What happens when a 27-year-old gets handed the keys to completely refactor nearly all of Cisco's code? This week's episode dives into tech's strangest management bets and the friction brewing inside one of the industry's giants.

• Cisco gives a 27-year old the task of recoding 98% of their software with AI.
• A serious but not earth shaking vulnerability found in PXE booting.
• The largest ($6.3 BILLION) financial heist in history (with crypto).
• 710 Polymarket gambling wallets emptied of $2.7 million.
• A new robots.txt control for AI bots, and agreement to obey it.
• Google generates haiku from the first orbital AI.
• From our listeners: Does stealth updating make sense, how to move web servers off the Internet, books don't contain knowledge, a small company attacked by powerful AI, how would an "AI kill switch" be implemented.
• Another new and worrisome application of reverse-engineering AI

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1103-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Mikah Sargent

Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now.

You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page.

For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

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With millions racing to embrace AI assistants and cybercriminals pivoting to new, high-stakes tactics, the episode tackles the dizzying pace of change and asks: just how worried should we be? The discussion pulls back the curtain on AI's unpredictable power, the escalation of digital extortion, and why the next breach may hit closer to home than you think.

• Muse has a bad 0-day
• The regularity of "Irregular"
• More rogue OpenAI breaches
• The Seven Deadly Sins (TSDS) hacker group
• Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) cargo ship hacked
• The FBI offended ShinyHunters's delicate sensibilities
• Canonical switches to an every–2-weeks release cadence
• Axios' AI 101: AI Explainer for normal people
• How worried should we be?

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1098-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now.

You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page.

For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts!
Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit

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• originhq.com/securitynow
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• doppel.com

As AI becomes startlingly capable, top minds at OpenAI admit they can't always control what their own creations do—or even fully understand how they think. This episode dives into the real-world tension between rapid progress and the growing challenge of keeping AI truly aligned.

• GLM-5.3 can be and has been abliterated. What does that mean?
• Firefox 157 repairs a large number of high-impact vulnerabilities.
• A surprising reduction in RSA crypto strength has been discovered.
• Powerful agentic AI is being used to attack merchants.
• A new and potent Spectre-style processor attack has been designed.
• A neighbor falls victim to a Bitcoin scam. What can be done?
• A new and surprising use was found for GRC's DNS Benchmark.
• An examination of the growing alignment challenges created by more intelligent AI

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1099-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now.

You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page.

For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts!
Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Sponsors:

• guardsquare.com
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• threatlocker.com/twit
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• material.security

An unreleased AI solved a 26-year-old cryptographic secret in less than half an hour, exposing the origins of a widely used standard. Discover what this jaw-dropping breakthrough means for the future of trust and transparency in cybersecurity.

• Another record smashing Patch Tuesday.
• But again, all those updates were not without consequences.
• Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 reports on an agentic attack.
• A mass-compromised hardware cryptocurrency wallet attack.
• How to create your own known-safe crypto wallet.
• Feedback about AI, coding and SpinRite from a listener.
• What the reverse-engineering of the ECDSA curves means for security

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1101-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Mikah Sargent

Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now.

You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page.

For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts!
Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Sponsors:

• bitwarden.com/twit
• joindeleteme.com/twit-biz
• threatlocker.com/twit
• canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT
• guardsquare.com

A newly uncovered PHP vulnerability put nearly 70% of the internet at risk, sending governments and enterprises into a frenzy as AI-powered attackers raced to exploit a flaw that had lurked unnoticed for 14 years. Hear why this could be just the start of an unrelenting wave of security crises.

• We take a detailed look at the many facets and aspects of last week's wild PHP ride:
• What happened.
• How it happened.
• Why it happened.
• How it could have been prevented.
• How it impacted many of our listeners.
• We consider the implications of what is said to be coming next and the idea of temporary "strategic disconnection" from the Internet

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1102-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Steve Gibson

Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now.

You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page.

For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts!
Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Sponsors:

• threatlocker.com/twit
• doppel.com
• hoxhunt.com/securitynow
• originhq.com/securitynow
• material.security

After Microsoft's historic Mega Patch Tuesday, enterprise IT teams worldwide are scrambling as a wave of updates triggers system meltdowns, broken domains, and silent Excel failures. Find out how AI-driven speed collided with real-world chaos.

• Andrew Ng weighs-in on AI Doomsaying.
• The wisdom of outsourcing AI security testing.
• The true risk of an AI-created bioweapon.
• The EU KIDS Act -- this one is even messier.
• "Nightmare Eclipse" finally unmasks himself.
• A whitehat firm used Claude to attack OpenAI.
• Cisco's own massive 77 CVE update.
• What was the fallout from Sept's Patch Tuesday

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1097-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now.

You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page.

For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts!
Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Sponsors:

• trustedtech.team/twit
• hoxhunt.com/securitynow
• rayneo.com
• guardsquare.com
• threatlocker.com/twit
• outsystems.com/twit

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

Think your open-source AI model is safe? This episode uncovers how LLMs can be secretly booby-trapped with undetectable backdoors, raising the stakes for anyone deploying AI in serious environments.

• Anthropic cuts live Internet access during testing.
• Will LLM technology turn out to be an uncontrollable dead end?
• What alternative AI technologies are underway?
• Anthropic offers free AI vulnerability scanning for open source.
• South Korean banks hit by Claude-driven cyberattacks.
• Japan declares a state of cyber-emergency due to attacks.
• For one listener, agentic coding has taken the joy out of coding.
• A listener is having way too much fun with AI and Halloween.
• Some listeners believe I'm downplaying the dangers of AI.
• We carefully examine the consequences of maliciously trained AI

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1100-Notes.pdf

Sponsors:

• threatlocker.com/twit
• hoxhunt.com/securitynow
• originhq.com/securitynow
• trustedtech.team/twit

Are we charging toward a Krell-style catastrophe with AI, arming ourselves with incomprehensible power while missing the real risks lurking beneath the code?

• The full report on last week's nearly 1,000 Microsoft security fixes.
• Five months after its start, what's the status of Project Glasswing?
• Anthropic's rogue agent escape count reaches four incidents.
• Not to be outdone, OpenAI's count passes 10 and maybe as many as 23!
• Revisiting California's DROP compulsory data broker data deletion.
• Russian criminals get their hands on more than 153 million drivers license scans.
• "Skynet" is the wrong model for the end of the world. The right model is The Krell

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1096-Notes.pdf

Hosts: Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

Download or subscribe to Security Now at https://twit.tv/shows/security-now.

You can submit a question to Security Now at the GRC Feedback Page.

For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts!
Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit

Sponsors:

• trustedtech.team/twit
• joindeleteme.com/twit-biz
• bitwarden.com/twit
• material.security
• canary.tools/twit - use code: TWIT
• threatlocker.com/twit