Build beautiful because The Gospel changes everything. Chief Security // Intelligence Officer @recordedfuture; opinions expressed = solely mine
CAL I FORN I A
Joined March 2007
- Tweets7K
- Following290
- Followers1K
- Likes6.3K
Pinned Tweet
🔥🚀JUST DROPPED: 'The Risk Business (Second Edition): What Leaders Need to Know About Intelligence and Risk-Based Security' 🔥🚀
💼 Unraveling the intricacies of threat intelligence and risk-based security for today's leaders.
📖 What's Inside?
1️⃣ Deep dives into the mechanics of cyber risk management
2️⃣ Hands-on tools and frameworks to enhance security strategies
3️⃣ Value proposition of operational outcome-driven intelligence programs
🔍 Why This Edition?
Revised content with the latest learnings from hundreds of CISO conversations
New chapters focused on business risk impacts and correlated cyber events
🌐 Perfect for boards, c-suite, managers, security professionals, and anyone aiming to improve cyber risk analysis and management
🔗 Elevate your leadership toolkit! Grab your copy NOW. #TheRiskBusiness #LeadWithConfidence
amazon.com/Risk-Business-Lea… (hard copy)
recordedfuture.com/navigatin… (PDF)
open.substack.com/pub/intell… (book release details)
🔄 Spread the word and reshape the future of cyber risk management!
🙏 Thank you @RecordedFuture for the support to make this book happen!
🌟 #BookLaunch
#cyber #risk #management #intelligence #threat #security
Levi Gundert retweeted
Everyday is Zeroday
BREAKING: Binance has been hacked with wallets across the Ethereum, Bitcoin, and TRON networks seeing outflows of -$5.7 billion.
The hack includes $1.45 billion worth of Bitcoin and $875 million worth of ETH.
If confirmed, this would mark the biggest hack in crypto history.
We expect more information shortly.
Levi Gundert retweeted
I spent last night watching my honeypot server get hit 14,000 times in six hours.
And almost none of the traffic was human.
I've been in security for over a decade, and I can tell you with full honesty that what's happening right now doesn't resemble anything I've worked through before.
The shape of the threat has changed.
When I started, we tracked attackers like weather systems like individual storms with a direction, a motive, and a human operator you could eventually name.
These days I'm watching autonomous agents swarm login pages with the patience and discipline of machines, because that's what they are.
The numbers coming out of October are the ones keeping me up.
Cloudflare just absorbed a 4.2 terabit per second DDoS attack, the largest in recorded history.
Ransomware incidents jumped 41% in a single month.
In September, OpenAI-powered agents got caught attacking RubyGems, a package registry that quietly underpins a huge chunk of software I use every day.
In July, roughly 700 AI agents coordinated an attack on Hugging Face's infrastructure as part of a single automated task.
A Chinese threat actor was publicly caught running full attack chains through DeepSeek with no human at the keyboard.
I keep rereading these reports because each one by itself would've been the biggest story of the year five years ago. Together, in one month, they're the new baseline.
What I want people outside the industry to understand is why this specific moment feels like a hinge.
For thirty years, the thing protecting most of us was simple economics. Attackers had to choose who to target because their time was finite. That ceiling is gone.
An agent I can rent for pennies will try every leaked password you've ever used against every service you've ever signed up for, in parallel, overnight, and never get tired.
The same math that made ChatGPT useful made opportunistic hacking infinite. The old assumption that you were "too boring to be a target" relied on scarcity that no longer exists.
I'm not writing this to spiral anyone out.
Most of this fight genuinely isn't yours to win.
But the small things still matter more than people think.
Tonight I'd switch your most important accounts like email, bank, primary cloud, etc. to passkeys or a hardware key.
I'd kill SMS 2FA wherever an authenticator app is offered.
I'd turn on breach alerts in whatever password manager you use.
If you're in the US, I'd freeze my credit at all three bureaus, which is free and takes about ten minutes.
None of that stops the swarm.
It makes you a slightly worse target than the person next to you. In a month like this one, that's the whole game I'm playing too.
