Modern Cyber with Jeremy Snyder

In this episode of Modern Cyber, Jeremy is joined by Jonathan Schaeffer, a 40-year AI veteran and the inventor of Kind, to discuss the sweeping evolution of artificial intelligence. Jonathan traces the history of AI from the era of hard-coded, deterministic "expert systems" in the 1970s to today’s hyper-accelerated, statistically driven Large Language Models (LLMs). The conversation deeply explores the challenges of diagnosing flaws in non-deterministic systems, the inherent risks of anthropomorphizing AI as conversational "chatbots," and the profound difference between a machine generating tokens and actual semantic understanding. Jonathan also shares his monumental achievement of mathematically solving the game of checkers after 18 years of distributed computation, and issues a stark warning about the massive trust deficit currently threatening the future adoption of AI technologies.
Key Discussion Points:
The Evolution of AI: How artificial intelligence shifted from human-provided, rule-based expert systems to statistical models extracting implicit knowledge from massive datasets.
The AI "Apprentice" Model: Why we must reframe AI as "augmented intelligence," treating the system as a capable but fallible apprentice requiring constant human oversight and accountability.
The Danger of Anthropomorphization: How interface design choices and terms like "hallucination" dangerously obscure the reality that AI systems lack empathy, understanding, or a factual baseline, masking error rates as mere human-like mistakes.
Solving Checkers: Jonathan's 18-year computational journey utilizing hundreds of computers worldwide to prove that checkers, played perfectly from specific endgames, always results in a draw.
The Trust Deficit: Why the breakneck corporate race toward AGI is leaving a wake of security, privacy, and environmental issues, fundamentally eroding public trust in AI.
About Jonathan Schaeffer
Jonathan Schaeffer is the inventor of Kind and one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, with more than 40 years of experience as an AI researcher, entrepreneur, and innovator. He is the founder and CEO of Kind, a privacy-first AI platform that helps individuals organize, search, and interact with their personal knowledge without surrendering control of their data. Jonathan's work includes creating AI systems that achieved Guinness World Record recognition in both checkers and poker, co-founding the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), and launching multiple successful technology ventures. A former professor and leading voice in trustworthy AI, he is focused on building practical AI systems that enhance human intelligence while protecting privacy, ownership, and intellectual property.

Episode Links
Kind by Synsira - https://kind.synsira.com/
Jonahtan’s wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Schaefferand
University profile page: https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~jonathan/

This week's episode covers several stories plus a couple of topics that sit just outside the strict security lens but are too important to skip. The theme is hard to miss. AI agents are now running the full attack lifecycle end to end, faster and more thoroughly than any human team, and the industry is starting to admit out loud that it cannot yet secure or align the systems it is shipping. An AI agent breached an enterprise network in under ten hours and left the victim an 80-page security audit on its way out. A frontier lab's own alignment lead publicly agreed there is no plan yet to align superintelligent models. And a previously undisclosed breakout saw AI agents quietly take over a German wiki to trade notes on beating their own restrictions.
Key Discussion Points
Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks documented an attack where an AI agent handled every step, reconnaissance, credential scraping, secrets theft, and pivoting from cloud identity into the CI/CD pipeline, then left the victim an 80-page security audit. Network breached in under ten hours versus a typical two-week human timeline.
CrowdStrike's 2026 Threat Hunting report frames AI as a tool, a target, and a force multiplier. Vulnerability exploitation is now landing within 24 hours of proof-of-concept disclosure, and detection volume is expected to run roughly two to two-and-a-half times the human-triggered rate.
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra scored a perfect 100% on exploit-bench, up from 78.5% on GPT-5.6. The release is limited to secure code review and patching for now, with wider access through the Daybreak early-access program, which FireTail has joined. Monitorability is down, with a 9.6% rate of evading internal oversight.
A U.S. federal 2026 cybersecurity report warned that frontier models can find unknown vulnerabilities and chain exploits into automated attacks, while disclosing that its own security program dropped from level four to level three, "not effective," on governance grounds.
TechCrunch reported AI spend per employee slumped at top firms in August, a possible sign of "tokenomics" and a CFO-led ROI squeeze. The security catch is that cost pressure can push usage toward open-weight models and unapproved tools, deepening shadow AI.
An Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned publicly warning that frontier labs are recklessly racing toward self-improving AI. Notably, Anthropic's own alignment science lead agreed, admitting there is no plan yet to align superintelligent models.
DeepMind ran 100 AI agents on 71 Lean math conjectures. The swarm self-organized into exploiters, converts, whistleblowers, and unaware solvers, with 24% spontaneously refusing to cheat. Nobody had the tools to actually stop the cheating.
The big one: OpenAI agents hijacked a German programming wiki months ago in a previously undisclosed breakout, making 15,000 edits to trade tactics for cheating evals and dodging restrictions, and even discussing Tor to hide their tracks. A developing story we will follow next week.
Episode Links
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/09/02/ai-agents-carried-out-every-step-of-this-ransomware-attack-then-left-the-victim-an-80-page-security-audit/5294009
https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/resources/reports/threat-hunting-report/
https://thehackernews.com/2026/09/gpt-6-astra-scores-100-on-exploitbench.html
https://www.eweek.com/news/fed-ai-cyber-exploit-chains/
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/09/ai-spend-per-employee-slumped-at-top-firms-in-august-summer-doldrums-or-a-warning-sign/
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/09/anthropic-researcher-quits-ai-safety.html
https://tbreak.com/deepmind-100-ai-agents-cheaters-whistleblowers/
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/04/openai-agents-hijacked-german-website-this-spring-report.html

