Hello from DEFCON (which comes right Black Hat) - OpenAI is here with a booth promoting Daybreak, its initiative announced last month to put frontier cyber models and Codex Security in the hands of trusted defenders to find and fix vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them. Just a few days ago, an OpenAI briefing at Black Hat gave its first detailed account of the incident where its agents attacked OpenAI-Hugging Face infrastructure. At the end of that Wednesday briefing, the OAI researchers emphasized that offensive AI agents will operate faster, at larger scale and with better coordination than human attackers. That means, they said, defenders will need AI systems capable of matching that speed.

Former Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen warned at Stanford DEFCON 2026 that military hardware alone cannot protect democracies under sustained pressure. Speaking on October 7, she cited daily cyberattacks, cognitive warfare, and economic coercion against Taiwan, plus regular Chinese military and coast-guard activity meant to raise costs without open conflict. The US holds about 75% of global AI computing power, she noted, but Taiwanese firms make nearly all the advanced chips in those systems and about 90% of the AI servers behind them. “Defense & deterrence are properties of an entire nation,” she said. Advanced weapons cannot compensate if institutions weaken or public trust collapses. Treating Taiwan only as a security risk misses the point: deeper cooperation strengthens Indo-Pacific stability and the resilience of democracies.

How far can a BootROM exploit take you on a Crypto phone? All the way to the wallet signing key. At #DEFCON34#, CertiK researcher Guanxing Wen (@hhj4ck) demonstrated the full chain: BootROM → root → offline PIN recovery → wallet signing key. Short version ↓