue to use.

But it would be remiss of us if we did not have some level of risk management involved, which is where we are starting to look at those other models.

Are there open weight models that are out there that allow us to hedge our bets, essentially? If those models go off overnight, can we fall back on open weight models instead?

It is worth mentioning as well, actually, the pen testing results we’re seeing under the hood — we haven’t been using Fable or Mythos.

Actually, the older Opus models are still incredibly effective at finding vulnerabilities. So yeah, that’s the balance that we’ve been trying to find.

Can you foresee yourself maybe in the future using a Chinese-made AI model in your security product, or would that raise concerns?

I’m not going to rule it out entirely. I don’t think it would be appropriate to say a hard no, that’s never going to happen.

I think if those models are as effective — and I suppose what would be important to note is I’m not sure we would be sending data to Chinese AI houses.

I’m not sure that’s something we are going to be willing to do as a UK-based company with a predominant US customer base.

But anything that is open weight that we’re able to set up ourselves, that we’re able to run ourselves on our own infrastructure, that would be something we’d likely investigate.

We’re both here in the UK at the moment.

The UK government has put something like, I think, £500 million they’re talking about into a homegrown AI as a kind of alternative to allay some of these fears.

Is that enough or is that just a token gesture? No pun intended.

I love it. So there’s the Sovereign AI Fund that was launched, I believe, back in April in the UK to try and build or help the UK have some footing in the AI race.

And there’s two sides to it. One, the fact that the UK government has stepped in and done anything at all is positive — I think it’s a good step.

But to your question, is it enough? I’m not sure it is.

At the moment, there is availability for compute, there is the £500 million available for the AI space, but there is more that we could be doing.

I think we’re already pretty far behind when it comes to the race against the US. And particularly US and China, but also Europe are pulling ahead as well.

And I’m still very fond and I would still consider European models as being something that is worth the UK being involved in as well.

So I believe there’s more that we could be doing.

It seems to me like AI cuts both ways in cybersecurity. It can genuinely help the good guys, but it can also make life easier for the attackers too.

What side of that fence would you fall on, do you think?

I think the answer is probably that AI is here and it’s going to be used by both sides. It is a tool that is going to be wielded by the good guys and the bad guys alike.

Anything that helps people do what they need to more efficiently, I think they’re going to lean on.

I think as we start to see attacks speed up, and attackers have a kind of asymmetric benefit to using AI and being able to use them in their attacks, in that as an attacker, I don’t really care about contractual obligations and terms of services, right?

As a defender, my business is running on this model. I have a lot invested.

I need to make sure that I’m not going to have my organisation banned overnight by trying to bypass safety.

And that’s kind of what we’ve seen in the defensive operations side of things, is that as an attacker, I can try and bypass safeguards and use those AI models to exploit organisations faster, more effectively.

But as a defender, I’ll get blocked because I hit a safeguard when I’m trying to defend against an AI-enabled attacker.

So it feels like there’s some asymmetry there between the good guys and the bad guys.

But when it comes to the defensive side of things, there’s a huge benefit that you can have as a defender.

The cost of pen testing now, of the ability to find risk and exposures within those web apps, has crashed.

It is becoming cheaper and more affordable to find risk more effectively, more quickly, more consistently.

We’ve seen people running pen tests once a year, right? And for decades we’ve been saying one pen test a year isn’t enough, right? It needs to be continuous.

But it feels like we’re potentially finally there. AI does seem to be the linchpin to that answer of: can I do continuous security validation?

Can I find risk more continuously, more effectively, and with the same level, or at least almost equivalent level of reasoning and understanding and context that I would get from a human?

And finally, I feel like we probably are.

I feel like that AI-led pen testing is finding more stuff more quickly, and it can be leveraged for good to hopefully make the internet a safer place.

Well, that is a great note to end on.

And listeners, you can learn more about Intruder or even start your own AI pen test in minutes. All you have to do is visit intruder.io/smashing. That’s intruder.io/smashing.

And as a Smashing Security listener, you can save 25% off your first pen test by using the code SMASHING25. Andy Hornegold, Chief Security Technology Officer.

Thanks, Graham.

Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been really interesting, and we appreciate you coming on the show.

Thank you very much for having me, Graham. It’s been a pleasure.

Well, that just about wraps up the show for this week. Thank you so much, Lianne, for joining us.

I’m sure lots of our listeners would love to find out what you’re up to and follow you online. What’s the best way to do that?

I’m on LinkedIn, so you can find me under Lianne Potter, or you can listen to my Yorkshire tones on either Compromising Positions podcast — do type in that full thing.

Don’t just type in compromising positions on the internet. And Tech Phil Noir, where you can look up the Memotech and see what Graham’s talking about.

I’m really pleased that I’ve actually met someone who’s had that computer. It’s really awesome.

And of course, you can find me, Graham Cluley, on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, Instagram, and the Tok of Tik. The list goes on and on.

Or you can follow Smashing Security on Reddit, Bluesky, and Mastodon.

And don’t forget, to ensure you never miss another episode, make sure to follow Smashing Security in your favourite podcast apps such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Pocket Casts.

For episode show notes, sponsorship info, guest lists, and the entire back catalogue of over 480 episodes, check out smashingsecurity.com. Until next time, cheerio. Bye-bye.

You’ve been listening to Smashing Security with me, Graham Cluley, and massive thanks to Lianne Potter for joining me this week, and to Andy Hornegold for popping by as well, and to this week’s sponsors ThreatLocker, Intruder, and Vanta, whose cash we’ve pocketed with tremendous glee and only the faintest trace of guilt.

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