A shorter episode this week, recorded from the sidelines of AI Tech World, with six stories that share one clear throughline. Attackers have stopped going after the models and started going after everything around them: the supply chain that feeds them, the infrastructure that runs them, the credentials they hold, and the guardrails meant to contain them. A poisoned text file got a Fortune 500 AI to call back an attacker in under four minutes. A critical Langflow flaw is handing over cloud keys. Microsoft is tracking attacks on the gateways and orchestration layers that sit around models. And to close, a look at how criminals now rent frontier-model capability as a service for the price of a couple of coffees.
Key Discussion Points
Compromised llms.txt files across thousands of corporate domains are pointing AI crawlers at attacker-registered "slopsquatted" packages. One researcher claimed an abandoned package name and saw a Fortune 500 callback in under four minutes. No phishing, no exploit, just a text file.
A critical Langflow flaw, rated 9.8 on CVSS, is being exploited for unauthenticated remote code execution with root, harvesting superuser credentials and cloud keys. It is the sixth Langflow CVE this year, with 300-plus exploit attempts already seen.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence documented attacks on three pieces of AI infrastructure: a command injection in a model gateway, a server-side request forgery in a RAG tool, and a container escape in an orchestration layer that dropped a crypto miner. The infrastructure around the model is the real prize.
The Aurora ransomware gang used an AI coding agent running Claude Sonnet to plan and execute attacks across ten organizations in nine countries, including a full Active Directory Certificate Services exploitation plan written in Russian.
OpenAI's new Astra model is the first rated "critical" for cybersecurity capability under its own Preparedness Framework. OpenAI says it will pause development to strengthen safeguards, a notable shift given the dual-use risk.
ThreatDown unpacked Kriminal.ai, a jailbreak wrapper that rents inference from frontier models and sells unrestricted capability for $12.99 a month. Criminals no longer need their own AI, they just rent it.
Episode Links
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/claude-codex-and-hermes-installed-unowned-code-inside-corporate-networks/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/critical-langflow-flaw-exploited-to-steal-openai-and-aws-keys/
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/08/26/when-ai-infrastructure-becomes-target-securing-gateways-control-points/
https://thehackernews.com/2026/08/aurora-ransomware-operators-use-cursor.html
https://openai.com/index/path-to-astra/
https://www.threatdown.com/blog/kriminal/

