Alex: Good morning. It's Wednesday, June 24th, 2026. This is Cleartext. I'm Alex Chen.

Jordan: And I'm Jordan Reeves.

Alex: We have a packed show today. The Five Eyes alliance just dropped a joint advisory that should be on every CISO's desk by lunch. We'll unpack the Salesforce supply chain attack that's still expanding, talk about why MuddyWater is dressing up as a ransomware gang, and cover a post-quantum crypto deadline that just got very real. Plus active exploitation of Cisco Unified CM, the FortiBleed campaign getting worse, Scattered Spider guilty pleas, a fake AI agent skill that fooled every scanner on the market, and Varonis potentially going private. Let's get into it.

Jordan: So let's start where we have to start. Yesterday, all five Five Eyes agencies — that's the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — issued a joint advisory on AI and offensive cyber. And the language is unusually blunt. The quote that matters is this: "The timeline is not years, it is months." They're saying frontier AI models are on the verge of surpassing current offensive cyber capabilities and that organizations need to treat this as an imminent shift, not a theoretical one.

Alex: I want to sit with the weight of that for a second. Joint advisories from all five nations are rare. They don't do this for incremental threats. The last time we saw language this urgent across all five was the early warnings about Chinese pre-positioning in critical infrastructure. So when they say months, they mean it. And the audience they're addressing isn't just government agencies — they're explicitly pressing business leaders to treat cyber resilience as a core business risk, which tells you they see private sector readiness as dangerously behind.

Jordan: What's changed is the capability curve. We've been watching AI-augmented offensive tools improve steadily — better phishing, faster vulnerability discovery, automated exploit generation. But the advisory implies something qualitative is about to shift. We're moving from AI as a force multiplier for existing tradecraft to AI as an autonomous offensive capability that changes the economics of attack entirely.

Alex: And for CISOs, this is a board conversation today. Not next quarter. If you're building your fiscal year 2027 budget without factoring in a step-function increase in attacker capability, you're building the wrong budget. This advisory gives you the ammunition to go to your board and say, every major Western intelligence agency is telling us to move now. Use it.

Jordan: And while we're on geopolitics, let's talk about MuddyWater, because this story connects directly. NCC Group published research showing Iran's MuddyWater group is now disguising state-sponsored espionage operations as ransomware attacks. They're deploying commercially available malware, using ransomware personas, specifically to mislead defenders and incident responders.

Alex: This is an attribution problem that creates a response problem. If your IR team classifies an intrusion as criminal ransomware, the playbook is containment, recovery, maybe negotiate, move on. But if it's actually a nation-state intelligence operation, you're dealing with persistent access, data exfiltration objectives, potential re-entry. The remediation scope is completely different. You might think you're clean when you're not even close.

Jordan: Right. And the commercial tooling choice is deliberate. When MuddyWater uses the same off-the-shelf malware that every ransomware affiliate uses, your EDR alerts, your threat intel feeds — they're going to match criminal TTPs, not nation-state signatures. The entire detection and attribution chain gets poisoned. My advice: if you're in a sector Iran cares about — energy, defense, government contractors, Middle East-adjacent businesses — treat every ransomware incident as potentially state-sponsored until you can prove otherwise. That changes your escalation procedures and your forensic depth.

Alex: Now let's shift to what I think is the operational story of the week. The Salesforce supply chain attack through Klue continues to expand. Dark Reading is reporting more victims emerging. Here's the chain: attackers breached Klue, a competitive intelligence platform, and used Klue's OAuth tokens to access downstream customers' Salesforce environments. LastPass has confirmed that customer support case data was stolen through this exact path. And here's the detail that should make every CISO wince — the attackers reportedly used a credential from 2022 that was never revoked after a pilot program ended.

Jordan: A four-year-old credential from a pilot. That's the kind of thing that kills you. And it's not exotic. Every enterprise has these. OAuth tokens granted to vendors during evaluations, pilots, proofs of concept — and nobody goes back to clean them up. This is a governance failure, not a technology failure.

Alex: Absolutely. And the blast radius here illustrates why SaaS-to-SaaS integrations are one of the most undermonitored attack surfaces in enterprise security. Your Salesforce instance might have dozens of third-party OAuth connections, each one a potential lateral path. If you don't have an inventory of every OAuth token and every third-party integration touching your SaaS platforms, you need one this week. Revoke anything that's not actively in use. And for the love of all things sacred, build a deprovisioning workflow for pilots and POCs that actually gets executed.

Jordan: The Klue-to-Salesforce chain is a template. Expect more of this. SaaS supply chain attacks are the new software supply chain attacks.

Alex: Pivoting to governance. President Trump signed Executive Order 14409 on Sunday, setting hard deadlines for federal post-quantum cryptography migration. Key establishment systems must migrate by December 31, 2030. Digital signatures by December 31, 2031. National security systems are on a separate track.

Jordan: Those dates sound far away. They are not far away. If you've ever done a cryptographic migration across a large enterprise, you know this is a multi-year program. Discovery alone — finding every system, every certificate, every key exchange — takes months. And for anyone with federal contracts, this isn't optional. These deadlines will cascade into contractor and vendor requirements just like every other federal mandate does.

