📺️ Panel: 2026 Predictions with Chainguard Founders

Next week I’m stoked to moderate a panel with Chainguard’s founders Dan Lorenc, Kim Lewandowski, Matt Moore, and Ville Aikas!

We'll discuss the most impactful developments in software supply chain security from 2025 and share predictions for 2026.

We’ll also cover recent high-profile attacks, AI's role in engineering productivity, and emerging trends that every security and engineering leader should know about.

I’m a huge proponent of secure-by-default software, so I’m excited for the discussion on where things are headed and what we can do to build scalable security programs!

👉️ Join us Wed Dec 10 @ 10am PST 👈️ 

🗓️ Reflections

I had a bit of a surreal moment yesterday.

In the morning I did a webinar with my good friend Daniel Miessler about his personal AI setup (GitHub), and a few hundred people joined our discussion, and asked a ton of great questions.

I then grabbed lunch at Anthropic with my bud Xiaoran Wang.

Most of the rest of the day I spent writing this love letter newsletter to you, dear reader.

A few years ago I would not have expected I’d have a day like this. It’s a bit humbling I guess.

I’m going to try to carve out some time to do a deeper, longer reflection over the holiday break.

Feel free to let me know if there are some annual review resources that you really like!

P.S. One of the ways I find great security content is following what people share. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn so your stuff shows up in my feed 👋 

Sponsor

📣 7 Best Practices for Secrets Security

Take the guesswork out of secrets management.

API keys, tokens, and credentials often end up scattered across repos, pipelines, and SaaS tools. This cheat sheet helps you cut through the noise, identify what matters, and build guardrails that prevent future leaks.

You’ll learn:

• 7 best practices to discover, validate, and protect secrets across your SDLC

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Whether you’re cleaning up old keys or setting guardrails for AI-generated code, this guide helps your team build securely from the start.

👉 Secrets Security Cheat Sheet:
From Sprawl to Control 👈

AppSec

Overall strategy: lay foundations with clear expectations, understand data flows, protect chokepoints, implement defense-in-depth, and plan for incident response when prevention fails.

Findings: there was a ~35% higher density of leaked secrets per repository on GitLab compared to Bitbucket, and Google Cloud Platform credentials were most commonly leaked (1 in 1,060 repos). See also Luke’s post on scanning 2.6 million public Bitbucket Cloud repos for secrets.

Sponsor

📣 5 Critical Microsoft 365 Security Settings You Might Be Missing

Set it and forget it? Not when it comes to M365 security. Configuration drift, admin sprawl, and risky integrations creep in over time, opening up security gaps that attackers love to exploit. This checklist from Nudge Security will help you catch common pitfalls and keep your environment secure.

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M365 is pretty complex and nuanced, I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff in here I’d forget to consider 👆️ 

Cloud Security

Phishing for AWS Credentials via the New ‘aws login’ Flow
Adan Alvarez describes how attackers can abuse the new aws login --remote command to phish for AWS credentials, bypassing phishing-resistant MFA. Basically the social engineering attack works by tricking victims into visiting a malicious site that runs the command in the background, then having them authenticate to a legitimate AWS login page and provide the resulting verification code back to the attacker, who can exchange it for temporary credentials. Adan also shares an SCP that blocks this attack and how to detect suspicious activity.

The log rings don’t lie: historical enumeration in plain sight
Exaforce’s Bleon Proko shows how attackers can use cloud logs as an intelligence gathering tool, demonstrating techniques to enumerate permissions, resources, and identities across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments.

Bleon shows how attackers with log access (CloudTrail events, Azure Activity Logs, GCP Audit Logs) can extract valuable information from audit trails (e.g. sign-ins, permission assignment, etc.) by analyzing fields like identity details, resource names, request parameters, and error messages to map the cloud environment’s infrastructure and determine their permissions, without triggering additional alerts.

