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Checking out malware, checking out Palo AltoNeed something to read?This week, we're taking a look at Mastering Palo Alto Networks by Tom Piens aka 'reaper'. The book is available for a knockdown price for a limited time, so don't miss out!Unlock the full potential of Palo Alto Networks firewalls with expert insights and hands-on strategies for mastering next-gen security:- Master Palo Alto Networks firewalls with hands-on labs and expert guidance- Stay up to date with the latest features, including cloud and security enhancements- Learn how to set up and leverage Strata Cloud Manager- Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBookCheck it out today!#205: Spider-Scam!A look at the issuesWelcome to another_secpro!It's been a busy few weeks for those of us wrestling with Scattered Spider.Over the past two weeks, the hacker group (also tracked as UNC3944 or Muddled Libra) has ramped up attacks across major industries. They’ve been using social-engineering tricks—ringing up help desks or call centers, pretending to be employees and convincing staff to reset or add MFA devices. That’s the pathway they use to slip past security, move through networks, and grab sensitive data or deploy ransomware.UK retail giants like M&S, Harrods, and Co‑Op have been hit in a wave of attacks, causing disruptions and steep financial losses. They quickly pivoted to U.S. insurance firms, and this week they’ve focused on aviation. At least Hawaiian Airlines and WestJet reported IT system incidents in late June, and most recently Qantas confirmed a breach of a third-party contact‑center platform tied to Scattered Spider tactics. That incident potentially exposed personal data of up to six million customers—names, emails, birthdates and frequent-flyer numbers—though no passports or credit card details were taken.Check out _secpro premiumThe FBI, Google/Mandiant, CrowdStrike and others issued warnings, flagging how the group targets entire industries in waves. Their method is low-tech but effective: exploit human trust to bypass tech defenses, then move laterally, extort data, and sometimes encrypt systems.Impact on global industry has been significant—retail sales stalled, insurance providers scrambled, airlines huddled with cybersecurity teams and regulators. Stock prices dipped, and affected companies are now tightening vendor controls, reinforcing help-desk protocols, and training staff to question any out-of-the-blue IT requests. Here's to better days ahead...Cheers!Austin MillerEditor-in-ChiefThis week's articlesMastering Palo Alto NetworksWe do our best to be good to you all - so here's a free look into Mastering Palo Alto Networks by Tom Piens. The whole chapter is for free as a thank you for staying with us over the years. Check it out!Check out this excerpt!News BytesQantas suffers massive data breach via third‑party call centre:Australia’s flagship airline confirmed that hackers accessed a third-party customer‑service platform, compromising personal info—including names, emails, phone numbers, birth dates, and frequent flyer numbers—of around 6 million customers. No financial or passport data was exposed. Regulatory bodies and law enforcement are engaged, and Qantas has initiated containment, support services, and strengthened monitoring.SK Telecom fined after data leak affecting 27 million records: South Korea’s top mobile carrier was reprimanded and fined ~30 million won after a breach revealed nearly 27 million pieces of user data (including USIM data). The government mandated quarterly security reviews and a ₩700 billion investment over 5 years. SK Telecom is also replacing millions of SIM cards as a precaution.Aflac hit by social‑engineering attack tied to Scattered Spider: Health insurer Aflac reported a data breach stemming from a sophisticated phone-based social‑engineering campaign by the Scattered Spider group. The intrusion—which may have exposed customer SSNs, claims, and health data—was shut down within hours. This incident aligns with similar recent attacks on Erie and Philadelphia insurers.FBI warns airlines face rising threat from Scattered Spider: The FBI has issued alerts that Scattered Spider—an agile cybercriminal gang specializing in social engineering—has turned its focus to airlines. Previously known for breaching casinos and insurers, the group uses help‑desk impersonation and MFA bypass tactics. Cooperation with industry partners is underway to strengthen defenses.Credentials dump exposes 16 billion login