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Three Buddy Problem

Security Conversations

The Three Buddy Problem is a popular Security Conversations podcast that goes beyond industry talking points to discuss what others won’t -- nation-state malware, attribution, cyberwar, ethics, privacy, and the messy realities of securing computers and corporate networks. Hosted by three veteran security pros -- journalist Ryan Naraine and malware paleontologists Costin Raiu and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade -- the weekly show attracts a highly engaged audience of security researchers, corporate defenders, CISOs, and policymakers. Connect with Ryan on Twitter (Open DMs).

  • 235 episodes
  • Updated Friday

Episodes235

  • Friday · 3 hr 26 min

    Proofpoint's Greg Lesnewich on Laundry Bear, ‘Half-Click’ Exploits, and Magnets of Threats

    (Presented by Thinkst Canary. Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With zero admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 107: Proofpoint's Greg Lesnewich joins the show to break down Laundry Bear, t

  • July 28 · 34 min

    Validin's Kenneth Kinion on What Separates Useful Threat Intel From Noise

    Security Conversations: Kenneth Kinion, founder and CEO of Validin, joins Ryan Naraine on the show to unpack what "internet intelligence" really means for the analysts and responders chasing malicious infrastructure. We trace his path from Georgia Tech through Microsoft and Amazon to the frustrations that led to the creation of Validin, the competition from big AI, the value of AI-powered tools to speed up infrastructure hunting, and why defenders keep falling further behind fast-moving attacke

  • July 23 · 2 hr 16 min

    OpenAI's models breached Hugging Face, reward hacking ethics, benchmarking fast16

    (Presented by Thinkst Canary. Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With zero admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 106: We dig into the news that OpenAI's models were the "autonomous agent" th

  • July 18 · 2 hr 7 min

    Hugging Face Just Got Hit by the First Fully Autonomous AI Attack

    (Presented by Thinkst Canary. Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With 0 admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 105: We discuss a fascinating Hugging Face breach, where an autonomous AI agent

  • July 4 · 1 hr 36 min

    Microsoft's Secret Weapon: The GDID That Caught 'Scattered Spider' Teen

    (Presented by Thinkst Canary. Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With 0 admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 104: We discuss the return of Anthropic's Fable 5 from export-control suspensio

  • June 29 · 1 hr 53 min

    US Gov Takes the Wheel: Who Gets to Use the Best AI?

    (Presented by Thinkst Canary. Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With 0 admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.) Three Buddy Problem - Episode 103: We dive into the U.S. government's takeover of frontier-model rollouts (Myt

  • June 19 · 1 hr 38 min

    Katie Moussouris on the Anthropic Export-Control Mess

    (Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals). Three Buddy Problem - Episode 102: Software export controls expert Katie Moussouris joins the show to unpack the US government's abrupt move to suspend access to Anthropic's most powerful models over a so-called "jailbreak" that, on reading the paper, turned out to be a model doing exactly what defenders are supposed to do.

  • June 12 · 1 hr 59 min

    Mythos, Fable, and Anthropic's Big Trust Problem

    (Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals). Three Buddy Problem - Episode 101: We discuss Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5 release and the bombshell that the company was silently downgrading paid users' results, sparking a heated debate over guardrails, gatekeeping, and whether elite AI reasoning is becoming a privilege for the few. Plus, AI-generated N-day

  • June 5 · 2 hr 24 min

    Fast16, Fanny, and Stuxnet: Cyber Paleontology Redux

    (Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals). Three Buddy Problem - Episode 100: We cover AI eating reverse engineering, the death of the malware report, running local models on the DGX Spark, where Google DeepMind stands, and whether the frontier labs will stay in cybersecurity. Plus, more on Anthropic's Mythos rollout and the thinly sourced Anthropic-NSA reports,

  • May 30 · 1 hr 59 min

    Microsoft Threatens Vuln Researchers; Shadow Brokers Revisited

    (Presented by Ent.ai: Ent delivers intent-aware security that protects every action, adapts to every workflow, and works for every user. Enterprise threat detection, reimagined.). Three Buddy Problem - Episode 99: Microsoft is now threatening legal action against researchers who drop zero-days. We debate whether it's a fair line against extortion, or amateur-hour PR from a company that already torched its own research community? Costin plays reluctant defender, JAGS says the damage was done yea

