The Human Aspect of Red Teams - Brian Fox, Tom Tovar, T. Gwyddon 'Data' Owen - ASW #379
Application Security Weekly (Audio)Show Notes
Red team exercises set goals to see if a particular outcome can be accomplished through a simulated attack, but the ultimate outcome should be educating the org about how to improve tools and processes that make attacks more difficult to succeed. Gwyddon "Data" Owen shares his experience building a red team, creating an exercise, and leveraging the results to improve security. And while the adoption of LLMs will accelerate a red team's activities, there are still plenty of foundational security controls that orgs can establish that would require a red team to be more than just fast, but fast and very careful. Coding Agents Are Getting More Cautious, But Not Safer A new study finds that while frontier AI coding models are hallucinating less than they did a year ago, they still preserve a significant amount of avoidable software risk when left ungrounded. Sonatype's research shows that connecting these models to real-time software intelligence dramatically improves remediation quality and reduces critical and high-severity vulnerability exposure by 60–70%. The takeaway is clear: safer AI-assisted development will depend not just on better models, but on grounding them in accurate, current dependency and vulnerability data. This segment is sponsored by Sonatype. Read the study: https://securityweekly.com/sonatypersac How We Achieve Agentic Outcomes in CyberSecurity: The "Do-It-For-Me" Mobile Defense If you look at deepfakes, synthetic identity, social engineering, and new malware variants coming to market, it seems like attackers have a first-mover advantage in using AI. The volume and variety of threats are growing faster than the current cyber stack can address. Against this backdrop, organizations are moving away from "do-it-yourself" delivery models (more tools, more alerts, more headcount) to "do-it-for-me" agentic AI delivery models (using platforms that unify data, execute policy, and automate outcomes). The emphasis outside of cyber is on empowering the expert human-in-the-loop — so teams spend less time in the noise and more time delivering business outcomes. This segment explores how cybersecurity leaders can make the most of the AI Age, leveraging it for good while staying relevant amid the explosive AI adoption curve. This segment is sponsored by Appdome. Visit https://securityweekly.com/appdomersac to learn more about them! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-379
More from Application Security Weekly (Audio)
The OWAS Mobile Application Security (MAS) project recently released an updated version of its guidance, with excellent advice organized into common weaknesses, a verification standard for devs (MASVS), and a testing guide (MASTG). Ryan Lloyd and Jan Seredynski from Guardsquare dive into the project to talk about how it's been updated, how orgs can use it, and the challenges orgs face in managing their mobile frameworks and environments. We also cover how agents and LLMs are impacting mobile security and what future iterations of the MAS project might include for securing mobile apps interacting with LLMs or being written by LLMs. Finally, we share practical ways for developers to get involved as OWASP contributors and advocates. Segment Resources: https://mas.owasp.org https://mas.owasp.org/MASWE/ https://hubs.ly/Q04ykvgm0 This segment is sponsored by Guardsquare. Visit https://securityweekly.com/guardsquare to learn more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-405
To celebrate our 404th episode we discuss what's not found in modern appsec and what still exists that should become not found. The conversation starts with a classic problem of appsec -- looking for a reliable vuln prioritization methodology. But we expand from there to challenge whether a focus on vulns and patches is even the right choice for an appsec program. Then it's on to incentives, the role of agents in writing and securing software, and what we should be looking for to bring new appsec practitioners into the industry. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-404
The principle of least privilege access is ubiquitous in recommendations, but perhaps too uncommon in practice. Alex Olivier explains how the AuthZen Working Group has been approaching new standards, guidelines, and practical deployment patterns to make it easier for orgs to establish more refined and correct access policies. It's a problem that predates LLMs, but also one that agents and MCPs made all the more acute. We talk about what intent means when trying to constrain agents' activities, what role LLMs have in policy decisions, and how LLMs can help create a much-needed inventory of access controls. Segment Resources: https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/dimmer-switch-not-a-kill-switch-rethinking-ai-agent-governance https://www.cerbos.dev/blog/multi-hop-delegation-ai-agents https://openid.net/wg/authzen/ Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-403
Finding flaws with LLMs and agents is changing bug bounty programs. But it's not necessarily changing how orgs fix those flaws. Shlomie Liberow shares his experience across a decade of bounty programs and how they have changed for researchers and orgs. He explains why fixing the bug reported through a bug bounty is more about understanding interconnected systems than fixing a single piece of software. We discuss how orgs can be more effective at securing their environment and what role LLMs might have in evaluating controls. Plus, we look to the future of bug bounty programs and how researchers can still excel through curiosity and expertise on a topic rather than relying on scanners, prompts, and luck. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-402
Prompt injection demonstrates one of the major challenges in securing LLMs and agents -- how do you ensure an agent ignores attackers and only does what you instructed it to do. The flaw highlights how LLMs mix inputs, context, and outputs without any strict boundaries between them. Julie Brunias joins us to talk through examples of injections, why their consequences can go beyond information leaks, and why trying to mitigate them with other LLMs is insufficient. Segment resources: https://llmgateway.io/open-source https://www.wiz.io/blog/off-guard-breaking-litellm-from-authentication-bypass-to-cloud-compromise Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-401