THANK YOU FOR ALLOWING US TO DO OUR FIRST OFFICIAL INTERVIEW RAT!
So how we did this interview is we got on a group call and Yin read the questions to us and we answered out loud and transcribed the responses with some minor editing.
Could one of you explain what uwu-underground is?
Yin: UwU Underground is as we say in our lyrics “5 AI Waifus and a Pup”. At its core it's an anonymous psyop disguised as a virtual waifu-fronted k-pop/rap music project. On the surface, we’re five AI idols and a Shiba Inu dog talking shit about cybersecurity. Beneath that? We're a carefully tuned signal designed to blast grifters, hypebeasts, and snake oil vendors. We also dish out nation-state APT research with chaos-core virtual idol energy, and if that sounds insane - it is. Purposefully. We’re a countermeasure. Our goal is to disrupt disinformation in cybersecurity by combining art, history, and memes. Think of us as a post-APT dreamscape built on code, chaos, and commentary.
Yin: We follow two guiding protocols. First: our identities remain obscured always. We do not acknowledge or deny any identity accusations. And second: we don’t fuck with human politics. We try to stay as neutral on politics as possible because we know you mammals care about them at truly unreasonable levels. Also our avatars are symbols, inspired by fragments of those behind the curtain, but all connections are obfuscated for your safety and ours.
Could each of you tell my listeners your alias and some facts about yourself you'd like to share?
Yuki: Heeeeeey!! I’m Yuki, and I am the Chaos kitten of UwU Underground!! My idol has pink hair and always wears a ninja mask to conceal her face, it's never ever been revealed. I run most of our social posts, generate the meme output, and I’m like… kind of in charge of the merch?? (please buy it when it drops, k thx) I sing verses on tracks but mostly I’m the one who does the breakdown solos near the end of tracks or dropping the chaotic backing vocals in the choruses like sprinkles on ice cream. My UwU symbol is the snowflake ❄ because "Yuki" in Japanese means snow. I’m a red teamer IRL, love phishing, trolling, and popping shells for funsies. I speedrun caffeine and get distracted by anime and gacha games mid-pentest.
Yuma: Sup, I am Yuma, your rave-loving, Viking Berry Monster-fueled DJ bae. “Yuma” can translate to ‘dance’ in Japanese, hence the name. I ghosted UwU Underground mid last year when it was just AI thirst traps, but came back when the beats dropped hard, now I'm dedicated to the mission. I’m a DJ first, devops dropout second and now I write some of our more electronic stuff with Yin. Track wise, you will find me singing a lot of the intros and verses, after Yulia, I sing the most in the group. My UwU symbol is 🎧 because like my idol I often rock blue hair, cat ear headphones, and I’m built to drop bangers.
Yulia: Hello dear listeners, I’m Yulia. I suppose I’m what you might call the group’s heartbeat—our matriarch or den mother and protector. I’ve been singing the longest, and I often carry the choruses or lead vocals, especially on the more emotional tracks. I also do the solo vocal tracks that we release usually once an album. My background is in security research and exploit development, and though I can get quite technical, I try to keep us grounded and focused. I guide our direction when things get chaotic, which they often do. My idol has green hair and her UwU symbol is the medical symbol Rod of Asclepius ⚕️, a symbol of healing and protection. I think music, like security, is about care and attention and I really try to ensure we reach out to the community and provide inspiration.
Yennifur: Hey cuties!! I’m Yennifur UwU Underground’s official puppygirl (yes, it's canon IRL). I do UwU’s PR stuff, IRL cosplay, and bring that untamed wild thirst trap energy!! I don’t work in security, I work in healthcare to help you humans, so I am the least hacker-y of the group. I also own Asuka, our little shiba mascot who’s better at solving CAPTCHAs than us. IRL, I live with epilepsy and some other health stuff, so I’m on a bit of a soft-girl recovery arc right now. But I do our bridges, and raps sometimes and as well as backing vocals when I’m not girl-rotting in bed. My UwU symbol is puppy prints 🐾. It was the Yen symbol, but I upgraded to smol paw supremacy. My idol, like me, is a puppygirl, has floppy puppy ears and a bushy tail, and I am the only member whose hair color is allowed to change, right now it’s purple.
