Associate Professor, Cyber Forensics and Security, NSA CAE Point of Contact
Huntington, WV
Joined March 2007
- Tweets37.1K
- Following3.5K
- Followers4.9K
- Likes31.1K
Bill Gardner retweeted
⚠️ We issued 1 updated public #ICS Advisory. This advisory provides info about current security issues, vulnerabilities, & exploits surrounding ICS. More at go.dhs.gov/iEv
Bill Gardner retweeted
Internet-exposed or unpatched refrigeration controllers can be exploited to alter temperatures, trigger heating or defrost cycles & disrupt cold chain operations. Read our joint Fact Sheet with federal partners for mitigations. 👉 go.dhs.gov/59J
ALT The image shows a digital illustration of a shield symbol against a background of circuitry, representing cybersecurity. On the right are logos of CISA, FBI, USDA, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Transportation. The text reads: "Joint Fact Sheet. US Government Partners Urge Hardening Industrial Refrigeration and Cold Chain Monitoring Systems."
Students Think Everyone Else Is Using AI to Cheat. That May Be the Bigger Problem substack.com/home/post/p-223…
Bill Gardner retweeted
The Solemnity of All Saints, which we celebrate today, invites us to share in the joy of that countless family of men and women who, following the Lord Jesus, have made their lives a gift to God and to their neighbors.
Bill Gardner retweeted
Missed the SecureWV 17 CTF, or want a rematch? Directive Zero is now on GitHub, so you can play it at home. 💻
Congrats again to our winners:
🥇 CN Solo
🥈 Transportation Gurus
🥉 PHP 5.2.4 is secure right
github.com/bkarnes/SecureWV-…
#SecureWV #CTF
Bill Gardner retweeted
One week ago, lawyers at Canada’s top firms received urgent calls from their IT departments about a critical software update or an expired password. The agents were happy to stay on the phone and help.
Even to a skeptic, the calls could seem legitimate. They were often placed through Microsoft Teams, appearing to come from internal IT employees, or they were phone calls from the IT department’s number.
The reality: Hackers were on the other end, spamming Canadian lawyers en masse.
The tactic the hackers used is called vishing, short for voice phishing – and it worked. At least four companies were broken into, all among the country’s most prestigious law firms: McCarthy Tétrault LLP, Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, Bennett Jones LLP and Borden Ladner Gervais LLP.
The extent of the damage is still being assessed, but the fallout is already immense. Law firms market themselves as trusted advisers, and the nature of their work means they store sensitive files on their servers. These include non-public corporate information, communication between client and counsel, and their clients’ tax, financial or health records.
theglobeandmail.com/business…
Bill Gardner retweeted
Happy Halloween. For something properly scary, Lillian Warner’s SecureWV 16 talk last year asks: “Is your Printer Haunted and your Laptop Possessed?” youtube.com/watch?v=mFNoBeJ5… #SecureWV #InfoSec #Halloween
Bill Gardner retweeted
At the @MarshallSOJMC 100th anniversary and Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where @BradMcElhinny is one of several being inducted.
Bill Gardner retweeted
The future of #ArtificialIntelligence is not pre-determined. As a technology developed by human beings, its future depends on the choices we make. We therefore have the responsibility to guide, change and, when necessary, reject its applications. A reliable system that serves the human person is of greater value than one that is exceptionally powerful but whose consequences cannot be adequately foreseen or controlled.
Bill Gardner retweeted
FOURTH-TIER FLEETWOOD TOWN ELIMINATE 2025-2026 PREMIER LEAGUE CHAMPIONS ARSENAL FROM THE CARABAO CUP 😱😱😱
BIGGEST UPSET IN ENGLISH FOOTBALL HISTORY 😤
Bill Gardner retweeted
Hackers absolutely compromised New Mexico hospital system.
Surgeries cancelled. Ambulances diverted.
Hackers demands broadcast over the sound system.
Bill Gardner retweeted
Arsenal just lost to Fleetwood Town in the EFL Cup.
Arsenal’s roster: $1.5 BILLION
Fleetwood Town’s roster: $3 million
Fleetwood is currently 18th in the 4th level of English soccer.
Possibly the biggest upset in English soccer history.
Bill Gardner retweeted
AI has really reduced the friction for novices to create a lot more work for experts. This php2shell event is just a widescale example of it.
Bill Gardner retweeted
During this red-teaming exercise, we also found a vulnerability that allows for unauthenticated remote code execution in Brotli, a widely-deployed compression library included in many pieces of software such as Node.js, Bun, and Envoy.
The flaw could let an attacker run their own code on affected systems by sending or replying with malicious compressed data, without any need to create a user account. That is, an unpatched server that accepts compressed input could be taken over by a malicious client, and an unpatched client that accepts compressed input (such as “curl --compressed”) could be taken over by a malicious server.
This root cause issue was actually fixed in the Brotli source code in February, but it wasn’t known at the time that it gave rise to a security vulnerability and there was no more recent release of Brotli. Since Brotli is built into other software, any software which includes this library needs to take the update too, followed by the users of that software. We disclosed the vulnerability to Brotli and other downstream projects such as Node.js, which released or are currently releasing security updates, and Brotli cut new release versions and published a CVE.
More details on the patch and mitigations below:
patchtheplanet.org/brotli
Over the past several months, we have substantially hardened the security of our research training environment. We’ve removed live internet access for all frontier models during training and built an offline world for them to use instead—a cached version of the web where they can still learn to browse, search, and use applications.
On September 20, after a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside of this offline world, we paused frontier training to strengthen containment further. We assembled teams of agents, powered by our most cyber-capable models, and tasked them with finding weaknesses in our research environments.
While they found no route to the internet they could easily exploit while concealing their activity from our monitors, they did find zero-day vulnerabilities, virtual machine escapes, and hardware side-channels for communication between agents. We used their discoveries to further strengthen our defenses and contribute fixes to open-source software.
After strengthening our containment architecture, we resumed our frontier RL training and inference on October 1. We’ve reserved substantial compute for continuous red-teaming, and made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to decide whether frontier training and evaluation can proceed securely.
openai.com/index/securing-ou…
Bill Gardner retweeted
Happy birthday to St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, who was born on this day in 1491!*
Learn more about his life: ow.ly/hv7A50Lir9W
*While we don't know for sure what day he was born, he was born in 1491, and some sources place it on Oct. 23.
