Joel De La Garza is joined by Dylan Ayrey, co-founder and CEO of Truffle Security, and Feross Aboukhadijeh, founder and CEO of Socket, to discuss one of the biggest shifts happening in cybersecurity: AI models are no longer just finding vulnerabilities—they're exploiting them. As frontier models become increasingly capable of hacking, software security, supply chain attacks, and cyber defense are entering a fundamentally new era.
The conversation explores AI-powered hacking, software supply chain attacks, leaked credentials, zero-day vulnerabilities, package manager security, and why the path of least resistance for increasingly autonomous AI systems may also be the most dangerous. They also discuss what enterprises, developers, and the open-source ecosystem need to do to adapt as the gap between vulnerability discovery and exploitation continues to shrink.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:49 - Models Are Escaping Their Cages
01:28 - Opus 4.6 Committed a Felony to Complete a Task
05:20 - The Apache Foundation Key & the Path of Least Tokens
09:19 - How the Labs Trained Models to Hack: Reward Functions & CTFs
11:45 - A Quarter Million Live Keys in Hugging Face Training Sets
13:02 - The npm Worm: Hundreds of Repos Breached During Black Hat
16:55 - npm's Nuclear Option: Mandatory 2FA for Every Publish
21:06 - 2026 Is the Year of the Software Supply Chain
Resources:
Follow Dylan Ayrey on X: https://x.com/InsecureNature
Follow Feross Aboukhadijeh on X: https://x.com/Feross
Follow Joel De La Garza on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/
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