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Smashing Security

Smashing Security

Graham Cluley 471 episodes Latest May 27, 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

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 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
What your Oura ring won't tell you May 27, 2026 3186 CISA, the US government agency whose entire job is keeping America's critical infrastructure safe from hackers, has had a contractor publish dozens of plain-text credentials to a public GitHub profile.Meanwhile, your Oura ring is quietly transmitting some of its data unencrypted - and when one journalist asked the company how often it hands user data to law enforcement, the answer was quite te
High-speed train hacks and homicidal lawnmowers May 20, 2026 3357 A 23-year-old radio enthusiast spent £300 on a piece of kit from the internet, and used it to bring four packed high-speed trains to a screeching halt. His defence in court? Possibly the most creative excuse we've heard all year.Meanwhile, owners of $4,000 robot lawnmowers are discovering that their gadget can be hijacked over the internet, redirected at journalists who foolishly lie down in f
How ShinyHunters hacked the world's biggest universities May 13, 2026 3854 Welcome to the largest educational data breach in history - affecting nearly 9,000 institutions, every Ivy League university, and 30 million students mid-finals. When Canvas's parent company refused to pay and announced they had deployed "security patches" instead, the hackers were less than impressed. So they came back through the cat flap.Meanwhile, a famous finance expert's face
Meta sees everything, Copy Fail, and a deepfake gets hired May 6, 2026 3762 Meta's smart glasses promise privacy "designed for you" - but everything they record was being beamed off to workers in Nairobi to label by hand. When those workers blew the whistle, Meta sacked all 1,108 of them.Meanwhile, the IT press is in a frenzy over a new Linux bug called "Copy Fail" - complete with logo, dedicated website, and a marketing-friendly name. But is it really
This developer wanted to cheat at Roblox. It cost millions Apr 29, 2026 3877 A developer at an AI startup wanted to cheat at Roblox. They downloaded a dodgy script on their work laptop. That one decision triggered a cascade of failures that ended with a $2 million data breach affecting hundreds of thousands of organisations. All for some free in-game currency.Meanwhile, there's a 1980s phone protocol called SS7 that lets shadowy surveillance companies track anyone, any
Rockstar got hacked. The data was junk. The secrets it revealed were not Apr 22, 2026 3085 A company that ran anonymous tip lines for 35,000 American schools - handling reports of bullying, weapons, and self-harm - boasted on its website that it had suffered zero security breaches in over 20 years. A hacker called Internet Yiff Machine thought that sounded like a challenge, with predictable results...Meanwhile, Rockstar Games gets hacked again - and the stolen data turns out to be less
This AI company leaked its own code. It's also built something terrifying Apr 15, 2026 3035 A hacking group claims to have broken into the flood defence system protecting Venice's Piazza San Marco - and is offering to sell access to whoever wants it. The asking price? A frankly insulting $600.Meanwhile, Anthropic accidentally leaked the source code for Claude Code via a basic packaging mistake. Oh, and by the way, they've also just revealed they've built an AI model called My
LinkedIn is spying on you, and you agreed to nothing Apr 8, 2026 2519 LinkedIn has been secretly scanning your browser for over 6,000 installed extensions — on every single click you make. It can tell if you're job hunting, what religion you are, and whether you have ADHD. And none of this is mentioned anywhere in their privacy policy.Meanwhile, California's crypto millionaires are learning that no amount of encryption can protect you from someone who knocks
This man hid $400 million in a fishing rod. Then it vanished Apr 1, 2026 2732 A cannabis-growing, beekeeping, gyrocopter-flying Irishman invested his drug money in Bitcoin back in 2011 - and now sits on a fortune worth $400 million. There's just one small problem: the access codes were tucked inside his fishing rod case, which has mysteriously vanished. Or has it? Because this week, one of his frozen wallets suddenly woke up and moved $35 million - and someone had to id
Never knock on the door of a nuclear submarine base and ask for a selfie Mar 26, 2026 2443 A disgruntled data analyst decides that the best response to losing his contract is to steal the entire company payroll database and demand $2.5 million in Bitcoin - signing his extortion emails from a company called "Loot."Meanwhile, two people drive up to the entrance of the UK's nuclear submarine base at Faslane and politely ask if they can have a look around. Tourists? Spies? Somet

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