Hacker Valley Studio

Hosted by Hacker Valley Media

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445

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Oct 2026

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About the show

Welcome back to the show! Hacker Valley Studio podcast features Host Ron Eddings, as he explores the world of cybersecurity through the eyes of professionals in the industry. We cover everything from inspirational real-life stories in tech, to highlighting influential cybersecurity companies, and we do so in a fun and enthusiastic way. We’re making cybersecurity accessible, creating a whole new form of entertainment: cybertainment.

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October 26, 2026Episode 44845 min

Your Cloud Backup Won’t Save You with Jake Bernardes

If someone wiped your cloud environment tomorrow, how long until you’re back in business? Not what the plan says. What would actually happen? Ron sits down with Jake Bernardes, CISO at Gambit Security, who got his first CISO job by sneaking into a company’s office and sitting in the CEO’s chair. He has since run security for tech companies and early-stage security vendors, and he hosts the Random Access Memories podcast. Jake shares the social engineering tricks that got him past security guards. He also explains why voice phishing now takes almost no effort. Then he walks through Gambit’s research on an AI-run attack that cost about $25 per target and needed fewer than ten non-technical prompts. Along the way, he takes on phishing simulations, AI guardrails and cyber insurance. Then comes recovery, the part of security Jake says is still broken. His take: tabletop exercises are “Dungeons & Dragons for executives.” Instead, figure out your minimum viable business, the systems you can’t live without, and prove you can bring them back. Ron closes by tying it to the grocery chain outage that hit his family’s workplace. Impactful Moments 00:00 - Introduction 03:20 - Busting the myth: the cloud has your back 05:45 - Seven minutes of agentic ransomware 10:35 - Breaking into a CEO’s office for a CISO job 12:15 - Paying strangers to get past security guards 15:25 - People don’t hack in, they log in 18:55 - The ASOS incident and the short-stock theory 20:00 - Too much exposed to the public internet 23:05 - Anatomy of a $25 AI attack 27:10 - Translating the attacker’s Chinese prompt 29:40 - Can CISOs rely on AI guardrails? 32:25 - Why cyber insurance is a tick box 35:30 - Minimum viable business for 2027 38:25 - Ron digs into the Giant Food outage Links Connect with Jake Bernardes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakeleobernardes/ – Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com Become a sponsor of the show: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/

October 14, 2026Episode 44722 min

Voice Phishing Is the New Front Door

What would you do if your phone rang and the caller ID showed your own company? Would you pick up? Would you help the person on the other end? This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Ron goes solo to break down a breach that started with that exact call. Attackers spoofed Astrana Health’s main corporate phone number, posed as coworkers, and talked their way into systems connected to roughly 1.5 million patients. Ron starts with a rewind from phone books to data brokers, including a live search on a people-search site that turned up his own family. From there he walks through the SEC filing, sends a swarm of AI research agents after the public record, and lines up the suspects behind the attack. The uncomfortable part is that we spent a decade training people to spot a bad email while attackers moved to the phone. Voice phishing is now the second most common way attackers get in, and resetting credentials doesn’t fix the instinct to help when a familiar number calls. Ron closes with three practical ways to stop making it easy for them, starting with one simple habit: hang up and call back. Impactful Moments 00:00 - Introduction 02:25 - The rewind: from phone books to data brokers 03:15 - What a people-search site found on Ron’s family 05:30 - A breach that started with a phone call 06:15 - Inside Astrana Health’s SEC filing 07:55 - Why spoofing the main number changes everything 09:05 - How the attack likely played out 11:35 - Technical fixes for a human attack 12:50 - The time Ron got got 13:35 - Why attackers want healthcare data 15:15 - 1.5 million patients’ worth of exposure 17:15 - Voice phishing climbs to #2 in M-Trends 19:35 - Three ways not to make it easy for them 21:05 - How to run a phone drill Links Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com Become a sponsor of the show: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/

