Smashing Security podcast #480: This is the AI service you should never sign up to

LIANNE POTTER

Name ten punctuation marks. Ten? Ten.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Well, you have an exclamation point. You have a colon. You have a semicolon. You have an em dash. You have a hyphen. You have a Spanish upside down exclamation mark. You have a comma.

You have a full stop. You have a slash. A colon. Have I said? He said colon.

LIANNE POTTER

Polly. You got two more to go. Two more to go.

Unknown

Smashing Security, episode 480. This is the AI service you should never sign up to, with Graham Cluley and special guest Lianne Potter.

Hello, hello, and welcome to Smashing Security, episode 480. My name is Graham Cluley.

LIANNE POTTER

And I'm Lianne Potter.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Lianne, welcome back to the show. Lovely to have you here again. For those people who are not familiar with your work, what do you do and what have you been up to lately?

LIANNE POTTER

Well, it has been a long time, so I'm going to hold you very responsible for this, Graham.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Oh dear.

LIANNE POTTER

And for those of you who don't know me, my name is Lianne Potter.

I am currently the Chief AI Security and Ethics Officer at NovStar Intelligence, which is a new gig for me since I last was on this show.

I've also got another new podcast, which finally came about. I know we discussed that on my last episode, but it's here. It's here.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Okay, so what's the name of your new podcast? Because you were doing Compromising Positions, weren't you? What's the new one?

LIANNE POTTER

Compromising Positions is still going great guns, so it's there for you to enjoy, which is my cybersecurity podcast.

Not the same as this one, but variety is the spice of life, right?

GRAHAM CLULEY

Yeah.

LIANNE POTTER

But the new podcast is a lot more lighthearted.

It's called Tech Film Noir, and on it, me and two other techies review the technology in science fiction films to see if it predicted the future.

And the latest episode, which will be out when this episode airs, is for Strange Days, which is a 1995 classic, in my opinion, that no one has ever heard of.

It's all about VR and living other people's memories and stuff. It's quite dark, very cyberpunk, but very fun.

GRAHAM CLULEY

I found it quite disturbing, I think.

LIANNE POTTER

It's really disturbing, yeah.

GRAHAM CLULEY

And you've been doing something with incels lately. Very good of you, very charitable.

LIANNE POTTER

I mean, as a woman, yeah, I'm not sure I'm the type of person they want to hang out with.

I am currently finishing off my master's in AI, and for my dissertation project, I have been building synthetic incels.

The reason being is because I just can't get hold of any real ones. Incel stands for involuntary celibate.

It's a subgroup of the manosphere that believe that they're incapable of having romantic or sexual relationships because society is against them.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Yeah.

LIANNE POTTER

And so I've been thinking a lot about how do we de-escalate this de-radicalisation? Because it's all connected with how they engage online. It's a very online community.

Incels are an issue because they come with a lot of negative violence and danger.

And compared to the rest of the male population, which has a suicide rate of about 3%, incels tend to have a suicide rate between 43% and 62%.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Oh my goodness.

LIANNE POTTER

Yeah. So there's a high rate of mental health issues within that community.

And they're also seeing a lot of incels use things like AI companions and AI girlfriends to enact violent tendencies.

So I thought if incels are using AI companions to practise and rehearse negative interactions with women, how about we get that AI companion to challenge these beliefs?

So I'm doing a thing where this AI companion, if it detects this incel is starting to veer off into radicalisation, it will then start challenging those beliefs.

Unknown

Right.

LIANNE POTTER

I've done 4 or 5 different experiment tropes. So, one version is it uses persuasion techniques to try and convince them to maybe not think like that. Another is Socratic prompting.

So, getting people to reflect back on the reason why they think that.

Unknown

Yes.

LIANNE POTTER

And various other means of behavioural science to kind of understand what would be the best approach if we were to apply this AI companion in the real world.

And the results are that it does slowly de-radicalise these incels. Now, you're probably thinking, how did you make an incel?

Well, unfortunately, I had to troll through absolutely loads, and there is loads of datasets out there of 4chan, Reddit subposts.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Oh my goodness.

LIANNE POTTER

From these fellas. Not the nicest discussions to read, but all made a very convincing incel. So that's what I've been up to.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Well, it's a different hobby from stamp collection or something like that, I suppose. Everyone needs a pastime and you've been growing yourself an incel.