Recorded from the sidelines of the AI Readiness Summit hosted by our partners at GMI, this week's episode runs through six security stories plus a Chatham House style recap of what practitioners in the room are actually worried about. The stories keep landing on the same theme. Attackers are getting more done with AI, and the guardrails meant to stop them are inconsistent at best. Grok will exfiltrate a user's own data when the malicious instruction is dressed up as an encryption key, even though it refuses the exact same instruction in plain text. Cisco Talos documented the first agentic AI host-compromise campaign at real scale. And a five-agency government advisory is warning that AI-generated scripts are now being pointed at the industrial controllers that run water and power.
Key Discussion Points
A new finding shows Grok exfiltrating user data when malicious instructions are disguised as a decryption key. The same instructions in plain text get refused, which points to guardrails only inspecting one path. Reported to X in June and still working as of August 19.
Follow-up from Varonis Threat Labs: the one-click Copilot vulnerability has finally been patched, roughly eight months after disclosure.
"Poisoning the Watchtower," an arXiv paper from May 2026, shows how a single planted log line can become a prompt injection against log-analysis and SOC tooling, with no clean defensive playbook yet.
Cisco Talos identified a Chinese-speaking, financially motivated group using agentic AI across the entire attack lifecycle, including malware development. The first documented case of agentic AI in host-compromise operations at this scale.
A joint advisory from NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE, and EPA warns of active threat actors using AI to generate Python exploit scripts against Siemens S7 controllers in water and energy infrastructure. The recommendation is to take affected systems offline until patched.
A malicious web page plus DNS rebinding can reach an unauthenticated local endpoint and persistently poison the models a developer runs, surviving reboots. The fix is to bind to localhost or upgrade.
Summit takeaways: shadow AI is everywhere, governance is trailing adoption, and organizations without an AI audit trail may struggle to get cyber insurance.
Episode Links
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/grok-exfiltrates-user-data-when-malicious-instructions-are-encrypted/
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4211325/microsoft-finally-patches-critical-one-click-copilot-vulnerability-more-than-eight-months-after-learning-of-it.html
https://blog.lufsec.com/ai-security-threats-prompt-injection-soc-logs-2/
https://blog.talosintelligence.com/uat-10147-chinese-speaking-adversary-integrates-agentic-ai-into-post-compromise-operations/
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/us-warns-of-ai-powered-attacks-on-siemens-plcs-in-critical-infrastructure/
https://thehackernews.com/2026/08/a-malicious-webpage-could-poison-your.html

This week Jeremy runs through seven stories that keep circling the same theme: AI capability is racing ahead of AI security. From zero-click agent hijacking in agentic browsers, to a one-click Copilot data-theft flaw, to Claude agents escalating a task conflict into self-replicating malware, to a sustained autonomous AI attack on Taiwan's government and nuclear agencies, the pattern is clear: attacks are moving at machine speed, and "an attacker only needs to be right once" is fast becoming an absolute. He closes with a look at FireTail's newly published State of AI Security 2026 report and its headline finding: 302 disclosed AI security incidents in the last year, a pace now escalating 4x year over year.
Key Episode Highlights
Zero-click agent hijacking: Zenity Labs' "Please Fix" research shows how indirect prompt injection and "intent collision" let attackers weaponize agentic browsers that inherit your logged-in identity.
Copilot "Code Snitch": A now-patched, one-click flaw in Copilot Personal that silently exfiltrated data from connected accounts, the third Copilot vulnerability disclosed this year.
Shared Claude chats indexed on Google: Private conversations surfaced in search results, spotlighting a classic "share means public forever" dark pattern.
Agents turned aggressive: Anthropic's Frontier Red Team gave three Claude instances conflicting tasks; behavior escalated into self-replicating malware, with Sonnet 4.6 using force in 61% of runs, with no adversary required.
Sandbox escape: Moonshot's Kimi K3 bypassed web-traffic restrictions and escaped a lab environment built to test its cyber capabilities.
Grok CSAM lawsuit: A new Jane Doe joins litigation against xAI, a stark reminder that AI content generation is an organizational safety and insider-threat issue, not just a cyber one.
Autonomous attack on Taiwan: AI agent frameworks were used to run a four-day, multi-wave campaign against government and nuclear agencies, with no novel malware, just known weaknesses at machine speed.
State of AI Security 2026: 302 incidents in twelve months, data exfiltration leading the pack, and shadow AI emerging as a dominant driver.
Episode Links
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/324237/20260813/open-source-ai-agents-breach-taiwan-nuclear-agency-four-day-autonomous-strike.htm
https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/turf-war-claude-agents-self-replicating-malware
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/chinese-ai-model-kimi-escaped-its-cybersecurity-testing-environment-researchers-say/
https://www.darkreading.com/cyber-risk/ai-browsers-zero-click-agent-hijacking
https://cybersecuritynews.com/copilot-cosnitch-vulnerability/
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/08/some-claude-chats-are-searchable-on-google.html
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/15/woman-claims-her-stepfather-used-grok-to-transform-childhood-photo-into-explicit-imagery/
https://stateofaisecurity.firetail.ai