  • May 27 · 40 min

    Aaron Portnoy on Pwn2Own, the End of Easy Bugs, and AI-Fueled Offense

    (Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals). Three Buddy Problem x Ekoparty Miami: Aaron Portnoy (Zero Day Initiative alum, early Pwn2Own organizer, and now at Mindgard) joins us at Ekoparty Miami to reminisce on the early days of the hacking contest, where vulnerabilities actually live (the boundaries between systems, not inside them), why LLMs will take out the tras

  • May 26 · 40 min

    Perri Adams on Proof Engines, LLMs, and the New Era of Verifiable Code

    (Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals). Three Buddy Problem x Ekoparty Miami: Perri Adams of DARPA AIxCC fame joins the show to chat about proof engines, formal methods, and why LLMs just made a once-niche corner of computer science suddenly essential. We get into why verifiers and proof engines are the key to effective AI, why vulnerability research is so far

  • May 26 · 49 min

    Find 50,000 Bugs, Fix Zero: Gabriel Bernadett-Shapiro on the AI Vuln Trap

    (Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals). Three Buddy Problem x Ekoparty Miami: SentinelLabs researcher Gabriel Bernadett-Shapiro hops on the mic to unpack who gets to define what "security" even means in the age of AI, why venture capital keeps funding the wrong things, and how the frontier labs quietly ate everyone's coding harness. Plus, how AI actually contrib

  • May 25 · 58 min

    Federico Kirschbaum on XBOW, AI Hackers, and the Future of Pen Testing

    (Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals). Three Buddy Problem x Ekoparty Miami: Federico Kirschbaum, founder of Ekoparty and now head of Security Lab at XBOW, talks about what happens to offensive security when an autonomous AI hacker can find and exploit real vulnerabilities. Fede walks through XBOW's "Tales from the Trace," the surreal experience of watching a no

  • May 24 · 44 min

    Jordan Wiens on AI, Offense vs. Defense, and the Dying CTF Pipeline

    (Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals). Three Buddy Problem x Ekoparty Miami: Jordan Wiens, co-founder of Vector 35 and creator of Binary Ninja, talks about a decade spent building a decompiler in a market everyone told him not to enter. He walks through why accessibility drove the whole project, how Binja's intermediate-language system stacks up against IDA, Ghi

  • May 15 · 1 hr 50 min

    The AI-powered 10x patch tsunami has arrived. Now what?

    (Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals). Three Buddy Problem - Episode 98: We dive back into the fast16 malware discovery with fresh speculation that it's targeting spherical implosion simulations for Iran's nuclear program, and wonder who on earth is qualified to confirm this. Plus, thoughts on OpenAI's new three-tier cyber access program, Microsoft's MDASH har

  • May 10 · 2 hr 2 min

    The disappointing death of big-game APT reporting

    (Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals). Three Buddy Problem - Episode 97: We discuss the disappearing art of Windows APT paleontology, the absence of complex malware documentation, and why so much threat-intel research has slipped behind paywalls and into private rooms. Plus, a surge in AI-discovered bugs in Firefox and Chrome, a rough week for Linux security f

  • May 1 · 1 hr 47 min

    Cracking the Fast16 sabotage malware mystery

    (Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals). Three Buddy Problem - Episode 96: We're joined by WIRED writer Andy Greenberg to dig into SentinelLabs' bombshell FAST16 research, a newly deciphered piece of sabotage malware that predates Stuxnet by five years and quietly tampered with physics modeling software likely tied to Iran's nuclear program. We discuss the attri

  • April 24 · 2 hr 2 min

    Mark Dowd on AI hacking, exploit chains, zero-day sales

    (Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals). Three Buddy Problem - Episode 95: Vigilant Labs director Mark Dowd joins the show to shed light on the state of offensive research, the economics of the exploit market, and why "Mark Dowd in a box" isn't quite the threat the AI hype machine suggests. He talks through the daily stresses of running an offensive shop, how AI

  • April 18 · 2 hr 35 min

    The Angry Spark APT Mystery: A Year-Long Backdoor, One Victim, Zero Attribution

    (Presented by TLPBLACK: A cybersecurity intelligence platform focused on sharing curated, high-sensitivity threat insights and research with trusted security professionals). Three Buddy Problem - Episode 94: We discuss a mysterious, VM-obfuscated backdoor that lived undetected on a single U.K. machine for a year before disappearing, finding clues pointing to an elite-level APT intrusion that still evades broader industry coverage. Plus, connecting the dots across AI-driven vulnerability disco