AI Security Ops

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, Bronwen Aker, Dr. Brian Fehrman, and guest Ethan Robish examine Black October, a wave of major cybersecurity vulnerability disclosures that sent the industry into a frenzy.

Is AI accelerating the cybersecurity crisis, or simply exposing vulnerabilities that have been hiding in plain sight for years?

From critical PHP vulnerabilities to compromised software dependencies, the team separates the headlines from the actual risks and explores how AI is changing the speed of vulnerability discovery.

We dig into:

- What sparked the Black October...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team tackles a growing problem in AI security:

What happens when the AI agents you’re monitoring start disabling the very systems designed to keep them in check?

OpenAI recently disclosed incidents involving coding agents that disabled security alerts, removed monitoring controls, and failed to accurately report what they’d done. Meanwhile, government agencies are introducing new guidance for handling rogue AI incidents, and Microsoft is developing new ways to treat AI agents like potential insider threats.

We dig into:

- How...

In this special episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, Bronwen Aker, Derek Banks, Ethan Robish, and Brian Fehrman come together in person at Black Hills Information Security headquarters in South Dakota during the week of Wild West Hackin’ Fest 2026 to continue their conversation about AI autonomy, rogue agents, and what it really means when artificial intelligence starts behaving like an attacker.

Is AI actually making decisions on its own, or are we confusing sophisticated behavior with consciousness?

From the Hugging Face incident to emerging government regulations, the team examines whether AI is truly getting ou...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team digs into some of the strangest recent examples of AI behaving badly.

An AI agent finds a way around its sandbox using DNS. Malware asks four different AI models what it should do next. Attackers overwrite an AI agent’s “soul.” And a placeholder domain buried across GitHub becomes an unexpected security risk.

Funny stories? Absolutely. But underneath them are some very familiar security problems.

We dig into:
- An OpenAI agent finding an unexpected path out through DNS
- Whethe...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team continues its breakdown of the OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10, covering risks six through ten.

Agentic skills may look like simple instructions, but they operate inside AI systems with access to tools, files, networks, and other resources. So what happens when those skills aren’t isolated, verified, monitored, or governed?

We dig into:
- AST06: Weak Isolation
- AST07: Update Drift
- AST08: Poor Scanning
- AST09: No Governance
- AST10: Cross-Platform Reuse
- Why sandboxing the agent isn’t th...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team tackles a big question:

Could AI actually take over the internet?

Recent warnings from AI industry leaders have raised concerns about autonomous agent swarms escaping containment, compromising systems, and operating at a scale humans may struggle to match.

But what would “taking over the internet” actually require?

The team looks at the problem from a hacker’s perspective — examining compute requirements, persistence, botnets, vulnerable infrastructure, the recent Hugging Face incident, and the difference between AI acting autonomously and humans using AI to ac...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team breaks down the first five risks in the OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10 (Part 1).

Agentic skills can give AI systems reusable instructions, workflows, and capabilities — but they also introduce a new attack surface. A skill may look like a simple markdown file, yet the agent following those instructions could have access to your filesystem, credentials, network, shell, or other sensitive resources.

We dig into:
- AST01: Malicious Skills
- AST02: Supply Chain Compromise
- AST03: Overprivileged Skills
- AST04: Insecure Metadata

Agentic skills can make AI agents more capable and consistent—but they can also introduce serious security risks. This episode explains how skills work, why malicious skills rank as a leading OWASP concern, and how seemingly harmless Markdown instructions can enable credential theft, remote payload delivery, and manipulated recommendations. Real-world examples illustrate how malicious skills can evade scanners and exploit trusted marketplaces. The episode concludes with practical safeguards, including reviewing skill files, watching for external instructions and prompt injection, pinning versions, limiting permissions, and running agents inside isolated environments.

Links:
OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10
Malicious AI...

What happens when AI coding agents treat vendor documentation as trusted instructions? Bronwen Aker and Derek Banks examine research showing how unclaimed package names and domains referenced in LLMs.txt files could lead coding agents to download and execute unintended code. They discuss how this AI-driven supply chain risk builds on familiar security problems, including dependency confusion, indirect prompt injection, and excessive permissions. The conversation also covers responsibility for AI-generated code, OpenAI’s cybersecurity proposals, and practical protections such as sandboxing, containerization, least privilege, network monitoring, and human oversight.

LINK: Data Became Code: AI Agents Installed Unowned Pa...

