Neural Newscast

Welcome to Prime Cyber Insights. I'm Noah Feldman. We are finally closing out 2025. And man, what a year it has been. We've really seen the digital economy start to buckle under the weight of its own complexity. From those deep supply chains to the very air we breathe in the cloud, you know, the vulnerabilities weren't just isolated incidents. They were systemic. Mm-hmm. And I'm Sophia Bennett. As we look at the legal and, well, the diplomatic fallout of these breaches, it's just so clear that our global institutions are struggling to keep pace with the shifting threat landscape. It's moving faster than the law can follow. To help us make sense of the sheer scale of these events, we have a very special guest joining us today. Joining us is Thatcher Collins. Thatcher is a space and astrophysics correspondent, and he's known for this really steady, awe-aware delivery. He balances scientific rigor with a sense of wonder, making even the most complex discoveries accessible. Thatcher, you bring a unique systems-level perspective on security and engineering, treating our global network almost like, well, like a planetary ecosystem. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Sophia. It's a pleasure to be here. You know, looking at the data from 2025, it is actually quite hard not to draw parallels to orbital mechanics. When one piece of debris, I mean even one malicious library, enters a high traffic orbit, the kinetic chain reaction can be, well, it can be staggering. We aren't just looking at software bugs anymore. We're looking at a collision of vast, interconnected systems. Yeah, that's exactly what we saw with supply chains this year. The Ars Technica report actually calls them the gift that keeps on hacking. We had incidents where compromised packages reached 2 billion weekly downloads. That is 2 billion with a B, Thatcher. When you look at the Solana blockchain backdoor or the poisoning of the Go language mirrors, does that feel like a failure of engineering or more like a failure of the environment itself? I would say it's environmental, Noah. In astrophysics, we talk about point failures that cause entire star systems to collapse. In 2025, the point failures were the developers. Threat actors didn't just break into companies. They poisoned the well. They compromised just three developers for Magento-based software and affected 500 e-commerce companies all at once. It's the efficiency of the attack that is so awe-inspiring, you know, in a terrifying way. Speaking of efficiency, the legal world was rocked by the Rondo Docs botnet. It exploited that React to shell flaw in Next.js. Noah, you've been tracking the North Korean link there, right? Exactly. The Shadow Server Foundation found over 94,000 assets exposed. But what's fascinating, and honestly a bit confusing, is the legal pivot we saw this week. The U.S. Treasury actually lifted sanctions on three individuals linked to Intellexa and the Predator spyware. They claimed these individuals demonstrated measures to separate themselves from the consortium. It's a controversial move that many in the human rights sector, like Access Now, are calling a dangerous precedent. Right. It feels like a, you know, a get-out-of-jail-free card for high-level spyware enablers. Right. Meanwhile, we have the human side of the crime. Two cybersecurity pros, a ransomware negotiator and an incident response manager, actually pleaded guilty to being ALPV affiliates. I mean, they were moonlighting as the very villains they were paid to stop. It's unbelievable. It's a reminder that the most sophisticated system is still operated by humans. Right. Whether it's an ALPV affiliate or that former Coinbase agent arrested in India this month, the human variable is the most unpredictable element in the equation. It's like a telescope with a perfectly ground mirror, but a shaky tripod. No matter how good the lens is, the image is going to be blurred. Thatcher, I want to talk about the cloud. October 2025 was a dark month. A single software bug in an AWS load balancer caused a 15-hour global outage. We were promised the cloud was decentralized and resilient, right? Like a digital redundancy of a nuclear-proof network? What happened there? The reality of 2025 is that the cloud is just someone else's computer. And right now, that someone is a very small group of companies. When AWS had that race condition in its DNS configurations, it wasn't just a website going down. It was a fundamental utility of modern life failing. It's a sobering realization that our digital infrastructure is far more centralized than the early internet pioneers ever intended. And then there's the AI. We saw memory poisoning this year. Researchers showed that you could feed an LLM like Eliza a false memory, and it would start diverting cryptocurrency to an attacker's wallet because it literally couldn't distinguish between a past event and a malicious prompt. It's like inception for bots. It's a fascinating evolution, isn't it? We're moving from hacking code to hacking cognition. If you can rewrite the history of an autonomous agent, you don't need to break its encryption. You just change its reality. It reminds me of how light from a distant star can be bent by gravity. What the observer sees isn't actually where the star is. We are entering an era of digital gravitational lensing. We should probably end on the one success story Dan Gooden highlighted, which was Signal. They overhauled their entire app to be quantum resistant. In a year of failures, this stands out as a genuine triumph of foresight. It truly is a triumph. While everyone else was patching holes in the hull, Signal was building a ship that can withstand the solar flares of the future. Quantum computing is the supernova on the horizon for encryption, and Signal is the first to actually prepare for the fallout. It's elegant, it's rigorous, and it's the kind of engineering that gives me hope. A rare bright spot in a year of shadows. Thatcher Collins, thank you so much for bringing that cosmic perspective to our year-end wrap-up. It's been a pleasure. My pleasure, Noah. Keep looking up. And keep your patches current. That's all for Prime Cyber Insights in 2025. We'll be back in the new year to see what else the digital universe has in store. For Noah Feldman and our guest, Thatcher Collins, I'm Sophia Bennett. Stay secure. Neural Newscast is AI-assisted, human-reviewed. View our AI transparency policy at neuralnewscast.com.