Absolute AppSec

In this episode, Seth and Ken debate OpenAI's Atlas browser, which embeds AI into web browsing. Ken views it as a major privacy concern, potentially accelerating invasive data collection and surveillance. Seth noted that new browsers historically have critical flaws. They acknowledged that AI is very useful for generic and technical internet searches. They discussed the Co-Fish attack, a phishing...

For the 300th (!!!!) episode of the podcast, Seth and Ken reminisce on changes to the industry and overall approach to application security since inception. The hosts discussed the evolution of the industry, noting that once-popular approaches like blindly emulating "hip" Silicon Valley security programs and running unmanaged Security Champions Programs have fallen out of favor, as organizations n...

The duo is back after a short hiatus. Today's episode is inspired by recent articles related to startups, funding, and the grind that happens when building a company or being an individual contributor. Specifically, a recent article about AI startup founders putting in long hours to the exclusion of everything else is debated. This is followed by aa discussion on the current security AI startup hy...

In what is (sadly) becoming a weekly segment, this episode starts with talk of the latest installment of npm package takeovers, dubbed Shai Hulud as discussed in Slack and analyzed by Paul McCarty and team. Strategies discussed for monitoring packages and preventing malware from entering into organization's products. This is followed by an article referencing security via intentional redundancy wh...

The Absolute AppSec duo returns with an in-depth episode talking about true and false positives, where context matters and business impact must be taken into account in order to avoid rabbit holes. This discussion spurred by a recent article from signalblur of magonia.io discussing alerts in a security operations center. In short, only considering existence of a flaw (or alert) is not enough by it...

Ken and Seth kickoff a podcast by reviewing current state of the OWASP Top 10 project, given recent requests and interactions on Absolute AppSec slack from various contributors. This is followed by an in-depth breakdown of the recent NX npm package compromise. This breakdown shows that even though AI is weaponized to exfiltrate data, the main exploit was the result of a command injection flaw. Cro...

Seth and Ken return with a new episode summarizing their experience at DEF CON 33 and all things Las Vegas over the past month. This includes panels, talks, workshops, happy hours, and even corporate (boo) events. This is followed by discussion of a few research items that came out of the conference, including James Kettle's HTTP1.1 Must Die talk. Finally, why AI is infecting Application Security.

Just in time for AppSec sweeps week, Anshuman Bhartiya is joining Seth Law (sethlaw on social media) and Ken Johnson (cktricky) on the Absolute AppSec podcast! With over a decade in the security industry, Anshuman Bhartiya brings a wealth of knowledge to the table, in web application penetration testing and product security for major enterprises (EMC, Intuit, Atlassian, Lytx, etc). As the current...

Spurred by a recent article from Venture in Security, this episode delves deep into the practical application of security into an organization's SDLC. Covering a range of issues from gaps in contextual understanding to disingenuous vendor claims, Seth and Ken share their experiences dealing with small and large organizations with varying levels of maturity. Some degree of nihilism is warranted, bu...

Seth and Ken are _back_ to talk through some recent experiences and news across the industry. To start the episode, Seth highlights the edge cases uncovered during manual code review that require context to understand and identify. Inspired by recent a recent post on AI Slop in the curl bug bounty program, the duo addresses the increase of slop across bug bounty reports and why it happens. Finally...

Sean Varga, current regional sales manager with noted ASPM company Cycode joins Ken (@cktricky) and Seth (@sethlaw) to discuss the dawning realization organizations are having that they need AppSec experience and tech help to accompany their swelling numbers of developers. Sean's introduces "the OWASP Top 10 for AppSec Sales" to the community Before joining Cycode, Sean worked as Large Enterprise...

Ken returns after a week's hiatus to review the latest AppSec news with Seth. Specifically, the idea that authentication fatigue exists for both consumers and developers. The amount of choice to implement security controls can have unintended consequences and introduces risk that may or may not be considered. This is followed by research from SquareX that claims Browser AI Agents are riskier and e...

