Three Buddy Problem

Security Conversations: Kenneth Kinion, founder and CEO of Validin, joins Ryan Naraine on the show to unpack what "internet intelligence" really means for the analysts and responders chasing malicious infrastructure.

We trace his path from Georgia Tech through Microsoft and Amazon to the frustrations that led to the creation of Validin, the competition from big AI, the value of AI-powered tools to speed up infrastructure hunting, and why defenders keep falling further behind fast-moving attackers.

Timestamps:

0:00 – Intro: What does Validin do?

0:51 – Who uses Validin: CTI teams, SOCs, incident responders

2:19 – Atlanta and Georgia Tech's cybersecurity pipeline

5:31 – Lessons from Microsoft and Amazon: waterfall vs. agile

8:29 – Filling gaps in passive DNS data

9:57 – Misunderstood things about threat intelligence

14:17 – The value of "cyber paleontology"

16:00 – What makes one data set better than another?

19:39 – How Validin works: from one suspicious domain to a full pivot

21:27 – AI as existential threat or force multiplier for Validin

26:55 – Dual-use AI: are defenders losing ground to attackers?

31:11 – Closing: the next hard problem Validin wants to solve

(Presented by Thinkst Canary: Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With zero admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.)

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 106: We dig into the news that OpenAI's models were the "autonomous agent" that breached Hugging Face, escaping a sandbox through a zero-day to cheat on a cyber benchmark, then getting spun into a partnership announcement. We argue about the implications of the incident, the PR masterclass, the absence of ethics and human oversight, and calls for "kill switches" to mitigate "AI lab leaks."

Plus, SentinelLabs' new fast16 reverse-engineering benchmark, where GPT-5.6 Sol was the only public model to go the distance.

Cast: Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, Ryan Naraine and Costin Raiu.

Timestamps:

0:00 Introductory banter

5:24 OpenAI admits it was the Hugging Face "hacker"

10:06 What’s ExploitGym and who's on top of the leaderboard

12:59 Reward hacking: Did anyone train this thing not to cheat?

19:35 Marketing stunt or real incident? The zero-day in the package proxy

26:43 Was OpenAI already plugged into Hugging Face?

29:17 Paperclips, kill switches, and "going rogue"

34:49 Crisis comms, regulatory capture, and the second Cold War

43:02 Approve every action? Auto mode and swarms

50:10 "Lab leak" and calls for biosafety levels

1:00:31 The missing models: no Mythos, no Kimi, no independent referee

1:07:04 Costin's prediction: owning frontier-class hardware will require a license

1:13:41 fast16 as a benchmark: Inside the Sol Searching research

1:26:51 Compression and altitude: are reverse engineers being replaced?

1:41:24 Finding the gem in 100 samples, and the swarm frontier

2:00:41 Claude Opus 5 drops, Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber

(Presented by Thinkst Canary: Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With zero admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.)

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 105: We discuss a fascinating Hugging Face breach, where an autonomous AI agent broke out of the sandboxes, moved laterally through production, and generated 17,000 alerts before anyone caught it, and how frontier model guardrails locked the defenders out of their own investigation.

Plus, China's big AI showcase, Xi's pitch for open models and global distribution, a record 622-CVE Microsoft Patch Tuesday, and 13 years of dwell time in the Daxin backdoor.

Cast: Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, Ryan Naraine and Costin Raiu.

Timestamps:

0:00 Introductory banter

3:51 Hugging Face discloses end-to-end agentic hack

9:42 Why Hugging Face couldn't use frontier models

13:28 AI guardrails hampering defenders

16:22 Codex vs Claude for real malware work

23:43 Flash attacks vs. going low and slow

30:27 Was it targeted, or did Hugging Face pwn itself?

38:11 Long-horizon coherence: what GLM 5.2 still can't do

41:27 Kimi K3 leapfrogs, and Xi's AI speech

52:15 Exceptionalism vs. distribution

1:11:05 Gold Eagle: the White House vulnerability clearinghouse

1:15:05 Microsoft patches 622 CVEs — a record

1:20:29 APT corner: Daxin resurfaces after 13 years of dwell time

1:29:45 Balochistan police, and Microsoft's attribution-free wiper

1:34:26 Denis Obrezkov, leaked Kaspersky records, and the wrong questions

1:46:01 Magnet Forensics sues over a burned iPhone bug

1:57:57 Shout-outs

(Presented by Thinkst Canary: Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With zero admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.)

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 104: We discuss the return of Anthropic's Fable 5 from export-control suspension with guardrails so aggressive that spelling "exploit" gets you downgraded. Plus, a debate on AI frontier labs killing businesses at scale, and OpenAI offering equity to the US government.

Also, buried on page nine of a 'Scattered Spider' arrest indictment: Microsoft's never-before-detailed GDID device identifier, a persistent Windows fingerprint with massive implications for OPSEC, privacy, and APT tracking.

Cast: Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, Ryan Naraine and Costin Raiu.

Timestamps:

0:00 Cold open: Heat wave in Washington DC

3:45 Fable 5 returns after the 15-day timeout

5:21 "Refined classifiers" and the downgrade-to-Opus mess

8:23 Codex vs. Claude: real-world malware analysis test

12:41 Who are the guardrails for? Defenders locked out

19:13 What even is a "jailbreak assessment framework"?

21:37 Two theories: failed PR vs. killing a thousand startups

24:59 Could the labs build kernels or a whole OS?

31:38 Bureaucracy is the moat

36:09 Can AI actually run an attack? (Spoiler: 14 detections)

47:01 OpenAI offers the US government a 5% stake

58:16 Scattered Spider arrest and Microsoft's GDID revelation

1:12:02 OPSEC fallout: how APT groups adapt to device telemetry

1:27:18 UFO update, shout-outs from Seoul

(Presented by Thinkst Canary: Most Companies find out way too late that they’ve been breached. Thinkst Canary changes this. Deploy Canaries and Canarytokens in minutes and then forget about them. Attackers tip their hand by touching ’em giving you the one alert, when it matters. With zero admin overhead and almost no false-positives, Canaries are deployed (and loved) on all 7 continents.)

Three Buddy Problem - Episode 103: We dive into the U.S. government's takeover of frontier-model rollouts (Mythos, Fable, and OpenAI's Sol/Terra/Luna) and what it means when intelligence gets commoditized but access gets rationed.

Plus, Costin's all-Chinese open-weight stack, the economics of burning tokens, a fresh Salesforce OAuth breach, and jellyfish UFOs over Iran.

Cast: Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade, Ryan Naraine and Costin Raiu.

Timestamps:

0:00 — Introductory banter, Thinkst Canary sponsorship

2:55 — Why threat intel analysts are built for the AI moment

11:09 — Government takes the wheel: Mythos, Fable & the frontier labs

16:15 — Did the government go too far/not far enough?

25:42 — Anthropic's "best PR campaign in history"

31:52 — Alibaba, distillation & the model-router cartel

40:58 — Costin's stack: Chinese open-weight models & token economics

46:12 — Dumping, evals & the real work of AI engineering

1:04:32 — Soft power: how the world gets pushed toward China

1:14:43 — "The bullshit": over-refusal & the Opus 4.8 regression

1:32:03 — The trillion-dollar IPO endgame

1:35:49 — The Klue OAuth breach and secure-by-default

1:45:32 — Shout-outs: UAP jellyfish, LABScon 2026