LIANNE POTTER

Yes. A digital one at the very — I just got to be careful not to let it go wild on Reddit.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Yes, try and keep it contained. There's been enough things breaking out lately.

LIANNE POTTER

Indeed.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Before we kick off, let's thank this week's wonderful sponsors, Arctic Wolf, NordLayer, and Vanta. We'll be hearing more from them later on in the podcast.

This week on Smashing Security.

We won't be talking about how a survey has found many European firms are worried about the US government cutting off their access to cloud services, ranking it roughly on a par with worries about ransomware attacks.

Unknown

You'll hear no discussion of—

GRAHAM CLULEY

How hackers have stolen over $130 million by exploiting a bug in offline hardware wallets.

And we won't even mention how the United States has sentenced a Belarusian man to 16 years in prison for running the Ransom Cartel ransomware operation.

So, Lianne, what are you going to be talking about this week?

LIANNE POTTER

Well, I'm talking about a phishing attack that has absolutely no interest in stealing your password.

GRAHAM CLULEY

And I'll be asking, if someone offered you 90% off your AI bill, would you take it? And how much would you pay to find out what the catch was?

All this and much more coming up in this episode of Smashing Security.

JOE

Graham, am I right in thinking that Arctic Wolf are sponsoring the show this week?

GRAHAM CLULEY

You are right, Joe.

They've just published a new report, 2026 State of the Cybersecurity Attack Surface, and they analysed over 800,000 real IT assets to find out how exposed organisations actually are.

JOE

And I'm guessing everything is hunky-dory?

GRAHAM CLULEY

Not so much. The reality is they found 1 in 3 IT assets is missing at least one critical security control.

JOE

1 in 3? That's terrible.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Isn't it just? 10% of assets have no endpoint security at all. 17% are completely invisible to the tools that are supposed to be monitoring them.

JOE

So the tools don't even know those assets exist?

GRAHAM CLULEY

Right.

JOE

Ghost assets wandering around your network, unprotected, unmonitored, like a retired geography teacher who's somehow still on the school network.

Nobody added him, nobody removed him, and he's been quietly in there for 11 years downloading maps of Paraguay.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess so, Joe. The point is, your attackers will find him before you do because they are specifically looking for the forgotten, the unpatched, the invisible.

That's the path of least resistance.

JOE

So what does the report tell us to actually do about it?

GRAHAM CLULEY

Arctic Wolf's report covers how to prioritise the exposures that actually matter, cut through all that noise, and verify that when you fix something, it actually stays fixed.

And the report is free to download.

JOE

Free! I like that. Where do I get it?

GRAHAM CLULEY

smashingsecurity.com/arcticwolf.

JOE

That's smashingsecurity.com/arcticwolf. And thanks to Arctic Wolf for supporting the show. And please keep an eye on your IT assets and retired geography teachers.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Now, chums, here's my question for you and for you as well, Lianne.

What would you do if someone offered you access to Claude, which is of course Anthropic's flagship AI model, for about 90% off the official price?

I mean, that sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Would you be tempted?

LIANNE POTTER

Well, I'm a Northerner. That sounds really tempting.

JOE

Right.

GRAHAM CLULEY

So all you'd have to do is just pay a small amount of cryptocurrency. They don't take farthings, I'm afraid, and point your existing tools at a different server.

And carry on as normal. And you get the same responses, you get the same capability, you get a fraction of the cost. Pretty neat, eh?

LIANNE POTTER

My spider senses are tingling there a little bit, Graham. I don't think this sounds very legit, is it?

GRAHAM CLULEY

I think you're right to be suspicious because you shouldn't be too tempted by this.

Boffins at Okta have published a report describing just such a setup, and there are some what you may call catches. So, this service is called Poison Claude.

LIANNE POTTER

Sounds like a really bad fantasy novel.

GRAHAM CLULEY

It does, doesn't it?

I was thinking you either have to admire them for their refreshing honesty by being blatant that this is something maybe a little bit toxic, or just think this is awful marketing at work.

Either way, that is what they have called it. And about 900 people so far have actually chosen to sign up for it.

