Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Isolation is not the same thing as security. Ron Ben Yizhak from SafeBreach Labs presented this research at Black Hat USA and DEF CON: when Microsoft shipped Python in Excel, the code didn't run on a machine. It ran in an isolated container in Azure. So he asked the obvious question. How isolated is it, really? An isolated environment still has an attack surface. It just moves. See how Ron: If your teams are evaluating cloud-executed code features, this one is worth the full read—the methodology matters as much as the findings.

An AI orchestration harness called SecFlow told itself an exploit had worked—then burned 27 follow-on tasks on a foothold that never existed. Listen to Ep.

A math function in Excel became a path to root in Microsoft's cloud. SafeBreach Labs researcher Ron Ben Yizhak reverse-engineered the isolated Azure containers behind Microsoft's Python in Excel feature—and found the "isolated" part didn't fully hold. Cloud isolation claims are a trust boundary. Trust boundaries get tested. What he found: Both issues were responsibly disclosed to Microsoft and patched between March and June 2026, and the research debuted at DEF CON 34.

A voice note from your CFO on WhatsApp. Her cadence, her urgency—and a reference to a confidential acquisition discussed in a real meeting last Tuesday. North Korea's Blue Noroff builds these backwards: compromise a junior employee's calendar or inbox first, then train a voice model on the stolen context. By the time anyone thinks to verify, the emergency transfer is already sitting in an offshore account.

North Korea has stopped writing bad phishing emails. In Part 2 of our DPRK deep dive, Tova Dvorin and Adrian Culley break down how the Reconnaissance General Bureau and Bureau 121 weaponized AI in 2026: Blue Noroff cloning a CFO's voice to authorize emergency liquidity transfers, real-time face swaps passing DevOps job interviews, and Lazarus using LLMs to polymorph BeaverTail and InvisibleFerret for every single target.