October 7, 2026Episode 44636 min

Securing the Apps Everyone Is Building with Roi Nisimi and Yonatan Levi

What happens when your marketing team, your sales team, and the person down the hall can all ship a full app from a single prompt? And what is that app quietly connected to? In this episode, Ron sits down with Roi Nisimi, Principal Security Researcher, and Yonatan Levi, AI Security Researcher, of Orca Security. They built apps on the most popular AppGen platforms and then tried to break into them. Ron, Roi, and Yonatan get into what's really running behind a prompt-built app, and what Orca's team found when they went looking for trouble. In one case, a single misconfigured app gave them a way into every integration connected to the workspace. They also explain why Supabase has become a favorite of builders and attackers alike, and share the security questions they ask before sending a prompt. The bigger tension is speed. With no code review between the prompt and production, Roi argues that velocity has broken the threat models that security relied on for years. And when the agent makes every decision, nobody fully understands what was built, not even the security researchers. Impactful Moments 00:00 - Introduction 02:15 - Busting the vibe coding myth 04:40 - Inside Orca's State of AI report 05:55 - The unpatched AI SDK problem 07:40 - What is AppGen? 10:20 - Who builds the backend? 12:25 - Inside Orca's AppGen hackathon 14:10 - Thinking like a citizen developer 15:15 - Who's really building these apps 19:25 - One misconfigured app, every integration exposed 20:45 - Why Supabase is the holy grail 23:00 - Checking your own exposure 24:30 - Why the SDLC is breaking down 26:55 - Prompting for a secure app 28:15 - Don't hand the agent every decision 31:20 - Staying sharp by never stopping learning 33:35 - From protecting environments to protecting apps Links Connect with Roi Nisimi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roinisimi/ Connect with Yonatan Levi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yonatan-levi-b22168258/ Register for Orca’s virtual Builder Exchange: https://orca.security/builder-exchange/?utm_source=HVN&utm_medium=3rd-part Read the security findings in Orca’s 2026 State of AI Security Report: https://orca.security/lp/2026-state-of-ai-security-report/?utm_source=HVN&utm_medium=3rd-party – Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com Become a sponsor of the show: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/

September 30, 2026Episode 44532 min

Giving Your AI Agent Its Own Identity with Ashish Rajan

Your newest hire has a Google Workspace account, a Slack login and a laptop. It never sleeps, and it never asks before it acts. So who owns its identity? Ron welcomes back Ashish Rajan, CISO at Techriot.io and researcher with AI Security Lab, who spent 17 years in identity, cloud security and security leadership. His take: vendors haven't solved AI identity, and the open questions are on your side, not the product's. Ashish got into identity after failing his OSCP three times: if he couldn't break in, he wouldn't let anyone else in. Now he reviews Ron's own setup, where Hacker Valley's AI agent, Jennifer Romani, has her own accounts just like an employee. Ashish explains how that call changes from a one-laptop small business to an enterprise where every developer's machine acts like five. They also cover the Gemini breach headlines, swarms of agents and AI Security Lab, which Ashish describes as what OWASP is for AppSec, but for AI security. The uncomfortable truth: defenders have the same models attackers do, but attackers don't wait for a pull request review. Ashish calls that a people problem, not a technology problem. He also shares the question he asks before handing anything to an AI agent: can this be reversed? Impactful Moments 00:00 - Introduction 02:30 - Busting a myth: AI identity isn't solved 05:30 - Three OSCP attempts and a pivot to IAM 07:00 - Why AI identity is more complex than ever 09:15 - Hot or not: giving an AI agent its own accounts 11:10 - One laptop, five machines in the enterprise 12:50 - AI gateways and developer observability 14:05 - Where Ashish would spend his AI security budget 18:20 - Why defenders don't hack themselves first 19:05 - The real problem is people 22:15 - Swarms of agents are coming 23:50 - What AI Security Lab is building 26:35 - Never share your credit card with AI 28:40 - Ron's callback: can it be reversed? Links Connect with Ashish Rajan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishrajan/ Listen to Ashish's first Hacker Valley Studio episode: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-bpaij-51b280 – Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com Become a sponsor of the show: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/

September 23, 2026Episode 44431 min

From Read Access to Admin with just an AI Agent

What if someone got full admin access to your company's platform, including your CRM, your payments app, and your private messages, and the only tool they used was an AI chatbot? Can AI models really find zero-days on their own, or is that just the headline? And if AI can do the attacker's job, who's actually holding the scissors? In this solo episode, Ron Eddings shares his own methodology for offensive assessments with AI. He talks about the models he trusts, the tools he uses to get agents working together, and a real assessment where his agents turned SQL read access into admin control and unlocked the API keys stored inside. Ron also calls out what's hype and what's real with today's models, and why the agent still needs a skilled person behind it. For defenders, Ron covers what attackers go after once they're in, and why the fundamentals like asset inventory are still where every strong security program starts. He closes with the bigger picture: anyone, good or bad, now has powerful intelligence on hand, and it's on all of us to look out for each other. Impactful Moments 00:00 - Introduction 02:25 - Can AI Really Find Zero-Days Alone? 04:20 - The Real Danger Is Human Intent 05:00 - Why Grok 4.6 Tops Ron's List 07:55 - Ron's Three-Model Assessment Workflow 09:50 - Maestro, Interceptor, and Agent Ensembles 11:20 - Privilege Escalation and Persistence With LLMs 12:50 - Why AI Hacking Feels Like Cheating 14:20 - Ron Called Automated Security in 2015 16:05 - The Lazy Way to Hack 17:55 - From SQL Read Access to Admin 21:05 - What Attackers Want After Getting In 23:40 - Asset Inventory Is Security Flossing 27:05 - Why AI Is Like Scissors 29:05 - Waymos, Robotaxis, and Physical AI Risk Links Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com Become a sponsor of the show: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/