details (Apple, Google, Facebook): A massive aggregation of stolen credentials—16 billion records including usernames, passwords, and URLs—was exposed, drawing from various infostealer malware campaigns. Experts warn this could fuel credential stuffing, phishing, and identity theft. Users are strongly advised to enable 2FA/passkeys, use password managers, and monitor dark‑web trade.Job‑seekers targeted in new “employment” phishing scams: Attackers are increasingly exploiting job‑seekers with fake hiring campaigns, impersonating real firms (e.g., Socure). Victims report losses averaging ~$8,000. With FTC receiving 100,000+ scam reports in 2024, companies like Socure are tightening verification. Meanwhile, DHS warns that Iranian-aligned threat actors could retaliate via cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructure—a reminder of broader geopolitical threats.This week's academiaThe AI Security Pyramid of Pain (Chris M. Ward et al.): This 2024 study introduces the AI Security Pyramid of Pain, adapting David Bianco’s original framework to AI systems. It structures threat levels from Data Integrity (bottom), through AI System Performance, Adversarial Tools, Adversarial Input, Data Provenance, and up to intelligent TTP-based attacks (top). The paper guides defenders on focusing defenses at higher levels that cause the most “pain” to adversaries.So, I climbed to the top of the pyramid of pain — now what? (Vasilis Katos, Emily Rosenorn‑Lanng, et al.): Published May 30, 2025, this paper examines the limitations of conventional models and proposes the Human Layer Kill Chain, integrating human factors (psychological manipulation) with AI-augmented TTPs. It introduces a “Sociotechnical Kill Plane” concept for holistic defensive strategy, bridging the Pyramid of Pain and human‑centric threat vectors.Analysis of adversary activities using cloud‑based web services to enhance cyber threat intelligence: This paper delves into proactive threat intelligence, explicitly citing Bianco’s Pyramid of Pain to clarify how different IOCs—from IPs to TTPs—vary in difficulty for adversaries and defenders. It emphasizes mapping indicators to pyramid levels to inform where defense efforts yield the greatest attack disruption.Upcoming events for _secpros this yearHere are the five conferences we're looking forward to the most this year (in no particular order...) and how you can get involved to boost your posture!DSEI (9th-12th September): DSEI stands out as a global platform that bridges defence, security, and cybersecurity. With its broad focus on cutting-edge technologies, this event is critical for those involved in national defence, law enforcement, and private security. Cybersecurity is a prominent theme, with sessions addressing both offensive and defensive cyber strategies.Defcon (7th-10th August): Defcon is a legendary event in the hacker and cybersecurity communities. Known for its hands-on approach, Defcon offers interactive workshops, capture-the-flag contests, and discussions on emerging threats. The conference is ideal for those looking to immerse themselves in technical aspects of cybersecurity.Black Hat (2nd-7th August): Black Hat USA is synonymous with advanced security training and research. This premier event features technical briefings, hands-on workshops, and sessions led by global security experts. Attendees can explore the latest trends in penetration testing, malware analysis, and defensive techniques, making it a must-attend for cybersecurity professionals.*{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width: 100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width: 100%;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}}

Google steps into robotics and dev-side AI tools AI_Distilled #102: What’s New in AI This Week Learn to Run and Deploy Open-Source LLMs with This Free Course Join Open-Source LLM Zoomcamp to explore how to run, fine-tune, and deploy open-source large language models. During this short free course, you’ll discover the open-source LLM ecosystem, learn practical tools like Hugging Face, vLLM, and Llama Factory, and work with models like DeepSeek-R1. Register now for free Hello and welcome to this week’s AI roundup! Here’s wishing our readers in the U.S. a very Happy Independence Day! This week, we’re witnessing thrilling developments in the AI race. With China closing in on the AI gap through its open-source strategy and Meta poaching OpenAI’s employees, it looks like this summer is heating for the AI giants. Dive in for the full scoop. LLM Expert Insights, Packt In today's issue: 🧠 Expert Build Recap: “Build AI Agents Over the Weekend” drew hundreds to prototype real-world agent use cases with LangChain and Python. 