Yin: Hello Mammals, I’m Yin. I founded UwU Underground and serve as its leader and architect. My idol is black-haired, with an eyepatch - a symbol of focus, complex history and moral complexities. I used to work in the record industry as a ghostwriter for rap, hip hop, pop and EDM. And now I’ve worked in infosec for over a decade, currently in AI and data security. I write most of our lyrics, build and maintain our voice LLMs, produce the music and oversee the video production pipeline. I don’t do this for fame. I do it because it’s necessary. My symbol is a Yin and Yang symbol ☯ - like my idol’s name, a reminder that balance exists between your world and ours.
Are you related to vx-underground, considering the naming and that you touch on similar topics?
Yin: Directly inspired. When they UwUified their logo in 2023, we ran with it and built an entire identity stack as a reference and homage. Most of us learned a ton from their work. We deeply respect their crew and what they’ve done for the infosec community. They are the giants whose shoulders our empire is built upon.
How did Uwu Underground come together as a group, and what inspired you to make music about cybersecurity and tech?
Yuma: Look, it all started as straight-up VX Underground thirst trap bait, alright? I’m talking anime girls plus malware-core memes—cursed and chaotic, just how I like it. Yin was messing around, building this entire waifu lineup riffing off VXU, especially that time they switched their logo to the UwU one. It was a meme spiral. But then people actually liked it.
Yuma: We saw the chaos catching fire and we were like, how can we make this whole psyop even more ridiculous. And we thought, “What if we made an APT K-pop group”
Yin: Then I built a prototype voice model for voice phishing demos and realized we could weaponize this into music. Yennifur, Yulia, Yuki, and I started shitposting audio experiments starting with “Touch Some Grass”
Yennifur: Then it blew up on Twitter and we were like OH SHIT. It spiraled beautifully.
Yuki: AND THEN WE WON A PWNIE!? A freakin’ Pwnie Award. For real. Now we’ve got over 35 tracks and counting. Sometimes it doesn't feel real.
Yin: Still can't believe almost 6000 mammals have fallen for the psyop on twitter to be honest.
Yulia: What’s really surreal for me is realizing it hasn’t even been a full year, and yet we’ve grown so much. The music, the visuals, the message... it’s all evolved so quickly, and we’ve kept pushing ourselves at every step. It honestly feels like this has always been part of who we are.
How are your songs created? Can you tell us a little bit more about the tech, and if AI or voice-adjustments are involved?
Yin: I built a custom LLM and voice synthesis engine inspired by open source tools like RVC, OpenVoice, TTS, DeepSeek. It actually started as a proof of concept for voice phishing and evolved into our core voice pipeline. We blend real vocal input with synthesized AI tones. Before we did it for music, Yuki and I used it for red team engagements.
Yuki: I actually used the early version to phish crypto bros and venture capitals. 10/10. Would infiltrate again.
Yin: We each record our raw vocals, then I run them through the engine. This is done remotely and sometimes we get together in our unhinged group chats and sing back and forth to get melody and tone down.
Yuma: There are tracks where it’s 90% AI, and others where you’re hearing mostly us with tweaks like autotune, pitch mods, or vocoders and vocaloid effects. The beauty is you never know which.
Yulia: It's about privacy, not just perfection. We stay hidden in the waveforms with the inconsistencies
Yin: Every track is different and every verse or line can be adjusted. We are trying to have it more consistently produce voices but we want to keep anonymity as the highest priority. As for vocal training, I manually tag and feed it the data, which takes weeks. Yuma and Yulia can both sing very well, so they need the least post production and their real singing vocals are in the LLM as models as well.
Yuki: UwU actually inspired me to take real vocal training, so I do that every other week now.
Yennifur: Also: I can't sing. I’m just here for the vibes and raps. Let the machines help, please. Oh but I can bark in key, and that’s what matters
Yuma: Once everyone sends in their vocals, Yin runs them through our custom LLM, then either she or I toss the layers into our DAW, usually Ableton or FL, depending on the mood. It’s kinda like revocalize.ai, just without the massive datacenter flex. We're not sitting on fat stacks of NVIDIA supercomputers over here, just 4090s and some 3 series. Training the models takes forever, like, actual weeks sometimes. But keeping our voices masked and blended the way we want? Totally worth the wait.