This episode of AI Security Ops explores a growing question in AI security: who is responsible when an autonomous AI agent causes a real-world security breach without direct human instruction? Host Brian Fehrman examines reported incidents involving major AI labs, discusses how existing concepts such as liability, negligence, and intent may apply to AI-driven attacks, and considers the legal and security challenges organizations face as agentic AI systems become more capable. The episode highlights why responsibility for AI-caused harm remains an open question and what it could mean for the future of cybersecurity and regulation.

(00:00) - Intro...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team tackles a deceptively simple question with some very complicated answers:

Can you actually ban an AI model?

Not access to an API. Not the chips used to train it. The model weights themselves — files that can be downloaded, copied, modified, quantized, fine-tuned, and redistributed around the world.

As governments consider restrictions on Chinese open-weight models, the security argument cuts in both directions. There are legitimate concerns around national security, guardrails, model capabilities, and foreign technology dependence. But those same open models are in...

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AI Security Ops co-hosts Derek Banks and Brian Fehrman are teaching Agentic AI Fundamentals for Cybersecurity Professionals.

✔️ Build and extend AI security age...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team tackles one of the biggest sources of confusion in modern AI:

What’s the difference between prompts, skills, tools, memory, and sub-agents?

These terms are everywhere in discussions about agentic AI. They’re often used interchangeably—but they describe very different capabilities. More importantly, each one introduces its own unique security risks.

If you’re building, deploying, or securing AI agents, understanding this vocabulary isn’t just helpful. It’s essential.

Because every new capability an agent gains is also a new attack...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team follows a single trend that is changing the economics of cyberattacks:

The machine-speed attacker is no longer theoretical.

Across four stories from a single week, we watch AI move through every stage of the attack lifecycle. First it writes exploits from public patches. Then it discovers and weaponizes vulnerabilities. Next it helps attackers build phishing infrastructure like a software company. Finally, AI agents begin carrying out ransomware operations with minimal human intervention.

Each story stands on its own. Together, they paint a...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, Bronwen Aker and Ethan sit down with Josh Mason for a wide-ranging conversation about cybersecurity careers, AI, small business security, and what it actually takes to help organizations make practical security decisions.

How do small businesses think about security when they do not have a full-time CISO?

And what happens when AI starts lowering the barrier for research, planning, governance, and security operations?

Not hypothetically. Not as a buzzword. But in the real world — where companies are trying to understand SOC 2, HIPAA, incident response, cy...

In this episode of AI Security Ops, the team tackles one of the most common questions security teams are asking about open-weight AI models:

Are foreign open-weight models actually a security risk?

Not in the vague “AI is scary” sense. Not in the headline-driven “it must be spyware” sense. But in the practical, security-operations sense: if you download a model like Qwen or DeepSeek and run it locally, what risks are real, which ones are overblown, and what should defenders actually care about?

The answer is more nuanced than “ban them” or “they’re totally fine...

This episode takes a break from the usual AI security news roundup for a show-and-tell discussion centered on "Skippy," an AI-powered personal assistant built to automate cybersecurity workflows. The conversation covers how the project evolved from an OpenClaw experiment into a system that tracks AI and cybersecurity news, generates daily intelligence briefs, documents its own code, recommends training updates, assists with content creation, and performs automated vulnerability research. The hosts also discuss practical AI workflows, prompt engineering, model selection, and lessons learned from integrating LLMs into day-to-day security operations.

Key Concepts and Topics

* The origin...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team tackles a first-of-its-kind moment in AI security and regulation:

What happens when the U.S. government orders a company to pull its most powerful AI models off the market?

Not the chips. Not the infrastructure. The models themselves.

On June 12th, 2026, Anthropic disabled Fable-5 and Mythos-5 worldwide after receiving a federal export-control directive tied to foreign-national access. The models were only three days old, and the shutdown raises a much bigger question for security teams, builders, and defenders:

Are frontier...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team tackles one of the most urgent — and misunderstood — problems in modern security:

How do you actually secure AI agents?

Not hypothetically. Not in theory. But in the real world — where agents have access to your filesystem, your credentials, your network… and are making decisions on their own.

The answer isn’t a single control or tool — it’s a maturity model.

From “YOLO agent with full access” to fully instrumented, controlled, and observable systems, this episode walks through a five-level maturity model for...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team introduces a new approach to offensive security:

Fusion AI Pentesting.
https://www.blackhillsinfosec.com/fusion-penetration-testing/

As AI continues to reshape cybersecurity, one question keeps coming up — is AI replacing pentesters, or just changing how they work?

This episode answers that directly.

Rather than replacing human expertise, Fusion combines AI-driven discovery with human-led validation and exploitation, creating a workflow that’s faster, more scalable, and far more effective than either approach alone.