🔮 Next Up—DeepSeek Demystified: Get ready for a live breakdown of DeepSeek’s architecture, strengths, and red flags. 🌍 Global Agent Meetups: From EUMAS to PRIMA, the best events this fall spotlight the future of multi-agent systems. 📦 ERNIE 4.5 Goes Open: Baidu drops 10 massive multimodal MoE models under Apache 2.0—toolkits included. 💸 Meta’s AI Flex: $14.3B Scale AI stake and a star-studded OpenAI exodus fuel Zuck’s Superintelligence Labs. 🤖 Gemini Powers Robotics & Devs: On-device robot control and CLI magic—Google is gunning for full-stack AI. 🛡️ Cloudflare vs AI Bots: With "Pay Per Crawl," Cloudflare strikes back at lopsided content scraping economics. 🛠️ Langfuse Gets Agentic: Multi-agent onboarding, DevOps-ready orchestration, and observability out of the box. 📈LATEST DEVELOPMENT Here is the news of the week. Baidu open sources ERNIE 4.5 model family Baidu's ERNIE 4.5 is a newly open-sourced family of 10 large-scale multimodal AI models, featuring Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures with up to 424B parameters. It features a heterogeneous modality structure designed for efficient cross-modal learning, enhancing performance in text, image, audio, and video tasks. Trained using the PaddlePaddle framework, ERNIE 4.5 achieves state-of-the-art results in instruction following, knowledge retention, and multimodal reasoning. All models are available under the Apache 2.0 license, accompanied by industrial-grade development toolkits. Read more. Meta creates SuperIntelligence Labs, SamA calls it distasteful Meta has successfully recruited several researchers from OpenAI, including Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai. These hires are part of Meta's strategy to assemble a world-class AI research team to drive its superintelligence ambitions. Read more. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called Meta’s $100 million-plus recruitment packages “distasteful,” insisting none of OpenAI’s top engineers have defected to Zuckerberg’s new Superintelligence Labs. In another development, Meta has announced a $14.3 billion investment to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI. This move is aimed atbolstering Meta's capabilities in AI data labeling and infrastructure, positioning the company to accelerate its AI development initiatives. Watch this at 22:39. Google pushes it with robotics on device and Gemini CLI Google DeepMind has introduced Gemini Robotics On-Device, is an AI model that runs directly on robots, eliminating the need for internet connectivity. It offers general-purpose dexterity and rapid task adaptation, enabling robots to perform complex tasks like folding clothes or assembling parts. The model adapts to various robot types and can learn new tasks with minimal demonstrations. AnSDK for developers is has also been made available for fine-tuning and testing. Read more. Google has also released Gemini CLI, a free, open-source AI tool that integrates Gemini 2.5 Pro directly into developers' terminals. It supports natural language prompts for coding, content creation, and task automation, with generous usage limits. The CLI is extensible, integrates with Gemini Code Assist, and supports tools like Veo and Imagen for multimedia generation. Read more. Cloudflare introduces pay per crawl feature, pushes for fair web-use Cloudflare's latest Radar update reveals a growing imbalance between AI bots' bots scraping content and genuine user referrals. For instance, Anthropic's Claude exhibits a 70,900:1 crawl-to-referral ratio, indicating extensive content access with minimal traffic return. This trend threatens publishers' revenue models, prompting Cloudflare to introduce tools like "Pay Per Crawl" and default AI bot blocking to help content creators manage and monetize AI-driven content usage. Read more. Langfuse gets agentic onboarding In its latest update, Langfuse introduces Agentic Onboarding and the Docs MCP Server, allowing developers to spin up multi-agent swarms with a single command, instrument them end-to-end, and hand them to DevOps for seamless production readiness. Read more. EXPERT INSIGHTS What We Built—and What’s Next DeepSeek is an emerging open-source large language model (LLM) ecosystem that’s making waves by delivering GPT-4-level performance without the usual proprietary restrictions. Its flagship DeepSeek-V3 