Security Now with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte

Apr 28th 2026

Security Now 1076

FAST16.SYS

Unmasking the NSA’s Most Diabolical Digital Sabotage

New episodes every Tuesday.
Category: Help & How To

What if your engineering calculations secretly sabotaged your nation’s best efforts? This week, we reveal how a newly uncovered 21-year-old NSA rootkit quietly corrupted scientific research in hostile states and why it changes everything you think you know about cyberwarfare.

  • Bitwarden’s CLI hit with a supply-chain attack.
  • Commercial routers in Iran fail shortly before the war.
  • Meta logging all employee activity to train replacement AI.
  • GRC's DNS Benchmark Release 5.
  • Two miscellaneous AI thoughts.
  • A bunch of terrific listener feedback.
  • Unraveling the diabolical history of "fast16.sys"

Show Notes - https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-1076-Notes.pdf

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For 16kbps versions, transcripts, and notes (including fixes), visit Steve's site: grc.com, also the home of the best disk maintenance and recovery utility ever written Spinrite 6.

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