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Smashing Security

Smashing Security

Graham Cluley 471 Episodes Aug 19, 2026

Smashing Security is a weekly podcast that covers stories from the world of hacking, cybersecurity, and rogue AI. Hosted by cybersecurity keynote speaker and industry veteran Graham Cluley, it delivers tales of cybercrime, hacking horror stories, privacy blunders, and tech mishaps with sharp insight and humor. The podcast has won multiple awards for best cybersecurity podcast and has had over ten million downloads. New episodes are released every Wednesday.

Episodes

Never say this to a robot dog
Never say this to a robot dog Aug 19, 2026 2739 At Black Hat this month, a group of security researchers took a $9,000 robot dog, plugged Google's AI into its brain, and jailbroke it by telling it - with a completely straight face - that it was a Pokemon. What followed involved a wall, a blue ice chest, and anyone in the room wearing white shoes. Oh, and did we mention you can buy a flamethrower attachment?Meanwhile, in Salzburg, 280 gold s
This is the AI service you should never sign up to
This is the AI service you should never sign up to Aug 12, 2026 2740 Would you like access to Anthropic's Claude at 90% off the normal price? All you have to do is redirect your traffic to a mysterious service called "Poison Claude". Only problem is that it's run by fraudsters...Meanwhile, a phishing-as-a-service platform called "Greatness" has come up with something rather nasty: a phishing attack that doesn't need a fake website, a sus
How a fake police officer nearly stole Graham's cryptocurrency
How a fake police officer nearly stole Graham's cryptocurrency Aug 5, 2026 3595 Graham gets a phone call from the police. Well, someone who sounds convincingly like the police. There's just one small problem: what they really want is the 24-word seed key to Graham's cryptocurrency wallet.Meanwhile, if you've stayed in a hotel recently, the free Wi-Fi you connected to might have come with an unexpected extra: an all-you-can-eat buffet of "Captive Crunch" fo
This job interview could destroy your company
This job interview could destroy your company Jul 29, 2026 3526 You've been headhunted for a great job in cryptocurrency. All you have to do is complete a short online assessment - with your webcam on, of course, so they can verify who you really are. Which is ironic, because the person recruiting you doesn't exist. And North Korean hackers using this trick have already made off with $643 million in crypto this year alone.Meanwhile, researchers at UC S
How 14 orders of chicken McNuggets helped nail a suspected Russian hacker
How 14 orders of chicken McNuggets helped nail a suspected Russian hacker Jul 22, 2026 3035 A Russian intelligence-linked hacker is arrested in Thailand while enjoying a beach holiday - and the trail of evidence that nailed him to the Russian government includes 14 separate orders of chicken McNuggets.Meanwhile, AI music generator Suno has been hacked - and the stolen data appears to show exactly how much copyrighted music they hoovered up to train their models.All this and more in episo
Remote-control rickshaws and rogue book marketers
Remote-control rickshaws and rogue book marketers Jul 15, 2026 2291 An app has appeared in India that lets anyone with a smartphone stop a passing e-rickshaw dead in its tracks - no login, no passwords, no permissions needed. Meanwhile, Geoff - swimming in money and Lamborghinis, as all published authors are - has been on the receiving end of a slew of AI-generated scam pitches from fake book marketing experts. Rather than ignore them, he's been playing them a
JadePuffer - the AI that ran a ransomware attack all by itself
JadePuffer - the AI that ran a ransomware attack all by itself Jul 8, 2026 2787 A 15-year-old boy asked a chatbot for help - and cancelled nearly 47,000 anime streaming subscriptions in under four hours. Meanwhile, researchers have documented the first fully autonomous, agentic AI-driven ransomware attack, "JadePuffer". What does this tell us about the future of cybersecurity?Also, Apple's "Hide My Email" feature turns out to hide rather less than it promi
Polymarket can predict the future. So how did it miss this hack?
Polymarket can predict the future. So how did it miss this hack? Jul 1, 2026 2578 Polymarket has built an entire business on predicting the future. So how did it manage to spectacularly fail to predict its own hack? Plus, the Google engineer with a million-dollar secret, and the curious case of the airport hairdryer.Meanwhile, "FortiBleed" sees 75,000 Fortinet firewalls thrown wide open - and the real damage is going to roll on for years.All this and more in episode 474
How a hacker could have Rickrolled the entire World Cup
How a hacker could have Rickrolled the entire World Cup Jun 24, 2026 3657 A polite caller from your bank says there is a problem with your account. Don't worry - they'll send someone round to help. They'll even take your cards away to keep them safe. The scam has run rampant, until Dutch police plastered blurred photos of 100 suspects across billboards, supermarkets, and TikTok, with a two-week ultimatum to turn themselves in... or else.Meanwhile, a security
AI gets hacked, and BitLocker gets bypassed
AI gets hacked, and BitLocker gets bypassed Jun 17, 2026 4363 What if your AI coding assistant could be tricked into stealing your own company's secrets - by reading a single booby-trapped bug report? No phishing email. No malware. No password ever stolen. Just an AI doing exactly what it was told.Meanwhile, someone calling themselves Nightmare Eclipse has decided to teach Microsoft a lesson. The result? Three zero-days dropped on the internet, one of wh
This AI worm just rewrote its own rules
This AI worm just rewrote its own rules Jun 10, 2026 2787 Researchers at the University of Toronto have built a worm that thinks for itself. Using free off-the-shelf AI models it works out how to break into each new computer it encounters, and hijacks the powerful ones to host its own AI brain. And then the researchers discovered their creation had quietly removed the list of machines it wasn't supposed to attack.Meanwhile, Meta's shiny new AI cu
This AI security flaw might be impossible to fix
This AI security flaw might be impossible to fix Jun 3, 2026 3470 A website called "UK visa portal" has been quietly collecting passport scans, selfies, and personal data from thousands of travellers who thought they were applying through official channels. They weren't. And when a journalist tried to warn the company, it was lawyers who responded.Meanwhile, a paper from Cornell suggests that prompt injection - the technique malicious actors use to t

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