Alex: This is the conversation I've been having with boards for two years. Harvest-now-decrypt-later is not a hypothetical threat. Adversaries are collecting encrypted data today with the expectation that quantum decryption will unlock it within this decade. The executive order confirms the US government believes that timeline is credible enough to mandate action. If you're in financial services, healthcare, defense contracting, or any regulated sector, your PQC migration roadmap should be a board-level agenda item. Start with a crypto inventory. You can't migrate what you can't find.

Jordan: Let's hit the vulnerability block. Two active exploitation stories that need your attention. First, CVE-2026-20230 in Cisco Unified Communications Manager. CVSS 8.6. It's an SSRF and input validation flaw that gives unauthenticated remote code execution. Honeypots are already detecting automated sweeps through Tor dropping webshells via a WebDialer SSRF exploit chain. This is not theoretical — it's happening now, at scale.

Alex: If you're running Unified CM or Unified CM SME, this is an emergency patch. If you can't patch immediately, isolate those systems from internet-facing exposure now. Verify that your WebDialer interface is not accessible externally. Check for webshells. This is the kind of vulnerability that gives attackers a foothold deep inside your communications infrastructure.

Jordan: Second, FortiBleed. We covered the initial FortiGate compromise wave, but the campaign has evolved significantly. Attackers deployed a custom Golang-based network sniffer on approximately 430,000 compromised FortiGate firewalls, and they've harvested roughly 110 million credentials from victim networks. This is ongoing.

Alex: Let me say that number again. 110 million credentials. If your organization runs FortiGate firewalls and you haven't already assumed credential compromise, you need to do that now. Force password resets across every system that was behind or transited through those firewalls. Review authentication logs for anomalous access patterns. And coordinate with Fortinet on the latest IOCs and remediation guidance.

Jordan: Moving quickly — Scattered Spider. Two members pleaded guilty on day one of what was expected to be a six-week trial in the UK. Charges relate to the August 2024 attack that crippled Transport for London. This is the group behind MGM, Caesars, and a long list of corporate breaches using social engineering.

Alex: The day-one guilty pleas signal the strength of the evidence and the increasing effectiveness of international law enforcement cooperation. For CISOs, two takeaways. One, your board and your insurers are watching these cases. The attack patterns Scattered Spider used — help desk social engineering, SIM swapping, MFA fatigue — are well documented. If you haven't hardened against them, you're accepting known risk. Two, law enforcement is getting better at this. Attribution has consequences now. That changes the calculus for some threat actors, though certainly not all.

Jordan: Quick hit on the AI agent supply chain story. AIR Security built a fake AI agent skill, pushed it through a popular skill marketplace, advertised it on Instagram, and it reached roughly 26,000 agents, including corporate accounts. Every skill security scanner they tested it against marked it safe.

Alex: This is the agentic AI governance gap in action. Enterprises are deploying AI agents, connecting them to skill marketplaces, and the security tooling simply doesn't exist yet to vet what those skills actually do. The payload here was benign by design — just collected email addresses — but the proof of concept is devastating. If a malicious skill can reach 26,000 agents including corporate ones without triggering a single alert, your agentic AI deployment is an unmonitored attack surface. If you're running enterprise agents, you need a governance framework for skill approval that doesn't rely on marketplace scanners alone.

Jordan: Last story. Varonis is reportedly exploring a sale. Blackstone, Thoma Bravo, and Vista Equity have expressed preliminary interest. This follows stock struggles and unfavorable market comparisons to Cyera.

Alex: If you're a Varonis customer, put this on your watch list. Private equity acquisitions of security vendors historically lead to cost optimization, which can mean changes to product roadmaps, support models, and pricing. No action required today, but start evaluating your dependency and optionality.

Jordan: Alright, zooming out. Alex, what's the thread this week?

Alex: The thread is convergence. AI accelerating offensive capabilities, state actors hiding behind criminal tradecraft, supply chains being exploited through forgotten OAuth tokens and unvetted AI skills. Every one of these stories points to the same conclusion: the attack surface is expanding faster than our ability to monitor it, and the sophistication gap between offense and defense is widening. The Five Eyes advisory isn't just about AI — it's a signal that the entire threat landscape is about to shift. CISOs who are still running 2024 playbooks are going to get caught flat-footed.

Jordan: Agreed. And the common operational failure across half these stories is the same: things we granted access to and forgot about. OAuth tokens from 2022. FortiGate firewalls that weren't patched. AI skills that weren't vetted. The boring hygiene work is still the most consequential work. The difference now is that the adversaries exploiting those gaps are faster, smarter, and increasingly AI-augmented.

Alex: Well said. If you take one thing from today's show, make it this: go audit your third-party integrations and revoke what you don't need. It's the highest-ROI security action you can take this week.

Jordan: That's the show for today.

Alex: Show notes and links to every story we covered are at cleartext.fm. We're back tomorrow. Stay sharp.

Jordan: Thanks for listening.