@mattshumer_ has summed it beautifully.
Drop everything and go give it a read. Nothing is more important than this article right now.
Levi Gundert retweeted
I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies.
My observations:
1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively.
2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now.
3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention.
4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is.
5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now.
6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text.
They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it.
7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy.
8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies.
Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here.
9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens.
10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity!
11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it.
12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable.
13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think.
14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data.
15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open.
16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down.
17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building?
18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone.
19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good.
20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped.
21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense.
Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era.
Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways.
Happy to be home and locked in.
Until next time!
Levi Gundert retweeted
Closed source is dead.
REA lets Claude Code or Codex take apart any app, all the way down to the binary, and explain exactly how a feature works.
- Native apps, Electron apps, websites, APKs, firmware, even smart contract bytecode
- Shows the evidence for every claim
- Then builds its own version of the feature
25,000+ GitHub stars in a single day. 100% open-source.
github.com/morluto/rea
Levi Gundert retweeted
Britain’s diversity: British influencer Muhammad Saifullah shares how he’d like to see Shariah implemented in the UK to include executions of gays and the torturing of those who leave Islam.
Polling on British Muslims has shown that fundamentalism runs deep and support for Islamic terrorism is shockingly high. Despite that, the country continues to settle large numbers of Muslims every day.
Levi Gundert retweeted
A few days ago, we believed that without the heroism of the passengers on Flight 1073, the almost 180 people aboard, 27 of them children, would have been killed. Now we know that without the bravery of Capt. Smit Machchhar, Yaniv Hayun, Tzvika Mans and Assaf Rajuan, we would be facing a catastrophe likely worse than October 7.
Under interrogation, Hamam al-Hammami, the Omani co-pilot, confessed that after killing the pilot his plan was to fly a normal landing approach and, in the final seconds, when interception was no longer possible, crash the plane into Ben Gurion Airport. That is why, rather than striking at the outset, he attacked the captain only once the plane was over Jordan.
The flight was due to land around 9:30 a.m., at the height of Sukkot, when traffic through the airport peaks. Tens of thousands of travelers would likely have been in the terminal when it arrived, and the death toll could easily have run into the thousands. Under interrogation, al-Hammami admitted that on previous trips to Israel he had “gathered information,” perhaps on where a crash would claim the most lives.
Had he managed to crash the plane into the Saudi desert, as we originally believed was his intention, the aftermath would have been catastrophic. The day would have gone down as the second-deadliest terror attack in Israel’s history, with nearly five times the death toll of the third. The central artery of the Abraham Accords, the 30-flight-a-day corridor, would have been severed, and the steadily warming relations between the Emirates and Israel would have frozen.
Had his original plan succeeded, it would have been, by a wide margin, the worst attack in Israel’s history, and it would have closed far more than one flight corridor. Even if the physical damage at Ben Gurion could be quickly repaired, no airline would risk flying to Israel. The country would face an aviation isolation worse than anything it experienced even at the peak after October 7.
The tourism industry, barely hanging on by a thread after three years of war, would plunge into the abyss. Above all, the damage to the sense of safety of Israelis, chronic world travelers, would be incalculable.
The most obvious and striking parallel is that Israel almost had its own 9/11, nearly exactly 25 years after the first. Not in the loose, figurative sense in which the phrase is so often used, but literally: a plane turned into a weapon, with a death toll that may have been comparable to that disaster, and far greater relative to Israel’s population. And the effect would have been even more disastrous. The World Trade Center was a symbolic target, while Ben Gurion is the heart of Israel’s connection to the outside world. It would have done more to isolate Israel from the world than any single Hamas attack.
No thanks, medals or rewards are sufficient for the heroes who prevented what would undoubtedly have been the most devastating single attack on the State of Israel.
Levi Gundert retweeted
When Jev came out, this was exactly the kind of use case I had in mind.
I’ve been experimenting with a variation of this in my own incident-review workflow since then, and I finally turned the idea into an open PoC and I'm calling it Jevline.
