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...

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, go...

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 atta...

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. Bu...

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: - AST...

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 p...

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, c...

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 e...

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, indi...

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 s...

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...

🔒 Want to run AI without sending your data to the cloud? AI Security Ops co-host Bronwen Aker is teaching Keeping Things Local: Build Private LLMs for Your Team. ✔️ Build a network-accessible private LLM with Ollama ✔️ Customize models for your workflows ✔️ Secure it with Tailscale and nginx ✔️ Keep sensitive data under your control Only $25 Next live session: August 17, 2026 🤖 Want to get hands...

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 secur...

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 atta...

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 t...

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 loc...

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 tra...

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-co...

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 — i...

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,...

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 contro...

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 syst...

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...

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...

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...