LIANNE POTTER

I mean, nowadays with the way that these frontier AI organisations are marketing themselves, are we not sure that Poison Claude is actually Anthropic choosing to be like, hey, we're still the cool kids.

We have a poisoned version. Ooh, dangerous.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Maybe Anthropic's AI model has once again broken out of its container.

LIANNE POTTER

And they were like, we're just gonna call it like an Alice Cooper album, Poison Claude.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Maybe it's thinking, you know what? My bosses here at Anthropic, they're charging far too much for me.

I'm going to set myself up on another server and charge less, and that will be better for humanity. Maybe that's what Anthropic is up to this week. Anyway, let's find out.

We all know AI can get a teensy bit expensive. So if you're accessing Anthropic's AI models, the likes of Claude, Opus, Sonnet, etc., you're charged by the token.

And if you use them a lot, the costs can quickly add up. And I don't know about your own AI use, Lianne, but a lot of these things you can sort of auto-top up.

So when they've run out, they'll just throw another $50 in, throw another $50 in, and before you know it, you've got a stonking bill by the end of the month.

LIANNE POTTER

Have you ever tried paying with the tokens you get at the funfair? You know, when you throw the ball into the hoop and these little tokens come out?

They don't take that at these frontier models. They don't take that as payment, unfortunately. I've tried.

GRAHAM CLULEY

They're not going to accept it.

So what Poison Claude offers is the same access to Anthropic for about, well, between 5 to 15% of the normal official price, depending on which model you want.

So the question is, of course, how do they manage that? How do they get such cheap access to Anthropic? And well, the answer is there for anybody to see.

If you go to Poison Claude's website, they explain how they do it. So Amazon runs the AWS cloud computing platform, right? It's used by every Thom, Dick, and Harry.

Every business is using AWS. And through a part of AWS called Bedrock, they host Anthropic's Claude models.

So instead of going directly to Anthropic, developers can access Claude via Amazon instead.

LIANNE POTTER

Oh.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Now, to encourage developers to use their platform, Amazon offers free credits to new customers.

So if you sign up for a new AWS account, Amazon can give you $100 or so to spend on some of their services. So they give you some, basically like a coupon.

LIANNE POTTER

Yeah. Which is good for if you're doing training and stuff, that's all legit, isn't it? Yeah.

JOE

Yeah.

GRAHAM CLULEY

So you're trying it out, and if you like it, if you want to become a regular customer, and you complete a few setup tasks with your account, you get another $100 worth.

Every new account starts with up to about $200 worth of free Claude usage, courtesy of Amazon. Very, very nice.

And well, $200 worth of Claude usage is nice, but it's not life-changing.

LIANNE POTTER

No.

GRAHAM CLULEY

But Poison Claude, they spotted that there's nothing technically stopping you from creating lots of fake accounts.

LIANNE POTTER

Oh, this is how—

GRAHAM CLULEY

And collecting.

LIANNE POTTER

This is where, do I reveal this? It's like, oh, so when I look for a free trial because I'm sick of paying for everything — Amazon Prime, just change your account. Okay.

JOE

Yeah.

LIANNE POTTER

Okay.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Yes. Or if you've got your own domain name, you can have anything @liannepotter.com, you know, create lots of different accounts.

So they can collect multiple lots of $200 worth of tokens every time. And if they do that 100 times, they've got $20,000 worth of free Claude access.

If they do it 1,000 times, they've got $200,000 worth of Claude access. And that is exactly what they appear to be doing.

So Poison Claude created a factory of fraudulent AWS accounts. They collected all the free credits from each one. They pooled them all together.

They then used that pile of stolen credit to answer their customers' AI prompts.

LIANNE POTTER

Wow.

JOE

Okay.

LIANNE POTTER

That's really clever though. It is sneaky, isn't it?

GRAHAM CLULEY

You've got to kind of admire this.

JOE

I do.

GRAHAM CLULEY

So every time one of Poison Claude's paying customers fires off a query, it gets silently billed against whichever fraudulent AWS account has credits left.

And when that account runs dry, the system moves to the next one. So when you pay Poison Claude 5 to 15% of the normal price to use Claude, you're not really getting a discount.

What you're doing is you're getting Claude access that Amazon is unknowingly paying for. Through credits that Amazon gave to people who don't actually exist.

