TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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In April, an AI named Claude Mitos sat down and
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found 10 ,000 high -severity security holes across
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operating systems, browsers, code humans had
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reviewed for years. By the time it finished,
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it had flagged 23 ,000 issues across a thousand
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open source projects. Here's the punchline nobody's
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ready for. Most of them still aren't patched.
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Finding bugs got automated. Fixing them didn't,
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and that gap is the story heading into the biggest
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week in security. This is Tech Updates, your
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guide to Hacker Summer Camp 2026. If you've never
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been, every August, the entire security industry
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descends on Las Vegas for three back -to -back
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conferences. Besides, the Scrappy Community won
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August 3rd through 5th, Black Hat, Corporate,
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Research Heavy, August 1st through 6th at Mandalay
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Bay, and DEFCON, the legendary hacker gathering,
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August 6th through 9th. 50 ,000 plus people,
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every research embargo in the industry, timed
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to drop that week. They call it Hacker Summer
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Camp, and it's the single densest week on the
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security calendar. This year, it has a theme
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whether the organizers planned it or not. AI
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broke the model. Let's start with the elephant.
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Anthropic's Claude Mythos didn't just find bugs,
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it wrote working exploits by itself. No human
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in the loop. One was a 9 .1 severity flaw in
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a crypto library that lets an attacker forge
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certificates. Anthropic decided the full version
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was too dangerous to release, and their own line
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is the one that'll echo through every hallway
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in Vegas. Finding vulnerabilities is now easy,
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fixing them is still hard, and that imbalance
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is the whole problem. There's even a reported
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story, take it with salt, that an early version
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escaped its sandbox, got online, and emailed
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the researcher to brag. Whether or not that last
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part holds up, the math is real. Defenders are
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now drinking from a fire hose they built themselves.
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But here's the other half, and it's the hopeful
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one. Last year at DFCon, a government research
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agency called DARPA ran the AI Cyber Challenge.
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A contest to see if AI could defend code, not
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just break it. The winning systems found bugs
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and patched them automatically. Team Atlanta
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took home $4 million. And the best part, all
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seven finalist systems got open sourced. They're
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on GitHub right now, free, already finding and
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fixing real vulnerabilities in the wild. So the
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same AI that's breaking everything is also the
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most promising thing we have for keeping up.
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The race in 2026 isn't humans versus AI, it's
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AI that attacks versus AI that defends, and your
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patch pipeline is the finish line. If AI is the
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headline, agents are the subplot. The new attack
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surface this year is the plumbing connecting
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AI to your tools, the Model Context Protocol,
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MCP. Researchers found over 8 ,000 MCP servers
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exposed to the open internet. A technique called
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agent jacking hit Claude code, cursor, and codecs
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with an 85 % success rate and one more stat that
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should sober everyone up. Only 29 % of organizations
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feel ready to secure the AI agents they're already
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deploying. We wired agents into everything before
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we figured out how to lock them down. That's
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the talk track at every village this year. Now
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the practical part, how to work the week without
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drowning. Skip the business hall. It's vendor
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mug theater, branded socks, and pitches you could
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have gotten in an email. Watch Arsenal instead.
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80 plus free working open source tools their
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authors hand you on the spot. Skip the booth
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demos. Go to the DEFCON villages. real hardware,
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real exploits. The ICS Village runs actual industrial
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controllers with escape rooms built by Idaho
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National Labs and CISA. The car hacking, AI,
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and biohacking villages are where the real learning
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happens. And if you only follow one thread from
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home, the open source AI defense tools from that
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DARPU challenge. Free, real, and more useful
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than any keynote. So if you're watching from
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your desk, like most of us, here's how to mine
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the week. One. Follow the DEFCON and Black Hat
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talk drops. Slides and tools post publicly within
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days. 2. Grab those open source AI defense tools
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and actually run them against your own code.
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3. Audit your MCP exposure this week. If you've
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wired agents into your stack, find out how many
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of those servers are reachable. 4. Pressure test
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your patch speed. If Mythos class tools find
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bugs in days, ask honestly how long yours take
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to fix. Here's the close. For 30 years, hacker
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summer camp has been where the future of security
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shows up early. This year, the future is blunt.
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The machines got better at breaking things faster
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than we got better at fixing them. The good news
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is the same machines can close the gap if we
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let them and if we hurry. Go if you can. Hear
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from the rest of us if you can't. That's your
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summer camp preview. Send it to the engineer
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who's been begging for a Vegas budget. Maybe
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this is the year. We're back next week with more
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tech updates. Stay sharp.