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Cybersecurity guru Steve Gibson joins Leo Laporte every Tuesday. Steve and Leo break down the latest cybercrime and hacking stories, offering a deep understanding of what's happening and how to protect yourself and your business. Security Now is a must listen for security professionals every week.

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New episodes every Tuesday.

Updated: 1 day 36 min ago

SN 1095: AI-Driven Expertise Loss - Gemini, Hugging Face, and the AI Arms Race

Tue, 09/08/2026 - 10:14pm

OpenAI's latest advances have the rumor mill buzzing about "hidden thoughts" and unsupervisable models, but are AI safety experts panicking over the wrong threat? Get the clear-headed take behind the headlines.

  • We start out with a classic old school hack against Dropbox.
  • Next Patch Tuesday will be enabling "Memory Integrity" for many.
  • Firefox moved to 155 and obtained a dumb Smart Window.
  • CISA is terminating 6 most valuable cybersecurity services.
  • OpenAI advanced to topof the heap with GPT-6 Astra.
  • But... is it now hiding some of its thinking from monitoring?
  • Nvidia is acquiring Hugging Face. Who's that good for?
  • Google releases Gemini 3.8 Flash and Cyber. Is it good?
  • Chinese cyberespionage is using AI to become more slippery.
  • Matthew Green proposes a fascinating take on AI bug drought.
  • A lifelong safety engineer contemplates AI-driven loss of expertise.

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1095-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.

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Categories: Security Now

SN 1094: AI Patching Shortcomings - Should You Trust AI-Generated Code?

Tue, 09/01/2026 - 10:10pm

AI-generated code is flooding the industry, but researchers reveal that almost half of it contains critical vulnerabilities. This week, we unpack what happens when the race for automation outpaces security best practices.

  • A possible means for preventing prompt injection abuse.
  • Clear evidence of Chinese-made router malicious intent.
  • A cool before and after SpinRite graph of SSD performance.
  • How about adding unpredictable hashes to role tags?
  • What did Claude make of last week's podcast?
  • Could much better harnesses prevent prompt injection?
  • A listener wants us to stop saying AI "thinks".
  • AI designers ignore well-understood security concepts.
  • Can we explain LLM AI using conventional computer terms?
  • A listener strongly dislikes the term "rotating credentials".
  • The land of AI is being filled with "meat proxies".
  • Researchers exhaustively test frontier model vulnerability remediation. (hint: It does not go well.)

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1094-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.

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SN 1093: Tokens in the Stream - Why LLMs are inherently insecure and prompt injection will persist

Tue, 08/25/2026 - 10:57pm

Turns out, every chatbot conversation runs on a messy hack at the heart of language models, making prompt injection an unsolved—and possibly unsolvable—security threat. Steve and Leo unravel the research that explains why "roles" in AI aren't what you think they are.

  • Understanding the controversy surrounding "AI Model Distillation"
  • Anthropic moves to make their most powerful Mythos 5 model more widely available.
  • Bitwarden's "Secrets Manager" offering prevents agentic and prompt injection abuse.
  • The astounding and disturbing truth about the way conversation AI actually works

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1093-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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Categories: Security Now

SN 1092: Restraint Abliteration - Rotating Keys, Broken Guardrails

Tue, 08/18/2026 - 10:40pm

From autocorrect to full-fledged conversationalists, discover how a few tweaks transformed language models—and why understanding this shift exposes urgent questions about AI safety and control.

  • Trusting an open source AI proxy might bite you.
  • France's under-15 social media ban hits its constitution.
  • A bit of AI prompting found a serious bug in Zoom.
  • AI-based network defenders see a stock price jump.
  • A (very) deep dive into the operation of AI chatbots

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1092-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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Categories: Security Now