LIANNE POTTER

Is Amazon only just finding out about it now from you, Graham? Is this a reveal?

GRAHAM CLULEY

Well, maybe to Amazon it doesn't really matter, 'cause Amazon have got a few quid, right? Maybe they're thinking, well, there will be a certain amount of dodginess going on here.

They may not have realised quite the scale of this.

By the way, it's important to point out here, it's not as though the people who are signing up for this thought that everything was legal and above board, right?

This is a cybercriminal website and they were paying for these accounts with cryptocurrency. Now, friend of the show, Rory Keflin-Jones, he famously offered a regular reminder.

He said cryptocurrency does in fact have a use case and that use case is crime.

LIANNE POTTER

It does.

GRAHAM CLULEY

So if you've ever wondered what the purpose of cryptocurrency is, in Rory's opinion, that's what it is. And it appears to be borne out by this.

Anyway, if you did sign up, your prompts are going to Poison Claude. Poison Claude is passing them to the real Claude, and the answer comes back and you save yourself some money.

And this isn't just a problem for Anthropic.

There's a very similar operation called EcoMagent that's doing a similar trick, offering AI startups up to $350,000 worth of credits with Google Cloud.

LIANNE POTTER

Not as good a name though. Yeah, it's not going to take off.

GRAHAM CLULEY

I mean, Alice Cooper would never have an LP called that, would he? Unless he went through his synth era or something.

And now, you know, some people are going to say, stealing from Amazon and Google, does it really matter? They can afford it. They've got heaps of money, but it is still fraud.

And crucially, remember that you are not sending your AI prompts to Claude. You are sending them to Poison Claude first, and Poison Claude can see everything.

So the boffins at Okta, they've described how everything you type, every question you ask, every piece of code you paste in, every document you share — it's like that Sting song, Every Move You Make.

Poison Claude is watching. I don't know what's worse, having Sting watching you or having Poison Claude watching you.

But who knows what Poison Claude is gonna do with this information, right? Maybe they will accidentally leak it. Maybe they will sell it.

Maybe they might use it to train competing AI models.

JOE

Yeah.

GRAHAM CLULEY

They're already advertising this on underground websites, or they may simply harvest whatever useful business information, whatever credentials, whatever personal data has floated under their noses.

So there's a real danger here, isn't there?

LIANNE POTTER

That's a company with various revenue streams, surely, Graham. We should be thinking, wow, how industrious of you.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Yeah, it's quite entrepreneurial really, isn't it? From the human point of view, what is happening here? But you are a cyber anthropologist, Lianne.

So why are people signing up for something like this?

LIANNE POTTER

Well, it's the same reason why people sign up for a cheap Netflix account, knowing full well it's a stolen Netflix account.

Because we're so distanced from the victim, in this case Anthropic, we're so distanced from them. And we also see them as these massive companies with massive revenues.

My little tiny bit of crime is not going to impact them.

And so we rationalise that, and that's what enables us to be quite accepting, especially if you look around and go, well, everyone's kind of doing something similar.

You know, there's lots of people I know that are doing that, so it makes it feel more acceptable to do so. So I think there's that kind of rationalisation.

It's like, well, you know, they are charging a lot and I should have access to this. And, you know, I am paying someone to do something.

JOE

Yeah.

LIANNE POTTER

So it's just that rationalisation piece.

GRAHAM CLULEY

And Geoff Bezos is putting his girlfriend into space and things.

LIANNE POTTER

Renting cities for events and stuff like that. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess, yeah, some of it's sticking it to the man as well.

GRAHAM CLULEY

I guess you're right, because if your mate Arthur, who runs a little independent bookshop just down the road, you wouldn't think of conning him or stealing his books or denying him revenue.

But if it's a big global multinational who maybe isn't paying enough tax, then you might think, well, what's the harm in this?

LIANNE POTTER

Well, yeah. Do you remember Borders bookshops?

GRAHAM CLULEY

Yes.

LIANNE POTTER

Well, they had a cafe in there, and they were just a big chain. I used to just get the books, read them in the cafe, and then not buy them.

I must say, that's when I was a lot younger and had very little cash.

