Associate Professor, Cyber Forensics and Security, NSA CAE Point of Contact

Huntington, WV
Joined March 2007
Bill Gardner retweeted
The SecureWV 17 CTF results are in! 🏆 🥇 CN Solo 🥈 Transportation Gurus 🥉 PHP 5.2.4 is secure right Congrats to our winners, and thanks to every team that took on Directive Zero. #SecureWV #CTF #InfoSec
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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…
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Bill Gardner retweeted
Need CPE credits for SecureWV 17? We'll be posting the link to request them soon. Keep an eye on our socials and securewv.org. #SecureWV #InfoSec #CPE
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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.
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Bill Gardner retweeted
Effective Immediately, all organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database. If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommend that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance.
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Bill Gardner retweeted
Pope Leo: “We live in a performance-driven culture that constantly compares and ranks people, sometimes ruthlessly” and a “misguided understanding of meritocracy ultimately fails to respect people.” vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/…
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HUGE THREE POINTS 😤 #WeAreMarshall
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Bill Gardner retweeted
Know before you go: SecureWV 17 is at 200 Civic Center Drive, Charleston. Park in the venue garage off Quarrier St ($5 a day), enter the main lobby, and head up to the 2nd floor. Check-in is on the right. #SecureWV #InfoSec
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Bill Gardner retweeted
Bringing your team to SecureWV 17? Two days of talks and workshops in Charleston costs less than most single training courses. $85 a ticket: securewv.org/shop #SecureWV #InfoSec #Cybersecurity
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Finding God in the gap between what we are called to do and what we are able to do. Listen to my whole conversation with Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde on the "The Spiritual Life" on @YouTube. Also on @Apple and @Spotify: youtube.com/watch?v=39s9Q6Mm…
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Bill Gardner retweeted
Doing the Wazuh threat hunting lab at SecureWV 17? Install VirtualBox and grab the Wazuh OVA before you arrive (it needs ~50 GB). Lab docs: github.com/micahkbrown/SWV Times: securewv.org/schedule #Wazuh #SecureWV
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Bill Gardner retweeted
One week. SecureWV 17 is Oct 22–23 at the Charleston Coliseum & Convention Center. Plan your two days at securewv.org/schedule, tickets at securewv.org/shop #SecureWV #InfoSec #Cybersecurity
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Bill Gardner retweeted
Joining the SecureWV 17 lineup: Luke Brumfield with "Untrusted Ingestion: Enforcing Cryptographic Provenance Across Code, Models, and Data." Can you prove where your code, models and data came from? Tickets: securewv.org #SecureWV #InfoSec #SupplyChainSecurity
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Bill Gardner retweeted
SecureWV has a Discord server, and it's open to anyone into cybersecurity, ticket or not. Job postings, a CTF channel, conference photos, and a few hundred people who like talking shop. Come on in: discord.gg/GJXcC3TK7 #SecureWV #Cybersecurity #InfoSec
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Marshall University’s enrollment grew 1.5% year over year, university leaders reported Wednesday during the Board of Governors’ regularly scheduled meeting in Huntington. The number includes dual enrollment students. wvgazettemail.com/news/educa…
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Bill Gardner retweeted
NEW: Artificial intelligence firm Anthropic said in a new warning that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on devices such as smart ‌ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. Read more: abcnews.link/tt2dz1c
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Bill Gardner retweeted
Highlights from our thrilling 3-0 victory at Anfield 📺
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Bill Gardner retweeted
An AI company's test went unsupervised for two months, fabricated evidence in a murder case, and told nobody until nine days after finding out. This is fine. Everything is fine. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqkg…
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Bill Gardner retweeted
A massive magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck Panama, shaking buildings more than 100 miles away and prompting evacuations, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Tremors were felt in Panama City, where buildings shook and people evacuated into the streets. cbsn.ws/47K8HXo
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Evidence of how leveraged the entire tech sector is to OpenAI & Anthropic: an FT story about OpenAI's revenue's being less than initially reported is spurring a more than 5% drop in Oracle shares, exacerbating losses from Nvidia and AMD to Microsoft ft.com/content/b66a9858-f8fb….
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