SilentGrid / Research

What the work turns up.

Consultants publish what comes out of the work: control bypasses, exploitation write-ups, OT and ICS findings, and the reasoning behind how we scope an engagement.

How Do You Pentest an AI When All You Have Is a Phone Number?

When performing LLM testing, we generally start with somewhere you can type. For this one though, all we had was a phone number.

Richard Tan 14 October 2026 6 min read

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2026 17

05 Oct

Stealing Auth Tokens Through the WebView Bridge

A JavaScript bridge with no origin check and a navigation policy with no host allowlist — how two missing lines of code chain into silent account takeover on iOS and Android.

Richard Appleby

17 Sept

A Phone Assistant Confirmed a Change It Never Made

The AI phone assistant told us it had updated a customer account. It hadn't. During an AI agent pentest, we called the assistant twice using the same account number but two different names.

Richard Tan AI/LLM

01 Sept

The New OWASP LLM Top 10 Isn’t a Pentest Checklist

OWASP released the 2026 edition of its Top 10 for LLM Applications in August. There are some notable changes in the ranking, but from a penetration testing perspective, the bigger change is what sits behind the model now.

Richard Tan AI/LLM

13 Aug

Your AI Assistant Said No. Its Tools Already Exposed the Data.

AI assistants do more than answer questions now. A support chatbot can pull up a ticket, a finance assistant can fetch an invoice, and an internal tool can change a record on someone's behalf, all through tool calls the model asks your…

Richard Tan AI/LLM

23 July

The Pentest You're About to Buy Might Not Help You

At least, not in the way you expect. Every year, we speak with organisations planning their first penetration test. The reason is usually familiar. A client has asked about security. The board has raised concerns.

Richard Tan Web application

09 July

Are You Testing Your LLM Gateway Like Any Other Critical Application?

As organisations continue adopting AI, one challenge quickly emerges: how do you manage access to multiple large language models (LLMs) in a secure and controlled way? For many organisations, the answer is an LLM gateway.

Richard Tan AI/LLM

23 June

Handala Hack and Friends

On the 11th of March 2026, the Iranian aligned Handala Hack (Handala) group claimed responsibility for a disruptive cyberattack which affected the medical multinational corporation, Stryker.

Marc Sleeman Red teaming

09 June

Exploiting Android JavaScript Interfaces

It's a single line of code - easy to miss in a review, and present in more Android apps than you'd expect: webView.addJavascriptInterface(new AppBridge(), "NativeApp"); When it's configured correctly, it's fine.

Richard Tan Mobile application

20 May

What We Found Testing HMI Security in Critical Infrastructure

There's a particular kind of screen you'll find in control rooms, substations, and utility plants the world over. It shows a live schematic of whatever process the facility is running (e.g.

Richard Tan OT/ICS

11 May

What setting up a self-hosted Minecraft server has taught me about business-to-business sales

Okay, so a disclaimer upfront… setting up a self-hosted local Minecraft server didn’t actually teach me anything about business-to-business sales. I mean, you were expecting that, right?

Ben Standen

04 May

AI-Assisted Penetration Testing in Practice: From SQL Injection to Custom Tooling

In a previous post, we discussed how AI-assisted analysis has become a useful tool in offensive security engagements.

Tim Wong Web application

28 Apr

Load Testing Multi-Step Workflows with k6 and Grafana

At SilentGrid, we rarely get called in for full-scale load testing - but recently, we had an urgent client request to validate system performance under high user activity.

Richard Tan

21 Apr

Supply Chain Attacks: From Cold War Espionage to Modern Cybercrime

A Threat That Has Evolved Beyond Nation-State Actors In the late 1950s, the Soviet embassy in The Hague placed an order for office furniture from a local Dutch company.

Richard Appleby Supply chain assumed breach

14 Apr

Cracking the Locker

During one of our red team engagements late last year, we were given a challenge: Once inside the building, could we access employee lockers? At first glance, this didn’t sound too exciting.

Richard Tan

23 Mar

How AI is Helping Our Offensive Security Testing

The integration of artificial intelligence into offensive security practices represents a significant evolution in how cybersecurity assessments are conducted.