September 16, 2026Episode 44338 min

Do You Know What Your Agent is Doing at 3AM? with Amir Ofek

Every AI agent in your environment inherits someone's permissions, and most teams have no idea what those agents are actually doing with them. Amir Ofek, CEO and co-founder of Aizome, shares how to make every agent accountable before the damage shows up as a $150,000 bill. In this episode, Amir explains why human and machine identity tools both fail for AI, why agents act more like eager, naive interns than employees, and how a new category called ARISE (Agentic Runtime Identity Security Enforcement) is emerging to fix it. This one's for anyone building with AI agents right now (so, most of us). Amir's take: the biggest danger isn't a breach. It's agents quietly doing the wrong thing at scale while nobody's watching. Impactful Moments 00:00 - Introduction 02:30 - Busting the Myth: "I Know What My Agents Are Doing" 05:30 - The Samurai Story Behind Aizome's Name 08:25 - Why Not All AI Agents Are Born Equal 11:15 - Where Enterprises Are Actually Deploying AI Agents Today 14:25 - What Claude Cowork Inherits Without You Realizing It 17:15 - Machine Identity vs. Human Identity vs. AI Identity 19:35 - Treating AI Agents Like Eager, Naive Interns 23:00 - The Biggest AI Risk Isn't Security, It's Cost 25:45 - Meet Ito: Aizome's Supervisor Agent 26:40 - Inside the New ARISE Category 33:35 - What Aizome Actually Does 35:30 - The Callback: Was the Myth Wrong, or Dangerously Wrong? Links Connect with Amir Ofek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirofek/ Learn more about Aizome: https://www.aizome.ai/ – Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com Become a sponsor of the show: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/

September 9, 2026Episode 44236 min

Cloud Broke My World Before AI Did with Dr. Jay Abdullah

Cybersecurity has survived cloud, mobile, and a dozen other "biggest disruptions of our lifetime," and each one felt unprecedented in the moment. In this episode, Ron sits down with Alyssa "Dr. Jay" Abdullah, Deputy CISO at MasterCard, who started her career as a radio DJ and has since worked inside the White House, Lockheed Martin, Stryker, and Xerox before landing in payments security. Ron and Dr. Jay trace her path from spinning records to securing global payment infrastructure, and dig into why she'd argue cloud, not AI, was the real turning point in her career. They cover what convergence actually looks like when AI, cloud, and synthetic identity start overlapping, why curiosity matters more than fast answers, and what it means when employees start bringing their own trained AI agents to work. The conversation closes on something most teams haven't fully reckoned with yet: AI agents that carry their own identity, independent of the humans who built them, and what that shift demands from the people responsible for securing them. Impactful Moments 00:00 - Introduction 02:25 - Busting the AI hype myth 04:40 - From radio DJ to Dr. Jay 06:10 - A day in the life as Deputy CISO at Mastercard 07:25 - Why AI hasn't disrupted her world 08:50 - White House tech through the decades 12:30 - Smartphones, wearables, and what's next 13:30 - Defining convergence for 2026 14:50 - When AI meets quantum computing 17:20 - Bring your own AI agent to work 19:00 - Negotiating salary in tokens 21:05 - Teaching curiosity over answers 23:50 - Overhype equals overtrust 27:10 - The future of tier one and autonomous SOC 29:50 - Hot take: AI in the SOC 31:35 - Predictions: AI identities and the human outside the loop Links Connect with Alissa "Dr. Jay" Abdullah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dralissajay/ – Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com Become a sponsor of the show: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/

September 1, 2026Episode 44135 min

The Dashboard Is Dead, Long Live the Harness with Myke Lyons

Security teams spent decades begging for more logs. Now the enterprise is generating petabytes a day, and the thing drowning in it isn't just the SOC anymore, it's your AI agents too. In this episode, Ron sits down with Myke Lyons, CISO at Cribl, who cut his teeth in telemetry and logging decades ago and has landed right back there in the age of AI. Ron and Myke dig into why most telemetry failures aren't data problems at all, they're decisions nobody made about why the logs are being collected in the first place. Myke breaks down what to track on every agent in your environment, why token spend belongs on the security team's plate, why dashboards are quietly dying, and why treating an AI agent like just another employee is a mistake that's going to bite security teams hard. Underneath it all is one question Myke keeps circling back to: do you actually know what normal looks like for every agent in your environment? Impactful Moments 00:00 - Introduction 01:50 - Myth Busting: AI Agents Aren't Just Another User Account 04:25 - Meet Myke Lyons, CISO at Cribl 05:05 - What it means to run security at a telemetry company 06:10 - From gigabytes of logs at GE to petabytes today 07:45 - MITRE ATT&CK, Cribl's new APEX framework, and orienting telemetry 10:20 - Why most telemetry problems are decision problems, not data problems 13:20 - OCSF and how security teams are rethinking their schemas 14:25 - Why the dashboard is dying 17:35 - What Myke wants to track about every AI agent 20:10 - How to spot an agent going rogue 23:15 - Making your data AI-ready and the case for schematizing everything 27:10 - Tokenomics: treating AI spend as a security responsibility 29:05 - The non-negotiable logs every org should be collecting 31:50 - Hot takes: build vs. buy, tier two to three, and Myke's daily AI briefing 33:35 - Closing thoughts and outro Links Connect with Myke Lyons on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mykelyons/ Learn more about Cribl: https://cribl.io/ – Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com Become a sponsor of the show: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/