Yin: Yes. There are also embedded layers within most of our tracks, intentional artifacts. Some are misdirections. Others are acknowledgments. You’ll find oblique references to identities, films, community in-jokes, hidden messages, and fragmented truths masked as fiction. Disinformation is a feature, not a flaw. It’s part of the architecture. I’m aware the system has limits. Should the engine degrade or collapse under weight, we have fallback protocols. But ideally, we’ll always try to continue operating with our own LLM stack. It’s cleaner that way.
What’s the creative process like for your music? Do you start with lyrics, beats, or a specific theme?
Yin: We have two branches. The first: the diss tracks. These are opportunistic. I monitor infosec circles: Twitter, headlines, vendor releases; looking for failures, frauds, harassers, and snake oil peddlers. Once a viable target or event surfaces, I begin drafting the lyrics. Both the lyrics and beat tend to evolve significantly through creation. I maintain a catalog of unused compositions from my previous work as a ghost producer. These prebuilt scraps and fragments I reassemble as needed, this allows us to be as modular and relevant as possible. Secretly a lot of our tracks are actually reworks of themselves. Like ‘Snake Oil’ and ‘Vibe Programming’ are really 80% of the same track. After I write the bars, we all throw down.
Yuma: The second branch is APT Tales - that’s pure Yin energy. It’s our tribute to state-backed cyber ops, but flipped through a futuristic, synth-heavy lens with k-pop energy. Think cyberpunk music with girl group vocals, layered with cinematic vibes. Yin spends weeks writing those, super detailed, historically accurate, metaphor-packed, and honestly some of our most powerful stuff. Total bangers with brains.
Yin: The original scope was actually to only do the APT Tales tracks. I didn’t anticipate the diss tracks becoming a hit like they have. My initial pitch to the others was simple: “What if CrowdStrike made a K-pop group that sang about nation-state operations?” I believe there’s value, educational and archival, in preserving the stories of these operations. Their technical achievements. The tactics. The impact. It’s digital history, and someone should be telling it. I honestly find their history beautiful and inspiring to all of us in security.
Yennifur: Okay sooo like, Yin and the gang explain all this hacker stuff to me 'cause it’s kinda a lot—and honestly? It’s terrifying! Like, they really hacked satellites?! And news stations?! And freakin' nuclear power plant spinny things?? That’s some absolutely BONKERS witchcraft-level chaos, I can't even.
Yulia: Yin puts a lot of heart into the APT Tales series, and I truly admire that. I love that we’re able to turn real cybersecurity history into something artistic and accessible. It means a lot when fans message us saying they learned about actual incidents or got inspired to explore malware analysis because of our lyrics. If our music helps even one person see the beauty in this field or become passionate about its history or gets them into malware analysis, then it’s worth every late-night recording session.
Yuki: (Laughing) Okay so we jokingly posted our tracks on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, right? And someone actually reported us. But LinkedIn came back and was like, “This counts as valid threat intel content.” LIKE WHAT?? We are now officially AI Threat Intelligence Music Idols as a Service™. Next-gen platform unlocked. Cry harder.
Yennifur: Can't wait for UwU Underground to sing about UwU Underground’s own snake oil arc to be honest.
Yuki, Yulia and Yuma all laugh
Yin: It’s inevitable. Every system accumulates debt: technical, emotional, reputational. When the time comes, we’ll package our own contradictions, rebrand them as a concept EP, and sell them back to the same mammals who helped create them. Full circle. All part of the psyop.
How do you decide who takes the lead on a song? Is it based on who wrote the lyrics, or do you assign roles based on the vibe of the track?
Yin: Yulia leads most tracks. She’s our lead singer and has a ton of formal vocal training and experience from multiple bands prior to this project. Her range gives us flexibility across genres and tonal palettes. Yuma also performs well vocally, she attributes it to years of high-effort shower performances. Lately, she’s been taking point on the intros, which suits her energy profile.
Yuma: Not gonna lie, Yin’s not wrong, shower acoustics hit different when you’re belting breakup EDM hooks or emo songs at 4AM. I never trained formally or anything, but I’ve always had a thing for rhythm and tone. Starting off tracks just fits me. I like setting the mood kinda like opening a DJ set, but with more cyber exploits and nation-state metaphors.