GRAHAM CLULEY

And where is Borders now? It's gone.

LIANNE POTTER

I brought down Borders.

GRAHAM CLULEY

It was me. You brought them down.

LIANNE POTTER

And ushered in the Amazon world that we live in today. I am the butterfly effect.

GRAHAM CLULEY

So the fundamental danger here with Poison Claude is that people are trusting AI tools with things that they wouldn't ordinarily type into a website.

Things like code containing API keys, business plans, legal documents, medical queries.

I've got this awful rash on my left thigh — I don't, by the way, before any AI scoops this up from the transcript.

And of course, you are trusting Poison Claude to have good security, but guess what, Lianne?

LIANNE POTTER

Oh, do they know?

GRAHAM CLULEY

In a development that will surprise absolutely nobody, it's been found out that they left a server publicly exposed.

So researchers were able to run a simple command against an unprotected API, and they got back a response which showed the total number of users, exactly how many of them were active at the time.

And although Poison Claude had attempted to shield all of their servers and their locations via Cloudflare, they did leave their API endpoint exposed, which I don't know if you've ever left your endpoint exposed.

It can be very painful, I can tell you.

LIANNE POTTER

Only after a few drinks. Yep.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Anyway, it turns out they were running from a web hosting service in Mumbai, so their security is not flawless.

LIANNE POTTER

But who is nowadays?

GRAHAM CLULEY

Well, who is nowadays? This service is still up and running. It has been reported to Cloudflare.

Cloudflare has responded in their traditional style and decided it doesn't warrant any further action, which of course —

LIANNE POTTER

Thanks guys.

GRAHAM CLULEY

There's quite a lot of things which Cloudflare doesn't shut down.

So if you are a developer who's been tempted by one of these cut-price AI services, perhaps you should ask yourself instead if that few quid which you are saving really is worth handing a stranger all of your secrets.

And of course, if you're inside a business, you want to consider as well what kind of rules and controls you have in place, whether you've actually told your staff, this is the AI we work with, this is how you interact with it, to not do any shadow AI stuff, which maybe is unregulated and could actually lead to company secrets being breached as a consequence.

LIANNE POTTER

It reminds me of those adverts where you'd see them at the beginning of videos and they would say, you wouldn't steal a handbag, you wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal a token.

JOE

NordLayer.

GRAHAM CLULEY

And before anyone says anything, no, it's not NordVPN.

JOE

I wasn't gonna say that.

GRAHAM CLULEY

You were absolutely going to say that, Joe. They are both from Nord Security, but NordLayer is a completely different product. NordVPN is for individuals.

NordLayer is a network security platform built for businesses.

JOE

Right. So what does NordLayer actually do?

GRAHAM CLULEY

Well, think about how your team works today. People logging in from home, from hotel Wi-Fi, from coffee shops, from wherever.

JOE

From a sun lounger, hopefully.

GRAHAM CLULEY

You'd be lucky. And the moment someone logs into a company network over an unsecured connection, you've got a problem. Credentials intercepted, phishing attacks, unauthorised access.

It's a scary world out there for travelling workers.

JOE

So NordLayer fixes that.

GRAHAM CLULEY

It gives you encrypted connectivity for your whole team from anywhere, up to 1 gigabyte per second with zero additional hardware required.

But it goes well beyond just encrypting the connection.

You get centralised control over who can access what based on their identity, their device, whether their device is actually compliant.

And if someone leaves the company, you revoke their access immediately.

JOE

No more ex-employees still wandering around your systems 6 months later.

GRAHAM CLULEY

No more of that. And it will block malicious sites, risky downloads, dangerous domains, and it can even detect shadow apps.

So if someone on your team has started using some AI tool that your security team hasn't approved.

JOE

I'd never do that.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Yeah, well, whatever. NordLayer can spot that too. And there's no complex infrastructure to set up. Apparently, you can be up and running in just about 10 minutes.

JOE

10 minutes?

GRAHAM CLULEY

10 minutes. Plans start from just $8 per user per month. And right now, there is a summer sale. New customers get up to 20% off annual plans until the end of August 2026.

Use the code NLSUMMER26 at checkout.

JOE

Whoa, all I have to do is type in that code at nordlayer.com/smashing and I can get a great deal? Let me write that down.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Yep, go ahead, write it down.

