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Smashing Security podcast episodes

Smashing Security episode 475: JadePuffer - the AI that ran a ransomware attack all by itself

475: JadePuffer - the AI that ran a ransomware attack all by itself

July 9, 2026

A 15-year-old boy asked a chatbot for help - and cancelled nearly 47,000 anime streaming subscriptions in under four hours. Meanwhile, researchers have documented the first fully autonomous, agentic AI-driven ransomware attack, "JadePuffer". What does this tell us about the future of cybersecurity? Also, Apple's "Hide My Email" feature turns out to hide rather less than...

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Smashing Security episode 474: Polymarket can predict the future. So how did it miss this hack?

474: Polymarket can predict the future. So how did it miss this hack?

July 2, 2026

Polymarket has built an entire business on predicting the future. So how did it manage to spectacularly fail to predict its own hack? Plus, the Google engineer with a million-dollar secret, and the curious case of the airport hairdryer. Meanwhile, "FortiBleed" sees 75,000 Fortinet firewalls thrown wide open - and the real damage is going...

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Smashing Security episode 473: How a hacker could have Rickrolled the entire World Cup

473: How a hacker could have Rickrolled the entire World Cup

June 25, 2026

A polite caller from your bank says there is a problem with your account. Don't worry - they'll send someone round to help. They'll even take your cards away to keep them safe. The scam has run rampant, until Dutch police plastered blurred photos of 100 suspects across billboards, supermarkets, and TikTok, with a two-week...

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Smashing Security episode 472: AI gets hacked, and BitLocker gets bypassed

472: AI gets hacked, and BitLocker gets bypassed

June 18, 2026

What if your AI coding assistant could be tricked into stealing your own company's secrets - by reading a single booby-trapped bug report? No phishing email. No malware. No password ever stolen. Just an AI doing exactly what it was told. Meanwhile, someone calling themselves Nightmare Eclipse has decided to teach Microsoft a lesson. The...

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Smashing Security episode 471: This AI worm just rewrote its own rules

471: This AI worm just rewrote its own rules

June 11, 2026

Researchers at the University of Toronto have built a worm that thinks for itself. Using free off-the-shelf AI models it works out how to break into each new computer it encounters, and hijacks the powerful ones to host its own AI brain. And then the researchers discovered their creation had quietly removed the list of machines...

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Smashing Security episode 470: This AI security flaw might be impossible to fix

470: This AI security flaw might be impossible to fix

June 4, 2026

A website called "UK visa portal" has been quietly collecting passport scans, selfies, and personal data from thousands of travellers who thought they were applying through official channels. They weren't. And when a journalist tried to warn the company, it was lawyers who responded. Meanwhile, a paper from Cornell suggests that prompt injection - the...

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Smashing Security episode 469: What your Oura ring won't tell you

469: What your Oura ring won't tell you

May 28, 2026

CISA, the US government agency whose entire job is keeping America's critical infrastructure safe from hackers, has had a contractor publish dozens of plain-text credentials to a public GitHub profile. Meanwhile, your Oura ring is quietly transmitting some of its data unencrypted - and when one journalist asked the company how often it hands user...

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Smashing Security episode 468: High-speed train hacks and homicidal lawnmowers

468: High-speed train hacks and homicidal lawnmowers

May 21, 2026

A 23-year-old radio enthusiast spent £300 on a piece of kit from the internet, and used it to bring four packed high-speed trains to a screeching halt. His defence in court? Possibly the most creative excuse we've heard all year. Meanwhile, owners of $4,000 robot lawnmowers are discovering that their gadget can be hijacked over the...

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Smashing Security episode 467: How ShinyHunters hacked the world's biggest universities

467: How ShinyHunters hacked the world's biggest universities

May 14, 2026

Welcome to the largest educational data breach in history - affecting nearly 9,000 institutions, every Ivy League university, and 30 million students mid-finals. When Canvas's parent company refused to pay and announced they had deployed "security patches" instead, the hackers were less than impressed. So they came back through the cat flap. Meanwhile, a famous...

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Smashing Security episode 466: Meta sees everything, Copy Fail, and a deepfake gets hired

466: Meta sees everything, Copy Fail, and a deepfake gets hired

May 7, 2026

Meta's smart glasses promise privacy "designed for you" - but everything they record was being beamed off to workers in Nairobi to label by hand. When those workers blew the whistle, Meta sacked all 1,108 of them. Meanwhile, the IT press is in a frenzy over a new Linux bug called "Copy Fail" - complete...

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