model offers results comparable to GPT-4 at only a fraction of the training cost, with model weights openly available to the community. Under the hood, DeepSeek’s success stems from unique technical breakthroughs. Techniques like Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA), Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, Multi-Token Prediction (MTP), and 8-bit floating point (FP8) precision training work in tandem to boost efficiency and scale. These innovations allow DeepSeek models to maximize throughput and minimize memory bottlenecks, enabling performance on par with leading closed models at dramatically lower cost. Equally important, DeepSeek’s open approach invites the global AI community to build upon these advances, accelerating progress toward more accessible AI. Real-world use cases for DeepSeek already span a broad spectrum. Developers are using the specialized DeepSeek-Coder model for AI-assisted code generation in over 80 programming languages. Other DeepSeek variants excel at complex reasoning (solving math and logic problems) and multilingual natural language understanding, thanks to training on massive, diverse datasets rich in high-quality multilingual data. This versatility makes DeepSeek attractive to practitioners seeking cost-effective, cutting-edge AI solutions. For those eager to learn more, Packt is hosting a one-day virtual summit "DeepSeek Demystified" on August 16 to explore these innovations. It’s a chance to hear insights from experts and see DeepSeek in action — interested readers can register here. If scaling LLMs in production is on your radar, block time for the ML Summit 2025 and MCP Workshop. And there is 25% off our combined ticket with the discount code MCP25. With the combined ticket, you’ll learn how to: Build flexible pipelines that don’t fall apart under load Utilize data infrastructure for AI: SQLMesh, DuckDB, and Apache Iceberg Use Model Context Protocol (MCP) to keep your AI tools and LLMs separate BOOK YOUR SPOT Use code MCP25 at checkout to get 25% off 📈UPCOMING EVENTS Upcoming Must-attend AI Agents Events The world of AI agents is evolving rapidly, with agent-based architectures and autonomous systems taking center stage. From global conferences to hands-on developer meetups, the latter half of 2025 offers many opportunities to learn, network, and build with cutting-edge AI agent technologies. Here's a curated list of key events you won't want to miss: 1. EUMAS 2025 – European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems Date: September 3–5, 2025 Location: Bucharest, Romania Cost: TBA Focus: Research on multi-agent systems 2. AI Agent Event 2025 – East Coast Edition Date: September 29–30, 2025 Location: Herndon, VA, USA Cost: $695 (Early Bird), $995 (Regular) Focus: Real-world AI agent use cases across business and tech 3. PRIMA 2025 – Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems Date: December 15–21, 2025 Location: Modena, Italy Cost: TBA Focus: Research, principles, and applications of multi-agent systems Website: prima2025.unimore.it 4. AI Agents Summit 2025 Date: TBA Location: Online Cost: TBA Focus: Tools, use cases, deployment, innovation in agents Website: aiagentsummit.com What’s stopping you? Choose your city, RSVP early, and step into a room where AI conversations spark, and the future unfolds one meetup at a time. Built something cool? Tell us. Whether it's a scrappy prototype or a production-grade agent, we want to hear how you're putting generative AI to work. Drop us your story at [email protected] or reply to this email, and you could get featured in an upcoming issue of AI_Distilled. 📢 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of developers and, technical professionals, and decision makers, you may want toadvertise with us. If you have any comments or feedback, just reply back to this email. Thanks for reading and have a great day! That’s a wrap for this week’s edition of AI_Distilled 🧠⚙️ We would love to know what you thought—your feedback helps us keep leveling up. 👉 Drop your rating here Thanks for reading, The AI_Distilled Team (Curated by humans. Powered by curiosity.) *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0}#converted-body .list_block ol,#converted-body .list_block ul,.body [class~=x_list_block] ol,.body [class~=x_list_block] ul,u+.body .list_block ol,u+.body .list_block ul{padding-left:20px} @media (max-width: 100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width: 100%;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}}