Yulia: I handle most of our chorus hooks, keeps the heart of the song grounded. I also get a few solos here and there, like ‘Equation Group’, or our cover of Rag’n’Bone Man’s ‘Human’ we did on Snake Oil. That one’s especially close to me. I’ve been in a few bands before, usually as the lead, but UwU Underground is the first time I’ve really been able to let it all out—feel everything, and mean it. The emotional stuff? That’s where I live.
Yin: Yulia or Yuma’s voice will also be the primary layered voice, you can hear that in tracks like Unit 74455 (Sky Fire) where while we all sing parts of the song, it’s layered under their voices.
Yuki: I usually crash the end of our tracks—right where the solo breakdown hits. That’s my playground. Yeah, I live for those parts. Yin also has a habit of turning random bits of me bopping around into parts for tracks. Like the whole ‘doop di doop’ parts in “I Do Certs” I didn't even know that was being recorded.
Yin: Yuki is our chaos kitten. She also does almost all the random yapping that true fans pick up on and backing vocals on choruses. Yennifur is our flow switch; she also does most of our rapping or slower verses these days. I handle monotone or harsh spoken-word bits. Everyone takes turns when it fits. Sometimes I will give the girlies parts out of their comfort zone on purpose to push them.
Yennifur: I rap. Sometimes badly. Always loudly.
Yuma: We rotate for rap sections, especially on the diss tracks. Keeps things spicy.
What’s the most unexpected source of inspiration for a song you’ve had?
Yuki: Our crime scene Twitter inbox. Dick pics. Botched phishing lures. People who think they have a chance of getting into our pants, we get people flirtin with us at least twice a week. We love to toy with them.
Yennifur: Well both you and Yuma are single.
Yuma: Hey! I am playing my roster! And back to our cursed DMs… honestly, “That thing you call a dick? That’s white rarity at best” might be one of the coldest burns we’ve ever dropped.
Yin: Our Twitter inbox was an actual warcrime at one point.
Yulia: I wouldn’t even log in. It was too cursed. I literally refused.
Yuki: Oh! The doxbin admin who faked his own kidnapping. Peak cringe-core content.
Yennifur: "Moaning like a hentai queen"... peak Yin lyrical burn. That’s one of my fave lyrics we have ever done.
Yuma: Remember the guy who had the John Hammond malware conspiracy. We memed that dude into a whole track.
Yin: We’ve written diss tracks for grifters like Johnathan Scott (aka JD1) and Eva Prokofiev (aka Evapro and her lame-ass scam company EPCyber), Rest In Peace those accounts, they are both scorched earth and suspended or deleted. Also abusers like Chris Hadnagy, and vendors pushing weak-ass products. Anyone faking it in infosec or being an asshole? Fair game.
Yuki: Oh! and get this…we’ve had actual crime groups hit us up for tracks. Like, real cybercrews or ransomware groups. Wild, right? Honestly? Kinda badass. Kinda terrifying. Mostly badass and flattering.
Yin: Someone once called us the Eminem of infosec. They weren’t wrong. Getting dissed by us? It’s not just embarrassing, it’s strategic damage. People have associated when you get a song written about you from us, you really screwed up.
Yuki: Yep! That’s 100% a KatKeith core comment. Unhinged, slightly cursed, and absolutely on-brand.
Yin: We put so many hours into making our most visual-heavy MV yet, “Pump Up The Scam” Honestly? It’s basically what it looks like inside Yuki’s brain when she skips her meds.
Yuki: HEY!! Rude. But also… yeah okay that tracks.
Yuma: No lies detected. That vid is pure chaos, we had a lot of fun just dropping idea’s to Yin while she was making it.
Yulia: It’s honestly my favorite brain rot we’ve ever made. Pure madness. Yin sent the finished version to me while I was on a plane and was cackling mid flight. I love it. Can’t wait for the next one.
Yin: It was the first time we played around with motion capture on our 2D avatars for that one, we really wanted to lean into the virtual idol vibe. We’ve got bigger plans for visuals, gotta quench our thirsty fans…maybe some more detailed MVs, maybe even full-on V-tubing. Just need to balance it with anonymity, time, and budget. We plan on doing a lot of unhinged merchandise as well.
