The #thoughtops blog · Casey John Ellis

security | ai | technology | policy | startups

Founder of Bugcrowd & disclose.io, pioneer of crowdsourced security as-a-service, principal of Tall Poppy Group. Sharp takes on breaking things, building things, fixing things, and the economics in between.

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Thinking

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Vulnerability Disclosure in 2026

Post-Mythos vulnerability disclosure: a 2026 field guide for vendors and researchers on AI-era bug bounties, slop triage, and rebuilding ecosystem norms.

By Casey Ellis · 17 May 2026
Policy

Coordinated, Until It Isn't

Everyone has a take on Moksha's 89-vuln XAPI drop. Almost everyone misses the same thing: it wasn't one decision, it was four: go public, go Day-0, withhold patches from Citrix, lean into the "shittrix" frame. Coordinated disclosure runs on goodwill, and the goodwill runs out sometimes.

By Casey Ellis · 17 May 2026
Security

Thoughts on the #slopdemic

Move over #vulnpocalypse — there's a new term we need to talk about: the #slopdemic. AI didn't invent low-quality vuln reports, but it just turbocharged them, and F/OSS is drowning.

By Casey Ellis · 04 May 2026
Personal

Continued Monitoring of the Situation

Week two of an AI-powered House Finch nest monitor: four model biases, a Wyze cam back from the dead, and a full pipeline rewrite before the eggs hatch.

By Casey Ellis · 03 May 2026
Personal

"Monitoring the Situation" - The Internet of Birbs

Two pale-blue speckled eggs on the sunroom bookshelf turned into three cameras, an Unraid NAS, two AI models, and a journal that writes itself every morning. None of it had to be useful — it just had to be possible. Because joy.

By Casey Ellis · 29 Apr 2026
Security

Spicy Takes from my Aikido Security Podcast

Nine takes from my RSAC conversation with Mackenzie Jackson on Aikido's Secure Disclosure podcast — on bug bounty, AI slop, hack-back, vibe coding, and why the internet still working is a minor miracle.

By Casey Ellis · 24 Apr 2026
Security

Offense Scales with Compute. Defense Scales with Committees.

Why AI is widening the attacker-defender gap faster than anything we've built to close it — and what that actually means for the next decade of security.

By Casey Ellis · 08 Apr 2026
Thinking

The Compliance Reckoning

AI makes security verification cheap, putting two decades of checkbox compliance, paper pentests, and audit theater under sudden economic pressure.

By Casey Ellis · 28 Mar 2026
Security

Bug Bounties in the Age of AI

As AI accelerates the offense-defense asymmetry, bug bounties and vulnerability disclosure remain essential. Casey Ellis on the future of bug bounties, the evolving threat landscape, and how disclose.io and the SRLDF protect the researchers keeping us safe.

By Casey Ellis · 27 Mar 2026
Security

The FCC Just Banned Every Foreign-Made Router

The FCC added every foreign-made consumer router to the Covered List — a March 2026 supply-chain action that goes far beyond previous adversary-nation bans.

By Casey Ellis · 24 Mar 2026
Policy

The White House AI Framework: What It Says, What It Doesn't, and Why the Gaps Matter More

The March 2026 White House AI policy framework analyzed: seven pillars, and why the AI security omissions matter more than what's actually in the document.

By Casey Ellis · 23 Mar 2026