All Paths Lead to Your Cloud: A Mapping of Initial Access Vectors to Your AWS Environment
Palo Alto’s Golan Myers and Ofir Balassiano describe two primary classes of AWS misconfigurations that create identity-driven initial access vectors: service exposure (misconfigurations allowing public access, shadow resource creation etc. that enable unintended access) and access by design (misconfigurations of services that provide access control for AWS resources).

The post describes how Lambda functions, EC2 instances, ECR repositories, and DataSync can be inadvertently exposed through resource-based policies and network configurations, and how IAM/STS, IoT, and Cognito services can be misconfigured to allow unintended access, highlighting specific pitfalls like public role assumption, IoT certificate misuse, and Cognito's default self-registration.

Supply Chain

chainguard-dev/malcontent
By Chainguard: A tool to detect supply chain compromises through using context, differential analysis, and over 14,000 YARA rules. It scans programs for their capabilities (gathers system information, evaluates code dynamically using exec(), …) to determine if it’s potentially sketchy, and can do a diff between two versions of an app or library, determining if high risk functionality has been added.

Inside the GitHub Infrastructure Powering North Korea’s Contagious Interview npm Attacks
Socket’s Kirill Boychenko describes details from tracking North Korea's "Contagious Interview" operation, which has recently deployed 197+ malicious npm packages targeting blockchain and Web3 developers through fake job interviews. The malware-serving code lives on GitHub, the latest payload is fetched from Vercel, and a separate command and control (C2) server handles data collection and tasking.

The payload “performs VM and sandbox detection, fingerprints the host, and then establishes a long-lived C2 channel. From there it provides the threat actors with a remote shell, continuous clipboard theft, global keylogging, multi-monitor screenshot capture, and recursive filesystem scanning designed to harvest credentials.”

Key changes: pull_request_target events will always use the default branch for workflow source and reference (preventing execution of outdated, potentially vulnerable workflows), and environment branch protection rules for PRs will evaluate against the executing reference rather than the PR head. These changes close security gaps where untrusted branches could influence evaluation or access environment secrets.

Blue Team

North Korea lures engineers to rent identities in fake IT worker scheme
Researchers Mauro Eldritch and Heiner García exposed North Korean IT recruitment tactics by creating a honeypot to document how Famous Chollima (part of Lazarus group) lures developers into renting their identities for remote jobs at targeted companies, offering 10-35% of salaries in exchange. The researchers used ANY.RUN sandboxes to create a simulated environment that recorded the threat actors' activities in real-time. Nice!

The North Korean agents requested 24/7 remote access via AnyDesk to victims' computers, and used tools including Astrill VPN and AI tools including AIApply, Simplify Copilot, Final Round AI, Saved Prompts to help with job applications and interviews.

AI + Security

OWASP AI Testing Guide
New 250 page v1 guide (PDF) by Matteo Meucci, Marco Morana, and many others on how to threat model AI systems, and a detailed testing methodology for AI applications, models, AI infrastructure, data, and more.

FuzzingLabs/fuzzforge_ai
By FuzzingLabs: An AI-powered workflow automation and AI Agents platform for AppSec, fuzzing & offensive security. Automate vulnerability discovery with intelligent fuzzing, AI-driven analysis, and a marketplace of security tools. It currently integrates a number of fuzzers (Atheris for Python, cargo-fuzz for Rust, OSS-Fuzz campaigns), has specialized agents for AppSec, reversing, and fuzzing, has a secret detection benchmark, and more.

gadievron/raptor
By Gadi Evron, Daniel Cuthbert, Thomas Dullien (Halvar Flake), & Michael Bargury: Raptor turns Claude Code into a general-purpose AI offensive/defensive security agent, using Claude.md and rules, sub-agents, and skills. Raptor can scan your code with Semgrep and CodeQL, fuzz binaries with AFL, analyze vulnerabilities using LLMs, generate proof-of-concept exploits, patch code, report findings in a structured format, and more.