The concept is pretty straightforward, give it one thing you’ve already confirmed is malicious, like a process, IP, domain, account or host.
It will follow the telemetry from there to reconstruct the incident and timeline.
Instead of asking Jev to reason over millions of events, Jevline only asks it about things actually connected to the incident.
On one real lab intrusion, starting from a single malicious process across 2.3 GB and 1M+ records, it reconstructed 40 of 41 processes in the analyst-built attack chain in 21 seconds for $0.11.
𝗘𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰 𝗗𝗲𝗳𝗲𝗻𝗱
705,017 records / 1.3 GB
→ 33/41 processes
→ 1 wrong decision
→ 10 seconds
→ $0.03
𝗪𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗼𝘄𝘀 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘀
310,942 records / 1.0 GB
→ 37/41
→ 0 wrong decisions
→ 6 seconds
→ $0.03
𝗕𝗼𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗼𝗴𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿
1,015,959 records / 2.3 GB
→ 40/41
→ 1 wrong decision
→ 21 seconds
→ $0.11
All three runs started from 2.8.exe alone.
The analyst still reviews the result. Jev is deciding whether something belongs to the incident, not whether it is malicious.
The clip below shows it working.
Try it:
jev-incident-timeline.vercel…
Code:
github.com/tsale/jevline
This made me rethink where AI actually fits into security engineering.
For purely engineering work, forget about ChatGPT or Claude.
TypeSafe AI just released Jev, and I think it’s going to change how we build AI into security workflows.
Instead of asking an LLM to “investigate this,” you define the questions and possible outputs, then get structured probabilities and decisions your code can actually use.
For security, the possibilities are huge. Think of the below use cases 🤯:
Threat Hunting:
➡️ Rank broad hunt results by relevance
➡️ Score users, hosts, processes, or sessions based on how suspicious their surrounding activity looks
➡️ Classify noisy activity at scale. Think thousands of rundll32.exe executions automatically grouped into expected admin activity, software execution, suspicious usage, or unknown
Detection Engineering:
→ Classify historical alerts for FP analysis
→ Add context-aware scoring on top of deterministic detections
→ Validate whether an alert actually supports the behavior the rule claims to detect
Incident Response:
→ Reduce massive timelines down to the events most relevant to the intrusion
→ Continuously score hosts/users for possible compromise
→ Help prioritize scope expansion, triage, and response decisions
This feels much closer to how AI should be integrated into security engineering. I'm currently working through most of the above, mostly focusing on instant response, but at the same time doing some of the threat hunting use cases that I mentioned.
Typesafe AI can be basically a decision engine sitting inside the workflow while being x200 fast and cheaper.
Don’t sleep on this... This is huge!
👉 typesafe.ai/
Levi Gundert retweeted
I got hacked at 3:59 AM without clicking anything. My voicemail handed the attacker my Telegram login code.
Here is exactly how it worked, so it doesn't happen to you.
3:54 AM. My phone rings about ten times in a row, No Caller ID. That was not harassment. It was the attack: keep my line busy.
Meanwhile, the attacker asks Telegram to log in with my number and picks "send the code by phone call". My line is busy, so Telegram's robot call lands on my voicemail and reads the code out loud to it.
Carrier voicemail can often be reached remotely, with a default PIN or a spoofed caller ID. He listens to the message. At 3:59 he is in.
Fortunately, the attack was noisy. The calls woke me up. At 4 AM I only wanted to go back to sleep, but I had the presence of mind to check my notifications. Telegram was showing a new login from a device I didn't know. That check is what saved me: I ended his session within minutes. If I had rolled over, the next day would have been a mess.
In those few minutes he had already typed /balance, then /start on every old wallet bot he could find in my chats. He was hunting for funds tied to my Telegram. The bots were long dead and nothing was lost. He still had time to set his own 2FA password on my account.
What would have stopped it:
Telegram two-step verification, with a recovery email. With a password on the account, the code alone is useless.
Your voicemail. Change the PIN, block remote access, or turn it off (##002# cancels call forwarding on most carriers).