With @cktricky out on a grand tour across the country (or just unable to record for the day), @sethlaw succumbs to the dark side to give @lojikil a platform to talk about recent developments in the application security world. Specifically, a discussion on vulnerability data and scoring mechanisms, including CVE, CVSS, CWSS, and other acronyms. Wraps up with a longer discussion on the use of AI acr...

Seth and Ken return with an in-depth discussion around the future of security due to use of AI. The landscape of security is changing quickly and we do not know where it is headed. As such, it is worth exploring how it has changed security's outlook and what we are seeing across organizations from a consulting and product perspective. A recent article from a16z titled "Next-Gen Pentesting: AI Empo...

Hayden Smith, Hunted Labs Co-Founder comes on Absolute AppSec to discuss, among other things, the Hunted Labs work discovering and publicizing the EasyJson software supply chain threat. Before co-founding Hunted Labs, Hayden was Senior Director of Field Services at Anchore, assisting US government, intelligence, and Fortune 500 clients. Long a specialist on supply-chain issues, Smith established t...

We are happy to have Kayra Otaner as a special guest on the Absolute AppSec podcast. Kayra (kayraotaner on LinkedIn and X/twitter), the current Director of DevSecOps at Roche, brings over 15 years of cybersecurity leadership experience from New York and Wall Street. He's led DevSecOps and DevOps teams across a variety of organizations, including ADP, Voice, and adMarketplace, and has served as a t...

News this week has been dominated by dependency issues and attribution towards unwanted nation states and actors. Specifically, easyjson is developed by a Russian firm that is under sanctions. The podcast duo discuss the implications and how to protect apps from sub-dependency threats. This leads to a deep dive into breaches and whether a breach has an effect on the industry, company, or individua...

Back after a hiatus for both BSidesSF and RSA, Seth and Ken recap their experience at both conferences. TL;DR - BSidesSF is great for technical security content and community, RSA focuses on sales for mostly large organizations and budgets. Two sides of the security industry coin and depends on preferences for which makes the most sense for career or business growth. This is followed by a short di...

Ok, so vulnerable MCP tools are a thing now? Ken demonstrates installing and running an intentionally vulnerable MCP server with a bunch of example issues. Following is a discussion of the recent article and research around hallucinations of 3rd party dependencies/libraries in AI-Generated Python and JavaScript. New attack targets all dependent on how creative the LLM is allowed to be. A short asi...

It is time to talk about Model Context Protocol (MCP), Google's Agent 2 Agent specification, and get back to the crocs and socks of authentication for Non-Human Identities (NHIs). MCP servers have exploded over the last few weeks and provide a standard mechanism for LLMs to interact with pretty much _anything_. Seth and Ken talk about the risks, exposures, and where things could go from here.

The duo are back for a discussion on securing machine learning models using Sigstore, based on a recent blog post from Google Security. Followed by some spicy takes on opinions on vibe coding and its effects on application and product security. Finally, short-lived tokens used to exploit RCE against the GitHub CodeQL Action.

Seth and Ken are back with an episode dedicated to a review of the recent Next.js middleware vulnerability and how that impacts application security both specifically and in general. Over-dependence on third party software accompanied by agile development can lead to devastating results when security flaws are identified. A followup and demo of using LLMs to analyze HTTP sessions for user enumerat...

After a week's hiatus, Ken and Seth return and start with a discussion on OWASP conferences and the effectiveness of attendance for vendors. This is followed by an expansive mental health discussion inspired by a recent blog post on Destructive Fatigue from Justin Larson at Redpoint Security. A constant focus on breaking and tearing down applications or anything can have mental health effects. Add...

Seth and Ken return without a guest to discuss recent news, breaches, and research. Initial discussions around the purposes of the various security conferences and what is recommended for various professional levels. An article discussing recent customer data exposure by Zapier in git test data. Synthetic test data has been an issue for long time so not a surprising turn of events. Finally, though...

Kyle Rippee, currently staff product security engineer at Tines, joins Seth and Ken for another episode of Absolute AppSec. Kyle has over a decade of experience both managing and working for Application Security teams, as well as working as a pentester, security consultant, and software engineer. Before Tines, he worked for PlanetArt (where he held the role of Director of Information Security), Fl...