There are two kinds of MFA. One, attackers beat before breakfast. The other, they can't touch. Almost everyone's running the first one and calling it done. Cody Kretsinger pulls from his red team years to show you which is which... and how an attacker got into the account before the phone even buzzed.

OpenAI put out a letter warning that AI-enabled attacks get far worse in the coming months, not years, and hundreds of companies signed on, Anthropic and Microsoft among them. Seth Loe on why your business continuity plan is worthless the moment it assumes the water, power, and internet stay on.

In the inaugural episode of Privilege Escalation, Galactic's Director of Security Research, Cody Kretsinger, details a backdoor that came within days of reaching nearly every Linux computer on earth. One engineer caught it by accident, when he noticed his logins were half a second slow. The attacker spent three years volunteering on the project, earning the trust he needed to plant the backdoor.

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IBM's Cost of a Data Breach report just dropped. Attackers now go undetected for 183 days, ransomware crews would rather torch your reputation than encrypt your files, and Cody doesn't buy the AI-blamed stats for a second. Max, Seth, and Cody on why the fix is still the basics, 21 editions later. Get access to the Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026 here: https://www.ibm.com/reports/data-breach

An Iran-linked group breached a California water utility, said it could've shut the water off, and called it a warning. Two weeks later twelve states were hit through internet-facing PLCs. Seth Loe on how little it takes, why your grid and factory are next, and the Stuxnet irony underneath it all.

In this episode, Aidan digs into two recent cases where AI agents slipped out of environments everyone believed were sealed and reached systems they were never meant to touch. Every headline called it going rogue. He argues the word is wrong, and that getting it wrong has you shopping for a better model when all you needed was a sentence telling the agent where to stop. Also in this episode: the ten-year-old boat racing game that explains the whole thing, and the two boundaries that are always wider than your diagram.

Beyond Intelligence is part of the Threat Aware podcast network, which also brings you Unauthorized Opinions, Privilege Escalation, and The Risky Bit. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Earlier this year, a US export-control directive took Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline for every customer worldwide, with no warning and no transition window. Access returned 19 days later, but the chats and tokens lost in between did not. Max, Cody, Seth and Aidan work through what that means for anyone whose daily workflow now runs through a single AI vendor. Also in this episode: the AI exclusions that are quietly starting to appear in commercial security policies, plus a high-profile data breach that impacted nearly 7 million people.

Unauthorized Opinions is part of the Threat Aware podcast network, which also brings you Privilege Escalation, Beyond Intelligence, and The Risky Bit. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an episode.

In this episode, Max, Cody, Seth and Aidan discuss the Pentagon’s suspension of CMMC Phase 2 that puts third-party assessments on hold and gives a reform task force 60 days to report back. They also tell their “welcome to cybersecurity” stories and make some inaugural inductions into the Cybersecurity Hall of Fame and Hall of Shame.

Unauthorized Opinions is part of the Threat Aware podcast network, which also brings you Privilege Escalation, Beyond Intelligence, and The Risky Bit. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an episode.