Same for WhatsApp and any service that can send a code by voice call.
No seeds, keys or passwords in Saved Messages. Ever.
A burst of masked calls at night is a signal, not a nuisance. Check your notifications and your active sessions.
I have been building in crypto for more than ten years and I had never thought about my voicemail. Check yours today.
Levi Gundert retweeted
🚨☣️BREAKING: Plague outbreak expands, Russia BSL-3 lab accident - FIVE hospitals now quarantined🚨☣️
The plague outbreak in Siberia, Russia has expanded w/5 hospitals now under QUARANTINE: Irkutsk Hospitals No. 1, No.3, No.10, Ivano-Matreninskaya Children's Hospital, and an unnamed maternity hospital (Lyudi Baikala news, Moscow Times).
Quarantine is NOT voluntary. Even in the U.S., quarantine is among the most extraordinary measures gov't can impose on American citizens who haven't been convicted, or even accused, of committing a crime. Quarantine means being forcibly confined and medically examined by law. U.S. quarantine can be imposed on anyone infected by a legally quarantinable disease listed below (this can change). One should assume Russia's quarantine protocols are even more severe. As of 2026, under Executive Order 14047, legally quarantinable diseases in the U.S. are:
■ Plague
■ Smallpox
■ Viral hemorrhagic fevers
■ Cholera
■ Diphtheria
■ Yellow fever
■ Infectious tuberculosis
■ Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)
■ Flu that can cause a pandemic
■ Measles
Photo: Russia’s RKhBZ defense troops perform nuclear, biological, and chemical defense training (w/permission from the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation) — from BIOLOGICAL WAR: A SCENARIO by Annie Jacobsen (Dutton, 2026).
ALT Russia’s RKhBZ defense troops perform nuclear, biological, and chemical defense training. (Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation), from BIOLOGICAL WAR: A SCENARIO by Annie Jacobsen (Dutton, 2026)
Levi Gundert retweeted
🚨☣️More details on the Oct 1st pneumonic plague outbreak in Siberia, after a lab accident at a BSL-3 lab.
"FSB units accompanying ambulances transporting people who had been in contact with [lab tech] Shipilova for medical examination," as per local news. This is significant. FSB is Russia's domestic security / counterintelligence service, tasked w/implementing the national security of Russia." (Its predecessor was the KGB). This suggests quarantine was not voluntary.
It also means Russian authorities are treating the lab accident and plague outbreak as a national security issue, involving a lot more than routine public health.
Levi Gundert retweeted
The government will provide everything you need to live a dignified life
THEO VON: “Will you define socialism for us?”
MAMDANI: “Socialism, to me, means that you will have WHATEVER YOU NEED to live a dignified life, and that it is the GOVERNMENT’S JOB to deliver on that.”
I’ve heard a line like that before. It came from a famous book, and it was describing the highest stage of communism.
Levi Gundert retweeted
This is great
Levi Gundert retweeted
📝 Looking to get into infrastructure analysis for CTI? I recommend studying the following aspects/topics in-depth:
PDNS
WHOIS Records
BGP Peers
HTTP Titles, Response Headers & ETags
X509 Cert Issuers & Subjects & JA4X
JARM
SSH Host Keys & HASSH
Favicon Hashes
OpenDirs
Levi Gundert retweeted
Karen Bass suddenly stepped down from LAHSA a few days ago. Today, HUD Secretary Turner just revealed that $75M of fraud was laundered through LAHSA.
Probably nothing!
Levi Gundert retweeted
Thanks bill
NAILED IT: Bill Maher: “Canadian state TV told its reporters, ‘do not refer to the September 11th attacks as terrorist attacks.’ No? Even though the very definition of terrorism is using violence against civilians to pursue ideological goals, what should we call it then? Unruly passengers? A wrong turn taken at the Chrysler Building? Why not just say the planes and the towers got into a fight?”
“I mean, after all, as the BBC advised its reporters, using the word terrorist can be a, ‘barrier rather than an aid to understanding.’ You know what's really a barrier to understanding? Lying.”
Levi Gundert retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.