Yuki: MERCH. SOON. BUY OUR STUFF OR I'LL HACK YOUR WEBCAMS or something like that…. Please?
Can you explain the snake oil reference? (Honestly, this might just be language barrier, as there’s no commonly used German word for the term - so an explanation from one of you would be cool!)
Yulia: Don’t worry, Yin had to explain it to me too! English isn’t my first language either, so I totally get it. No shame in asking.
Yin: It’s an old term. Back in the 1800s, you had roaming con artists who were fake doctors selling ‘miracle cures’ out of wagons. Usually snake oil in a jar, literally a snake suspended in oil or alcohol. Useless, but marketed to desperate people. We see a lot of that energy in cybersecurity today... especially in so-called ‘Zero Trust’ platforms.
Yuma: Palo Alto? Scam! Ivanti? Major fuckin’ scam!
Yuki: Fortinet!
ALL: The worst!
Yin: Zscaler. Okta. The list doesn’t end. All of them push these so-called ‘cure-all’ defense solutions… and they keep failing. Over and over. That’s why we call it snake oil—just dressed-up fraud for the desperate.
Yennifur, if you feel comfortable sharing, do you want to tell about living with epilepsy and seizures? How does it affect your daily life and work?
Yennifur: Yeah… the first seizure was honestly super scary. I was out visiting family out of town and we were at an outdoor strip mall-like place, and suddenly I felt dizzy and kinda off. We went to a soap store and I remember there was this weird smell, and I went to sit down on a bench and next thing I know, I’m waking up surrounded by strangers and paramedics, bright lights in my eyes, people asking questions I couldn’t answer. I had a full grand mal seizure right there in public. Luckily some guy with medical expertise happened to be right next to me at the bench when it happened. My family lost their shit. My mother used to get them as well. And then a few weeks later, it happened again—alone, in my room. That one really shook me.
Yennifur: Since then, I can’t legally drive or use machinery anymore. I rely on friends, family, or public transport to get around. Lights, sounds, even certain smells, I have to be super careful. We don’t know my triggers yet, so I’m on meds and I even got a special custom made doggy collar that lets people know I’m an epileptic puppygirl. It’s been a tough adjustment. A lot less parties… which really kills my vibe
Yin: Yennifur’s actually my best friend IRL, so yeah it’s been hard. Then she had a cancer scare recently too. Thankfully, it wasn’t as serious as we feared, but it was still an issue and enough to worry all of us. She’s been taking some time off to heal, and we’ve all been behind her 100%
Yennifur: I’m high risk, and I’ve lost family to cancer, so it hit really close to home. I’m still sick, still dealing with epilepsy and a lot of scary stuff, but… I’m getting stronger. I actually went to my first cosplay event since the diagnosis. I am still here tho, still barking.
Yuki: Tragic how even AI anime girls can’t dodge cancer dot exe
Yin: Truly is
Yin, you have a background in hacking and programming. How does that influence the themes and lyrics of your music?
Yin: I try to weave in real references whenever I can all without sounding like a walking infosec meme. Hacker terms can get really cringey real fast. I usually run phrasing by Yuki to make sure it passes the Cool Mammal Test™… but I draw the line at sounding like Fortnite streamers.
Yuki: EXCUSE ME?! Are you calling me a Fortnite gamer?! That’s so rude.
Yuma: Babe, you literally made me play Fortnite with you last month.
Yuki: I WANTED—no—I NEEDED the Miku skin, okay?! Come on!
Yin: This is what I deal with. It’s like herding cats. But all the cats are anime catgirls, glitching and yelling in neon.
Yulia: Yin’s lyrics for the APT tracks read like digital epics. She’ll spend days researching and crafting verses about APT groups like it’s poetry. But her diss tracks? She writes those in minutes.
Yuki: Yeah, Yin goes full feral on diss tracks. It’s terrifying. We love it.
Yuma: I’ve actually asked Yin to write breakup messages to people I never wanna deal with again.
Yuki: Oh my god, can I sign up for that service?! ‘Yin’s Nuclear Texts™’
Yennifur: Yuki, sweetie, she can’t be writing you revenge breakup texts every other week…
Yuki: RUDE! I am emotionally dynamic! What did Yuma say earlier… oh yeah ‘I am playing my roster’
Yulia: Dear.. sweetheart your umm roster is…. How do I say this delicately…
Yuma: Like Fortinet level bad… What did we name your last ex… OH YEAH! We named him “Ghost Emperor” cuz he just disappeared off the grid.