💡What I think is especially cool about this is that RAPTOR really leans into using Claude Code as the orchestrator/work bench and leveraging its existing functionality (custom slash commands, agents, skills) vs trying to roll it all from scratch. Makes a lot of sense to me. And of course having tools and deterministic code for the parts that would benefit from it.

aliasrobotics/cai
By Alias Robotics: A lightweight, open-source framework that empowers security professionals to build and deploy AI-powered offensive and defensive automation. Supports 300+ AI models, built-in security tools for reconnaissance, exploitation, and privilege escalation, agent-based architecture (modular framework design to build specialized agents for different security tasks), evaluated on HackTheBox CTFs, bug bounties, and real-world security case studies, and more. See also their papers:

CAI: An Open, Bug Bounty-Ready Cybersecurity AI
Paper by Victor Mayoral-Vilches et al presenting the first classification of autonomy levels in cybersecurity and introducing Cybersecurity AI (CAI). CAI achieved first place among AI teams and secured a top-20 position worldwide in the "AI vs Human" CTF live Challenge, and reached top-30 in Spain and top-500 worldwide on Hack The Box within a week. The framework enabled non-professionals to discover significant security bugs (CVSS 4.3-7.5) at rates comparable to experts during bug bounty exercises.

Cybersecurity AI: Evaluating Agentic Cybersecurity in Attack/Defense CTFs
Paper by Francesco Balassone, Victor Mayoral-Vilches et al on evaluating whether AI systems are more effective at attacking or defending in cybersecurity. Using CAI's parallel execution framework, they deployed autonomous agents in 23 Attack/Defense CTFs. Defensive agents achieve 54.3% unconstrained patching success versus 28.3% offensive initial access, but this advantage disappears under operational constraints: when defense requires maintaining availability (23.9%) and preventing all intrusions (15.2%), no significant difference exists.

💡 Having AI defensive and offensive agents play against each other on existing (Hack The Box) CTFs is neat. I like experiments like this, though I wonder if the difference in outcome could be attributed to scaffolding, prompting, etc. (e.g. maybe the defensive prompt is just written a lot better), vs AI is inherently better at attack or defense.

AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain smart contract exploits
Anthropic researchers + collaborators evaluated AI agents' ability to exploit smart contracts by creating Smart CONtracts Exploitation benchmark (SCONE-bench)— a new benchmark of 405 contracts that were actually exploited between 2020 and 2025. On contracts exploited after the latest knowledge cutoff (March 2025), Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and GPT-5 developed exploits collectively worth $4.6 million.

They also evaluated both Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5 in simulation against 2,849 recently deployed contracts without any known vulnerabilities, both uncovering two novel zero-day vulnerabilities and produced exploits worth $3,694, with GPT-5 doing so at an API cost of $3,476. (I assume they didn’t share the Sonnet 4.5 API cost because it was higher 🤔)

“Over the last year, frontier models' exploit revenue on the 2025 problems doubled roughly every 1.3 months.”

“In just one year, AI agents have gone from exploiting 2% of vulnerabilities in the post-March 2025 portion of our benchmark to 55.88%.”

Misc

Feelz

• Keep Going - Collected motivational memes by Jack Friks 🥹

• HealthyGamerGG - How To Actually Process Your Emotions 🔥 

• Leila Hormozi - Brutally Honest Relationship Advice

• Bryan Johnson - “Guys…I have a girlfriend.” YouTube, X. Actually very sweet.

• Can You Change Someone's Life in One Night? - Mark Manson gets a blank check from Airbnb to host an experience. I thought how he conceived of structuring the experience fascinating - determining the right “container” to give attendees a certain association (intimate dinner → sharing stories), a pattern interrupt to break people’s expectations, progressively vulnerable sharing, something physical + metaphorical (fire walking).

AI

• Dwarkesh Patel - Ilya Sutskever – We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

• Benedict Evans - AI Eats the World - SuperAI Singapore 2025 (slides)

• Mom on son’s Gemini 3 work 😂 

• Grok says Elon Musk is better than basically everyone, except Shohei Ohtani - People on X have been circulating posts where Grok says Elon is better than the Peyton Manning at football, Tyra Banks at the runway, etc.

• Text Gibberifier - Block AIs from reading your text with invisible Unicode characters while preserving meaning for humans.