August 25, 2026Episode 44035 min

The AI Already Inside Your Company with Russell Spitler & Richard Penshorn

A year ago, the average employee held about 30 OAuth grants. Today that number has risen to 88, and it isn't slowing down. Ron sits down with Russell Spitler, co-founder and CEO of Nudge Security, and Richard Penshorn, a senior security engineer at a top financial services company, to talk about the AI already living inside your business. Ron, Russell, and Richard dig into why shadow AI doesn't behave like shadow IT, how one forgotten grant became the door into a real world breach, and whether AI agents should ever get access to a corporate inbox. Underneath all of it is the one thing Russell and Richard keep coming back to: ownership. Give an AI agent access with no owner attached and it becomes invisible. Give every employee an approved, low-friction path to use AI and they stop wandering off it. Find out how you can get ahead of the AI already running inside your walls. Impactful Moments 00:00 - Introduction 02:00 - Busting the "shadow AI is just shadow IT" myth 03:45 - Meet Russell Spitler and Richard Penshorn 05:50 - The surprising long tail of AI tool usage 07:00 - Entertainment vs. finance: build vs. buy culture 08:50 - How 30 OAuth grants became 88 in 2026 10:25 - Why manual OAuth audits became untenable 11:30 - The Canva example: what "click to connect" really grants 15:20 - Benign vs. malicious: how a stolen OAuth grant gets exploited 17:00 - Shadow IT vs. Shadow AI: what's actually different now 21:00 - Hot take: should AI agents ever touch corporate email? 25:10 - The three buckets of AI agent discovery 27:55 - Russell's best practices for locking down agents 31:00 - Fundamentals for the next 18 months: visibility and easy paths Links Connect with Russell Spitler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/russell-spitler/ Connect with Richard Penshorn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardpenshorn/ Learn more about Nudge Security: https://www.nudgesecurity.com/ – Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com Become a sponsor of the show: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/

August 19, 2026Episode 43934 min

Humans First: Adobe's Rule for Building AI Security Tools with John Gillis

Imagine how much investigation time your SOC could get back if the busywork just disappeared. Ron sits down with John Gillis, Staff Security AI Engineer at Adobe, who built an in-house AI investigation platform from scratch. John's system runs on more than 30 specialized agents that reason through cases instead of following a script. In one run, that meant over 140 detections investigated in under four hours at an 80 to 85% quality rating. Ron and John dig into the hard lesson that made John rip out his own tooling and rebuild it around function calling, why "humans first" drives every decision his team makes, and whether AI SOC is actually different from SOAR or just the same promise with way better marketing. Underneath all of it is the one thing John says decides whether any of this actually works: context. Give the AI too little and it's guessing, give it too much and it drowns just like a human would. Listen to find out what it actually takes to build an AI SOC that reasons instead of just automates. Impactful Moments 00:00 - Introduction 02:05 - The rewind: how SOAR promised to save the SOC in 2015 03:35 - Meet John Gillis, Adobe's Staff AI Security Engineer 05:30 - What cybersecurity looked like before AI at enterprise scale 07:00 - The "humans first" strategy behind Adobe's AI investigator 09:30 - Why careless context management is the biggest pitfall in agent design 14:45 - Solving the speed problem: is it tooling, process, or people? 17:10 - From monolith to microservices: rebuilding the platform for scale 24:05 - What actually makes an AI agent's "persona" work 26:00 - John's prediction for the SOC three years from now 28:50 - The three skills every security practitioner needs for 2026 32:10 - Final verdict: is AI SOC really different, or SOAR with new branding? Links Connect with John Gillis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-gillis/ If you're a researcher ready to make an impact, check out the announcement about Adobe’s new home for the Adobe Bug Bounty Program here: https://blog.adobe.com/security/a-new-home-for-the-adobe-bug-bounty-program Check out Adobe’s Bug Bounty profile on Intigriti: https://app.intigriti.com/programs/adobe/adobepublic/detail Learn more about Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/ – Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com Become a sponsor of the show: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/