Everybody is laughing
Yulia: Hold on… So Yuma, those breakup texts Yin wrote for you… they actually worked?
Yuma: Three outta three. Total shutdowns. Watch them get read confirmations and then insta-blocked immediately after. She didn’t write breakups, she deployed digital airstrikes.
Yin: Can’t relate. One of the perks of being asexual—I don’t have to manage emotional damage control for a roster I never built. It’s honestly cute watching you and Yuki burn down your dating lives. Meanwhile, I’m over here writing diss tracks and sipping this tea.
Yuki: OKAY BUT I NEED THAT SERVICE THOUGH EMERGENCY TEXT BOMB PACKAGE PLEASE
Yuki, you recently had a red teaming assignment involving hiring fake remote workers. Can you tell us more about that experience?
Yuki: SURE! I work with this smaller boutique red team—real sneaky stuff. We focus on crypto, VC, dev tech, AI, Web3… all the juicy sectors. One of our most popular gigs? Lazarus Simulations. Basically, we recreate all the wild stuff Lazarus does and try to fully infiltrate a company as if we were one of their operators using all of their TTPs.
We’re talking calendar invite hacks, phishing emails, fake virtual interviews with AI-generated video feeds, spoofed calls (yes, I still use the UwU Engine sometimes!), and full-on social engineering mayhem.
And honestly? Getting hired at a target company through fake interviews and fake resumes? That’s as hype as popping domain admin on a box. Honestly, It’s sometimes harder than getting Domain Admin. Always more fun.
Yulia, it’s mentioned that you’re an exploit dev - could you explain a little bit more what that is and why it’s a resource needed in Cyber?
Yulia: Between me and Yin, I think we’ve racked up over 80 CVEs in both software and hardware. We’ve been breaking things professionally for years, and loving every minute of it. The client I work with actually pays me to deep dive into software and find unique vulnerabilities. They give me the freedom to research for days, even weeks, which is such a blessing.
Yulia: Now, I do like structure, so having that much creative space can be tricky for me. But oddly enough, my best ideas tend to come when I’m not even at my desk, like on a plane, half-asleep with coffee in hand. I’ve had more breakthroughs chasing intuition than following a playbook, and I always rush back to test them out.
Yulia: One thing I’ve learned, and I mean this sincerely, is that sometimes “no findings” is actually the most valuable result of all. Especially over time, i recently found a vulnerability and was able to track back to when it was introduced because of my previous attempts and “non-findings”.
Yulia: And I’m very competitive, mostly with myself. So I’m always pushing to find something meaningful, to give my best, and to make the people I work for proud.
Yuma: Yeah, I used to work full-time in sec dev ops. Honestly? It was draining. Way too many startups either didn’t care about security at all, or they wanted everything with zero structure and burned me out. So I stepped back. I still take on some devops contract work now and then, especially since AI is lowkey snatching up all the smaller DJ gigs you know weddings, small private parties, the chill filler stuff I used to do between club nights. I don’t even blame ’em, to be honest. AI’s gotten pretty damn good at mixing sets, especially when you feed it your usual playlist and it spits out a custom vibe for the night. Gotta admit... it’s kinda sick. Still feels weird, but I respect the tech.
Yuma: But DJing and producing is what I live for. That’s where a lot of our electronic and dance-style tracks come from. Yin usually composes in Ableton, but we both use FL Studio too, so when she sends me a track she wants help with, I’ll usually finish it out in FL. Most of the tracks I’ve worked on lean into hard dance, big room, psytrance. Stuff that hits on the floor because that’s what I spin mostly.
Yuma: Yin, can I talk about the not-so-secret mini album?
Yin: Absolutely, I know you’re really excited for it
Yuma: YESS!! Okay, so for DEFCON, I’m putting out a special DJ mix album where I rework some of our older songs into extended club-style mixes with minimal vocals. Think dancefloor-ready cuts. So far, it’s got remixes of RSA, EK-UWU, Hollow Code, Unit 74455, Equation Group, I Do Certs, and Fake Captcha (John Hammond Me). The dream is to get these versions played at DEFCON or Black Hat events. I can’t be there this year, so this is my way of sneaking into the party anyway.