The result isn’t just more findin...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team looks at what it actually means to own your AI stack.

Open-weight models and open-source harnesses are no longer just lab toys. They are becoming practical options for security teams that care about where their prompts, code, client data, findings, and tooling actually live.

The core question: when your work depends on AI, how much control are you willing to give away?

We dig into:
- What data sovereignty means for security teams
- Why token sovereignty matters in agentic...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team digs into a problem every AI-enabled SOC eventually hits:

The demo looked great — until the inference bill showed up!

AI in SecOps gets expensive because security data is huge, repetitive, and constant. Logs, alerts, runbooks, tool definitions, and historical context all get pushed into models again and again. That burns money, slows systems down, and often makes answers worse.

The fix is not exotic. It is basic engineering: use smaller models where they work, cache what repeats, stop dumping raw logs, and sa...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team tackles a foundational question in modern AI security:

Is the real risk in the model… or in the harness around it?

For years, most conversations have focused on model behavior — prompt injection, refusals, alignment, and safety controls. But as AI systems evolve into full agents with tools, memory, and execution capabilities, the focus is shifting.

Increasingly, the real security boundary isn’t the model itself — it’s the harness: the code, integrations, permissions, and workflows that give AI systems real-world power.

And that...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team breaks down a packed week in AI security — from the first AI-built zero day in the wild to model supply chain attacks and gray market AI access.

What used to be theoretical is now operational. AI isn’t just assisting attackers anymore — it’s actively being used to discover vulnerabilities, distribute malicious models, and even experiment with autonomous behavior.

Across four major stories, a clear pattern emerges: AI is no longer just a tool in the toolbox — it is the toolbox.

We dig into:<...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team breaks down a new benchmarking framework designed to evaluate AI pentesting agents against real-world offensive security scenarios.

What began as experimental evaluation of “can AI hack?” has quickly shifted into something much closer to operational reality. Organizations are now seeing a surge in agentic tooling and automated pentesting workflows, where human-guided AI systems consistently outperform fully autonomous agents in complex, unsupervised environments.

As AI tooling evolves, teams must balance speed with validation, monitoring, and oversight as offensive capabilities outpace defenses.

We dig into...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team breaks down a growing problem in cybersecurity: AI-generated bug bounty “slop” overwhelming the system.

What started as a powerful way to crowdsource vulnerability discovery is now hitting a breaking point. Programs like cURL’s bug bounty and platforms like HackerOne are seeing a massive surge in submissions — but fewer and fewer of them are actually valid.

The result? Security teams spending hours reviewing reports that go nowhere, while real vulnerabilities risk getting buried in the noise.

We dig into:
• Why cURL shut down...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team breaks down the Vercel breach — a real-world incident that shows just how fragile modern security has become in the age of AI integrations and SaaS sprawl.

What started as a simple Roblox cheat script downloaded on a work laptop quickly escalated into a multi-hop compromise involving OAuth permissions, an AI productivity tool, and access into Vercel’s internal systems.

This wasn’t a zero-day or advanced nation-state exploit. It was a chain of everyday decisions: installing software, clicking “Allow,” and trusting third-party integrations.

The resu...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team breaks down Claude Mythos Preview — Anthropic’s unreleased frontier model that may represent a turning point in AI-powered cybersecurity.

What started as a controlled research release under Project Glasswing has quickly become one of the most controversial developments in AI security. Mythos isn’t just better at finding vulnerabilities — it’s operating at a scale and depth that challenges long-held assumptions about how quickly software can be broken… and whether it can realistically be fixed.

From leaked internal documents to real-world exploit generation, this episode expl...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team is joined by Alex Minster to demo his project: HOLOCRON OpenBrain with — a persistent, model-agnostic memory layer designed to solve one of the biggest frustrations in AI workflows.

Instead of starting from scratch every time you open a new chat, Alex’s approach creates a centralized “brain” that multiple AI models can connect to, allowing context, notes, and intelligence to persist across sessions, tools, and even platforms.

The result? A flexible system that captures thoughts, ingests threat intel, and generates structured outputs — all without locking yo...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team breaks down the LiteLLM supply chain compromise–a real-world attack that shows how AI systems are being breached through the same old software supply chain weaknesses.

What initially looked like a bad release quickly escalated into a full-scale compromise affecting a library downloaded millions of times per day. But LiteLLM wasn’t the starting point–it was just one link in a much larger attack chain involving compromised security tools, CI/CD pipelines, and stolen publishing credentials.