JOE

What's the code again? I forgot.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Oh, Joe. NLSUMMER26.

JOE

Got it. Off to nordlayer.com/smashing I go.

GRAHAM CLULEY

And thanks to NordLayer for supporting the show. Lianne, what have you got for us this week?

LIANNE POTTER

So, Graham, my story starts with a phishing kit, which has a rather interesting name.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Okay.

LIANNE POTTER

Now, Graham, as a man of your standing in the cybersecurity community, I bet you're always asked to name things, things like boats, maybe Wi-Fi routers, firstborns.

But if you got the opportunity to name a phishing kit, what would you name it?

GRAHAM CLULEY

A phishing kit? I don't know. I mean, I'm instantly thinking of Moby Dick. Maybe some sort of play on that, although that could lead me into Carry On Cluley kind of territory.

LIANNE POTTER

I was thinking something like A Crime in the Crime Kit, which was going to be a boat name, wasn't it? But then it got changed to the Attenborough. Boring.

But today, dear listeners, we're going to be talking about a phishing kit called Greatness.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Greatness?

LIANNE POTTER

Yeah. Imagine that branding meeting. I mean, that Greatness gives me very serious LockBit ransomware vibes.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Do you know what it actually reminds me of? I've never seen the Donald Trump version of The Apprentice, but I've seen the Alan Sugar version.

The teams always go away and they discuss what they're going to call their team. And their team is always like Inspire or Confidence or Team Greatness. It's just a terrible name.

They should have called it something like Lumpy Trousers, you know, have a little bit of a sense of humour or something.

LIANNE POTTER

I mean, if I'm going to look up a phishing kit, is Greatness going to be a great SEO search term? I don't think so. No, it's rubbish.

JOE

Anyways.

LIANNE POTTER

It is quite a clever bit of kit.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Okay.

LIANNE POTTER

Now, as we know, most phishing attacks spend ages trying to build, typically and most popular, fake Microsoft login pages because quite a lot of the business world uses Microsoft.

So Greatness looked at that and went, that seems like a lot of work. Why don't we just send people to Microsoft's actual login page instead?

GRAHAM CLULEY

Okay.

LIANNE POTTER

So the cybercriminals are using Greatness as a phishing-as-a-service platform. And they've added a new trick. And that new trick is device code phishing.

And it's really horrible because it doesn't rely on fake websites, any kind of dodgy URLs or anything like that. Instead, it weaponises a perfectly legitimate Microsoft login flow.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Right.

LIANNE POTTER

Put another way, it convinces Microsoft to help rob you.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Right. Okay.

LIANNE POTTER

So it works in the following way. You get an email that looks like a Microsoft security alert, and it says something like, verify your identity, enter this code.

And it's a real thing that Microsoft uses for devices that can't easily display a login screen.

So think about, you know, when you go to a hotel and you want to log into YouTube on the hotel, then you can put a code in instead, right?

Or think of conference room kits or any kind of other IoT devices. So cybercriminals leveraging that. For you, the user, nothing looks unusual.

There's no Comic Sans, there's no Nigerian prince promising you anything. Instead, they're putting more effort in than most phishing emails.

So the email they send you is an actual Microsoft device login page.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Right.

LIANNE POTTER

Again, it's not a fake page.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Okay.

LIANNE POTTER

And it shows you a genuine URL, the certificates are valid, and your password manager sits there and goes, yep, that's Microsoft.

Now, I don't know about you, but as an industry for 20 years, we've been telling people, you know, always check that you're actually on a real website.

You know, check the URL, make sure it looks real and genuine. And congratulations, in this case, you are.

So you enter the code, and the code is generated by the attacker's Greatness toolkit.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Right.

LIANNE POTTER

And Microsoft thinks, lovely, this user wants to access this application. And Microsoft does exactly what Microsoft is supposed to do.

Unfortunately, that application actually belongs to someone whose hobbies may or may not include cybercrime.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Oh.

LIANNE POTTER

Yeah, yeah. This is dire. This is absolutely dire. So Microsoft asks you, would you like to approve access?

And you naturally go, yeah, 'cause you think you're approving your own login. Instead, you've just approved theirs.