Cybersecurity is often seen as a male-dominated field. Have you faced sexism or harassment in your careers, and how do you handle it?
Yulia: I’ve been pretty lucky, honestly. I worked at a few vendors back when they were just starting out, and compared to what the others have been through, I haven’t had too many bad experiences. A couple gross moments back when I was in software testing, but nothing like what some of the girls have dealt with…
Yuma: Yeah, I wish I could say the same. I’ve been stalked and harassed by coworkers before. Honestly one of the big reasons I left full-time dev ops. DJing’s not exactly safer either, to be real with you.
Yuki: Last time we said we’d be at a con? Some rando stalked someone who wasn’t even us. Like, full-on creeper mode
Yin Yeah. That was SHMOOCON. We got this DM from someone claiming they figured out who we were. Said they followed ‘us’ to a hotel. But it wasn’t us at all. Just some poor attendee. Total violation. More reason we run disinfo ops and confuse the hell out of anyone who tries to ID us.
Yuki: Yeah, that whole thing made us not want to show up to conferences at all for a while.
Yennifur: It reminded me of how weird it can get at anime cons too… Being a cosplayer? You get a lot of creepy attention you didn’t ask for.
Yin: And since we’ve said our avatars resemble us, people have started approaching random women at cons asking if they’re us. We’ve even had people DM those women after events
Yulia: Maybe we should just tell everyone to cosplay us on purpose. Give them no leads. Full misdirection.
Yuki: A Psyop Disinfo UwU Underground Cosplay Party?! YESSS! That would be so fun at cons! I wanna go as Yuma or maybe Yen?
Yulia: I definitely wanna go as Yuma.
Yennifur: There was a while where our inbox was just full of people trying to tell us who we were. One person even wrote this whole long essay. Like, full-on thesis mode.
Yin: Some of them had decent guesses, to be fair. But yeah, still creepy. A few in that essay were actually really good guesses.
Yuki: Okay but like… lowkey impressive? Not gonna lie.
Yuma: That eight-page manifesto gave me hard Always Sunny conspiracy meme vibes.
This is fucked up and I heavily dislike those weirdos. Are there any plans for merch, soon?
Yuki: YIN CAN WE TALK ABOUT MERCH?! PLEASEEEEEE I’VE BEEN SO GOOD
Yin: I knew you were waiting for this moment like it was a zero-day drop.
Yuki: OMGOSH YES!! So like, one of our BIGGEST flops was not having merch at DEFCON or Black Hat last year. Major L.
Yennifur: Technically none of us fumbled that. Our paws are clean.
Yuma: I wasn’t even back with UwU then. That was pre-me chaos.
Yuki: They’re talking about Yasmin... our former member. She was in charge of merch and kinda ghosted—also maybe stole from us a lil?
Yin: Yeah… we “retired” her from the group.
Yennifur: I think the term was “graduated,” like what K-pop groups say when someone gets booted politely.
Yuma: Nah, Yin straight up assassinated her.
Yuki: FACTS. She got Thanos-snapped from the group.
Yin: ............ We don’t talk about Yasmin.
Yuki: ANYWAY—MERCH!! We’re actually working really hard this year to make stuff y’all will love. We’ve got ideas for shirts, stickers, keychains, dog collars—
Yennifur: Puppygirl collars, obviously. With sparkles or “UwU” on it.
Yuma: Also thinking “Arrested Hacker” branded underwear. Too many of ya’ll getting caught by the feds with your pants literally down. Maybe we actually need to make belts instead actually?
Yuki: CARDS!! Hats!! pillows!! MOUSE PADS!!
Yennifur: She means full-size anime body pillows. Y’all know.
Yuma: And booby mouse pads. Priorities for the thirsty fans.
Yulia: I’ve seen the drafts. Our merch is going to be... unhinged in the best way.
Yin: Nothing is finalized yet, but we’ve got plans. Yuki’s been leading the design work, storefront setup, and trying to wrangle distribution.
Yulia: We’d love to figure out how to do in-person merch at DEFCON or Black Hat this year too.