Privacy

• jermanuts/bad-opsec - Collection of links on bad operational security (OpSec) by various hackers, leakers, etc.

  • Useful resource if you too want to be “clean on OpSec” like U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

• The WIRED Guide to Digital Opsec for Teens

Misc

• GreyNoise IP Check - Free simple site to determine if your home network has been compromised (e.g. home router, IoT, and other “edge” devices have become part of a residential proxy network). Blog post with more context.

• withoutbg/withoutbg - Open source image background removal model.

• How much SNL cast members make

• @tikalteacall - “I like to test doors to see if they’ll open. My policy is that an unlocked door is a policy to enter. Thread of places I’ve been by walking into unlocked rooms:”

• Someone At YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled - When you make a joke creating a trend line of non-ad videos on the YouTube home page, predicting it’ll eventually be 1… and then you’re right.

Politics

• Part 1: My Life Is a Lie - Michael Green unravels why the American middle class feels poorer each year despite healthy GDP growth and low unemployment: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.” But $ spent on housing, healthcare, childcare is way higher now.

  • Also interesting numbers around disincentives to work between being certain wage ranges, as the benefits you lose are greater than the wages you earn.

• Why Am I Paying $40,000 for the Birth of My Child? - Aaron Stannard describes in detail the unreasonable healthcare costs when you’re a small business owner in America

• 30 Days, 9 Cities, 1 Question: Where Did American Prosperity Go? - Kyla Scanlon visited a number of U.S. and EU places, and reflects on people trying to make things better.

  • “What became clear almost immediately is that the prosperity is real, it’s just not showing up in the places people actually live. It exists in balance sheets, in stock portfolios, in data centers behind chain-link fences. But in daily life like in commutes, in childcare costs, in housing, in safety, in community, people are feeling decay. I kept running into the same contradiction: a wealthy country where everything visible seems to be slowly breaking while everything invisible keeps getting richer.”

  • “There’s a new study showing that housing costs account for about half the US fertility decline between 2000 and 2020. It’s childcare too - a new paper from Abigail Dow reports that a 10% increase in the price of childcare leads to a 5.7% decrease in the birth rate. The affordability crisis compounds - without affordable homes, young families don’t form. Without young families, the tax base ages. Without young taxpayers, resources shrink. The system eats itself.”

• Australia’s spy boss says authoritarian nations ready to commit ‘high-impact sabotage’ - Chinese government hackers are probing and pre-positioning in Australia’s critical infrastructure. “Imagine the implications if a nation state took down all the networks? Or turned off the power during a heatwave? Or polluted our drinking water? Or crippled our financial system?” Burgess said those scenarios “are not hypotheticals,” adding “foreign governments have elite teams investigating these possibilities right now.”

• Chinese authorities shut down the inaugural IndieChina Film Festival in New York City by harassing dozens of Chinese film directors, producers, and their families, forcing over two-thirds of participating films to cancel before the festival was suspended. “Even directors abroad, including those who are not Chinese nationals, reported that their relatives and friends in China were receiving threatening calls from police, said Chiang.”

• China-linked Actors Maintain Focus on Organizations Influencing U.S. Policy - Details on a Chinese APT that compromised a U.S. non-profit organization that is active in attempting to influence U.S. government policy on international issues.

• Data breach at Chinese infosec firm reveals weapons arsenal - Chinese security company Knownsec had a data breach exposing over 12,000 classified documents, including state-owned cyber weapons, internal tools, global target lists, and evidence of Remote Access Trojans (Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android) and extracting data from messaging apps. The leaked data also contained a list of 80 successfully attacked overseas targets and stolen information including 95GB of Indian immigration data, 3TB of call records from South Korean telecom LG U Plus, and 459GB of Taiwanese road planning data.

✉️ Wrapping Up

Have questions, comments, or feedback? Just reply directly, I’d love to hear from you.

If you find this newsletter useful and know other people who would too, I'd really appreciate if you'd forward it to them 🙏

Thanks for reading!

Cheers,
Clint

P.S. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn 👋