"Go Hack That Bank": Asymmetric Research's CEO on Wormhole, Drift, and Bad OPSEC
Jonathan Claudius, CEO and co-founder of Asymmetric Research, started his first real pen-test after guys in suits picked him up at the airport, dropped him at a bank, and told him to go hack it. Twenty years later he's the person Solana calls when something blows up.
We get into his path from breaking into banks to running offensive security at Mozilla, and why his second day at Jump Crypto was the day Wormhole got hacked. He explains why AR doesn't call itself an audit firm, and why AI knocked out the bottom of the audit market without touching the top: "when execution is free, you end up with a huge human attention bottleneck." He also walks through STRIDE and SIRN, the proactive and reactive programs AR runs with the Solana Foundation. By his count, about 60% of Solana TVL has gone through STRIDE, and SIRN has saved north of $5M so far.
Also: wrench attacks and why AR now runs protective services with an ex-Secret Service agent, Lazarus versus the 14-year-old with $200M, and the boring afternoon of policy work that would have prevented this year's biggest hacks. 0:00 Welcome — Jonathan from Asymmetric Research ("we're not an audit company") 1:34 From breaking into banks to Mozilla: what offensive security actually is 5:05 Day two at Jump Crypto: Wormhole gets hacked, and the 2.5-year recovery 8:37 Founding AR at Block Zero Amsterdam: "the first rule of BD is we don't sell anything" 13:18 Audit firm vs. security firm: being the inside guys, and "Be Boring" 16:53 AI ate the bottom of the audit market, and judgment is the new bottleneck 21:24 Can AI replace your auditor? Agreeable models and waves of AI psychosis 25:21 Re-audit every commit? Threat models, Mozilla's RRA, and where to start 32:10 STRIDE and SIRN: the Solana Foundation's proactive and reactive security programs 37:05 Is it always North Korea? Attribution, AI-enabled attackers, the 14-year-old with $200M 40:56 From leaky code to bad OPSEC: why 2026's big hacks were human failures 47:07 Wrench attacks, Tom's mustache, and AR's protective services 51:50 Eden's question: the bank bathroom trick and the "running man" 57:45 The question you should've asked: boring policy wins, hardware keys, branch protection 1:01:02 Pirates Parley Telegram + see you in London
"Go Hack That Bank": Asymmetric Research's CEO on Wormhole, Drift, and Bad OPSEC
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