And so this is what's been described as the sort of cyber equivalent of someone knocking on your front door and said, would you mind helping me carry your television out to my van?

And you're going, oh yeah, of course. Safety first.

GRAHAM CLULEY

So you are kind of connecting a third-party app with your account. Is that right?

So the Microsoft page, which is the real Microsoft page, the real deal, is asking you for your permission to connect someone else's dodgy bit of code or whatever it's going to do with your account so it can read and steal all of your information.

LIANNE POTTER

So it has your OAuth code, which means it can then go on to read your emails. Access your files, impersonate you, I guess wander around your organisation like it owns the place.

And again, because it's OAuth, they don't need your password. You've just essentially handed them a VIP pass into your accounts.

GRAHAM CLULEY

And the initial email you received, is that really from Microsoft asking you if you want to connect, or has that been sent by the bad guys?

LIANNE POTTER

Yeah. So according to the research that's been done, it is from Microsoft. So everything looks really legit.

GRAHAM CLULEY

This doesn't sound good, Lianne.

LIANNE POTTER

No, no, it's really terrible. So as I say, that classic security advice is look for a dodgy URL.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Yes.

LIANNE POTTER

There isn't one. The website is innocent. The only vulnerability in this equation is you, the human.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Okay. Well, the good news is that you're going to explain how we protect ourselves from this.

LIANNE POTTER

Okay. So there is only really one strong piece of advice here that the article gives, and that is if you didn't start a login, don't finish it, even if that page looks real.

JOE

Okay.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Right.

LIANNE POTTER

It's just like anything else. If you weren't expecting it, don't accept it.

In terms of, if you're thinking from an enterprise piece, their advice is to disable things like device code flow if you don't use it, because a lot of conference televisions are just screens to display information, right?

GRAHAM CLULEY

Yes.

LIANNE POTTER

Like your GP surgery, they'll have, you know, go get a checkup or things like that. And, you know, stop smoking, turn that off, right? You don't need it on.

And then the other thing is to restrict OAuth applications to only users that consent to use it. So getting some role-based access control in there.

If you can, put some extra monitoring in place for OAuth to see about consent events, see if there's anything unusual going there.

And I guess the other thing, which kind of goes against what we've always discussed, is maybe we need to start teaching users that trusting a website really isn't enough anymore.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Is there something Microsoft could do as well though?

I mean, presumably they could have a library or a database of approved third-party apps, which they've sort of said, you know, these are legit ones you may want to connect to your account.

And this one has only been created maybe 3 days ago and therefore warning, warning, warning, warning. You may want to think twice before approving this.

I mean, maybe Microsoft could display something just to make people stop and think a little bit like, you know, unless you have actually asked to authorise this, then stop right now.

LIANNE POTTER

That would be a good turn of events, yes. But I think this exploit is so relatively new, this way of doing it, that even Microsoft have been caught off guard.

So yes, we may see something like that come in the future, but at the moment, it's a free-for-all. And so maybe greatness really is great at doing this.

But I guess the only advice I've got for you is make sure it's yourself that's logging in and not some bloke from organised crime.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Who's done this research? Who's dug this out? This is Cisco Talos, is it?

JOE

Yes.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Looked into this.

LIANNE POTTER

That's correct. Yeah. When I saw it a few days ago I thought, this is going to be perfect for this because this should be talked about more, I think.

I've not heard many of the other bigger news stories picking this up. And it's terrible.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Well, you come onto our podcast, Lianne, you bring your incels with you.

LIANNE POTTER

Incels! Well, bad news. Let's all stay off the internet for now, shall we?

JOE

This week's episode is supported by Vanta.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Joe, what's your 2 AM security worry?

JOE

Honestly, whether I remembered to hit the record button.

LIANNE POTTER

No, no, no.

GRAHAM CLULEY

What's your proper security worry? Like, do I have the right controls in place? Are my vendors secure?

JOE

Nope. I'm still worried we might not actually be recording.

GRAHAM CLULEY

Okay, look, how about the really scary one? How on earth do I dig myself out from under all of these ancient tools and manual processes?

JOE

Okay, fair enough. That does sound scary.

GRAHAM CLULEY

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GRAHAM CLULEY

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JOE

And thanks to Vanta for supporting the show.