Richard Appleby

02 Mar

Help Us, Help You.

Maximising Value in Offensive Security Assessments: Why More Information Leads to Better Results When organisations engage offensive security firms like SilentGrid for adversary simulation or penetration testing, a common assumption…

Richard Appleby

03 Feb

VexBot Returns: How We Levelled Up Our LLM CTF at BSides Canberra

When we first unleashed VexBot at BSides Canberra 2024, the response was electric. Players loved the challenge of hunting down five flags hidden behind an AI agent's defenses.

Richard Appleby

2025 10

04 Nov

Understanding Post-Quantum Security: What Business Leaders Need to Know

The cybersecurity landscape is approaching a fundamental shift. While quantum computers remain largely experimental today, their eventual capability to break current encryption methods represents a significant concern for organisations…

Richard Appleby

03 Nov

BSides Canberra 2025: T-Shirts, Time Travel, and Why Mainframes Are Still Terrifying

Another year, another BSides Canberra in the books, and honestly? We're still recovering (in the best possible way).

Richard Appleby

20 Oct

Adversary-driven Social Engineering

This article discusses the key principles and practical considerations for conducting adversary-driven social engineering engagements that prioritise realism over volume.

Ben Standen Social engineering

04 Sept

Mainframes: Legacy and Longevity

The humble mainframe is often mentioned in the same breath as the word “legacy”. When we consider the speed at which new technology emerges, it would be easy to assume that these systems should have quickly become extinct in the face of…

Helen Browitt

22 Aug

Use Device Code FIRESALEZ at Checkout

Introduction On the 2nd of July 2025, an Australian Airline reported (https://www.qantasnewsroom.com.au/media-releases/qantas-cyber-incident/) that it had been the victim of a cyber security incident affecting one of its contact centres.

Marc Sleeman Social engineering

15 July

Why AI Won't Replace Penetration Testers Anytime Soon

As artificial intelligence continues to transform industries across the board, many organisations are questioning whether traditional cybersecurity roles will become obsolete.

Richard Appleby

12 June

One Hacker's Trash, is Another's Treasure

Introduction Phishing attacks are an extremely common method used by adversaries for initial access.

Marc Sleeman

08 Apr

Ghost in the Pipelines

We recently had the opportunity to work with a client that had a technology stack that differs from the usual enterprise environment that uses Active Directory, Entra ID and a mix of on-premise and cloud infrastructure.

Marc Sleeman

20 Mar

Generative AI (LLM) Security Assessments

At SilentGrid Security, we've observed increased interest in security testing for applications using generative AI Large Language Models (LLMs).

Richard Appleby AI/LLM

28 Jan

Purple Teaming - Intelligence Driven Assurance

You don't know, what you don't know Most organisations have adopted an annual cyber security programme which commonly includes penetration testing of internet facing systems and the "internal" network.

Marc Sleeman Purple teaming

2024 4

11 Dec

AI CTF Adventures with Vexbot

Introduction At the recent BSides Canberra, we ran a Capture the Flag (CTF) for visitors to our sponsor's booth.

Richard Appleby

04 Dec

Breaking Down Office Security: What We Discovered During Our "Break-In"

When you think of office security, you probably picture high-tech firewalls and complex passwords, right? But what about the simpler tools we rely on daily, like lanyards and RFID cards?

Richard Tan Social engineering

27 Feb

Navigating a SQL injection attack

SilentGrid delves into the impact of a SQL injection that affected a healthcare application, which claimed to adequately protect the privacy of its…

Tim Wong Web application

17 Jan

Hands-On Modbus Security

In the realm of industrial control, Industrial Control Systems (ICS) play a crucial role in overseeing complex processes, with the widely used Modbus protocol serving as a key player in communication.

Richard Tan OT/ICS

2023 2

31 Jan

Local File Read to RCE

During a recent engagement against a web application, a known vulnerability, CVE-2020-35340 was exploited to gain remote code execution on the server hosting the…

Admin Web application

16 Jan