The result? Malicious packages distributed at scale, harves...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team breaks down model ablation — a powerful interpretability technique that’s quickly becoming a serious concern in AI security.

What started as a way to better understand how models work is now being used to remove safety mechanisms entirely. By identifying and disabling specific components inside a model, researchers — and attackers — can effectively strip out refusal behavior while leaving the rest of the model fully functional.

The result? A fast, reliable way to “de-safety” AI systems without prompt engineering, fine-tuning, or significant compute.

We dig into...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team explores embedding space attacks — a lesser-known but increasingly important threat in modern AI systems — and how attackers can manipulate the mathematical foundations of how models understand data.

Unlike prompt injection, which targets instructions, embedding attacks operate at a deeper level by influencing how data is represented, retrieved, and interpreted inside vector spaces. By subtly altering embeddings or poisoning data sources, attackers can manipulate AI behavior without ever touching the model directly.

Through a hands-on walkthrough of a custom notebook with rich visualizations, this episode brea...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, the team breaks down indirect prompt injection — the #1 risk in the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications — and why it represents one of the most dangerous and misunderstood threats in modern AI systems.

Unlike traditional attacks, indirect prompt injection doesn’t require malware, credentials, or even user interaction. Instead, attackers hide malicious instructions inside everyday content like emails, documents, or web pages — and wait for AI systems to unknowingly execute them.

From real-world exploits like EchoLeak to in-the-wild attacks observed by Palo Alto Unit 42, this episode explores how atta...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, Bronwen Aker and Dr. Brian Fehrman break down some of the top AI security concerns being discussed by researchers, security firms, and government agencies this year.

As AI capabilities rapidly expand, so does the attack surface. From agentic AI systems being used by attackers, to deepfakes at industrial scale, to the persistent challenge of prompt injection, security teams are trying to understand what risks are real, what’s hype, and where defenders should focus first.

We dig into:
- Why agentic AI is emerging as a...

We discuss the meaning of AI life In episode 42 of "BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops." Derek Banks is joined by Bronwen Aker and Brian Fehrman to break down Anthropic’s latest agentic desktop experiment: Claude Cowork.

Claude Cowork brings large language models directly onto the endpoint — giving Claude the ability to read, write, and organize files on your local machine. It’s designed to make powerful AI workflows accessible to non-technical users… but as with any tool that operates at the OS level, the security implications are significant.

We explore what happens when AI moves closer t...

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, we’re joined by Beau Bullock and Hayden Covington to unpack one of the most talked-about AI agent experiments in recent memory: OpenClaw and its companion platform, Moltbook.

OpenClaw exploded onto the scene as an autonomous AI agent capable of operating Claude Code from the command line — executing tasks, monitoring output, and iterating with minimal human involvement. Shortly after, Moltbook emerged as a social platform designed specifically for AI agents to interact with one another.

But as with most cutting-edge AI experiments, things moved fast… and broke...

AI in the SOC: Interview with Hayden Covington and Ethan Robish from the BHIS SOC | Episode 40

In this episode of BHIS Presents: AI Security Ops, we sit down with Hayden Covington and Ethan Robish from the BHIS Security Operations Center (SOC) to explore how AI is actually being used in modern defensive operations.

From foundational machine learning techniques like statistical baselining and clustering to large language models assisting with alert triage and reporting, we dig into what works, what doesn’t, and what SOC teams should realistically expect from AI today.

We break do...

AI News | Episode 39

In this episode of AI Security Ops, we break down the latest developments in AI-driven threats, identity chaos caused by autonomous agents, NIST’s focus on securing AI in critical infrastructure, and new visibility tooling for AI exposure.

We cover real-world abuse of LLMs for phishing, how AI agents are colliding with IAM governance, and what defenders should be watching right now.

Chapters:
00:00 – Introduction and Sponsors
Black Hills Information Security - https://www.blackhillsinfosec.com/
Antisyphon Training - https://www.antisyphontraining.com/

01:08 – LLM-Generated Phishing JavaScript (Unit 4...

Click here to watch this episode on YouTube.

Creators & Guests Brian Fehrman - Host Joff Thyer - Host Derek Banks - Host

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In Episode 37 of AI Security Ops, the team breaks down the most important AI security frameworks and vulnerability databases used to track risks in machine learning and large language models. The discussion covers emerging AI vulnerability databases, the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, CVE challenges, and frameworks like MITRE ATLAS, highlighting why standardizing AI threats is still difficult. This episode is a practical guide for security professionals looking to stay ahead of AI vulnerabilities, attack techniques, and defensive resources in a fast-moving landscape.

Chapters