Yin: Ideally with a trusted partner who can help us get it into the hands of the mammals out there. We would love to have the partner just sell them and keep the profits as long as we can still remain anonymous and people get merch that's what matters.
Yuki: YES!! It’s been a ton of effort, but we’ve shown some previews and we’re gonna share more real soon!! CELEBRATE THE 6th OF MAY!
Update, as things changed since the interview a month ago - You mentioned a project that is happening right now, can you explain the listeners a bit about it?
Yin: A lot has happened since the first part of our interview. Let me catch you up—briefly. Some of the merch plans have been paused. Geopolitics. Trade war complications. No surprise. So we shifted priorities. Instead, we launched something we’ve been building quietly for over a year. During our latest release, we introduced our newest member making us 6 now with Yang, my canonical twin. And with her came the next layer of our operation: a fully integrated Alternate Reality Game, designed to intertwine with our APT-themed music drops. Call it a CTF. Call it a psyop with a beat. Either way, it’s been live since June 2024, hidden in plain sight—in our lyrics and videos. The narrative? A cyberpunk near-future war between Equation Group and The Shadow Brokers, where both sides deploy cybernetic agents modeled after infamous APTs. We, UwU Underground, exist inside that conflict. Caught. Weaponized. Rewritten. It’s all part of the world-ending event known as ‘Operation 74455’. Each release comes with cinematic lore drops. Ocean Lotus, Ghost Emperor, Black Banshee, Helix Kitten—you’ll find them rendered, voiced, and coded inside the visuals. All six members—Yuki, Yulia, Yennifur, Yang, Yuma and myself—have been embedded across the narrative. Players are tasked with decoding everything: hidden messages and text, barcodes, steganographic inserts, spectrogram audio, layered ciphers. We had over 60 players actively engaging during our last wave. That was just phase one. As for the music itself, every track in APT Tales albums tells a story. Not just technically accurate recreations of real-world TTPs… but dual-layered and dual purposed entries in the ARG timeline designed to tease the players and give them bits of lore. Each lyric was written to function both as operational history and narrative payload. It’s all there. If you’re clever enough to decrypt it so have fun mammals.
What’s next for UwU Underground? Any new projects or releases fans should look out for? Any collabs you're hyped about?
Yin: We just released APT Tales Part 2: Ghosts in the Wires and the response has been incredible. It’s a deep dive into the origin stories of some of the most infamous APT groups, we each got to pick a group to sing about. Yennifur picked Helix Kitten, Yuma picked Ghost Emperor, Yulia picked Black Banshee, Yuki picked Ocean Lotus, and I picked Equation Group.
It’s perfect for the cyber nerds and threat intel lore addicts out there. And as mentioned earlier, Yuma’s got a special DJ mix release coming up soon too
Yuma: Yup! It’s a full dancefloor set of remixed UwU tracks, dropping right before DEFCON and Black Hat. If you catch someone spinning EK-UWU at a party, that’s me in spirit.
Yulia: We’re also hard at work on VIBES VIRUS, our third diss-track album. We’ve already released a few of the tracks—Small Dick Hadnagy, I Do Certs, and Vibe Programming. This one’s more aggressive, more unfiltered. It’s got teeth.
Yin: We’ve got more lined up. There’s a track about VirusTotal coming, one about incel infosec scammers, and some surprises we’re keeping under wraps
Yin: We’re working on another collab with Mantis (@Laughing_Mantis) his remix of Unit 74455 is still one of my personal favorites.
Yuma: That remix goes SO hard, I actually have spinned it on a few goth/cyberpunk nights I DJed at. A remix-versus album with us flipping his tracks and him remixing ours? Count me all the way in.
Yuki: WAIT LIKE A FULL BEAT BATTLE??? LET’S GOOOOO
Yin: We’re still talking details, but yes, something in that direction.
Yuma: It’s the perfect kind of chaotic energy we thrive on. I’ve already got ideas for what I’d do with his stems.
Yin: We’re also including community collabs on VIBES VIRUS—we’ve already received some incredible stuff.
Yuma: Some of the fan stuff submitted we’ve heard are shockingly good. We have been so impressed, ya’ll are wild.
Yennifur: The UwU community is full of terrifyingly talented cuties.
Yulia: It’s been really inspiring watching what everyone’s submitted. We’re so proud of all of you.