Safe Mode Podcast

October’s wave of vulnerabilities and attacks earned a stark nickname: “Black October.” But was it an unprecedented crisis—or a glimpse of what’s becoming normal? On this episode of CyberScoop’s Safe Mode, Greg discusses the month’s events with Tom Hagel, distinguished threat researcher and research lead at SentinelOne’s SentinelLabs. Hagel explains why many incidents that surfaced in October bega...

Fresh off the PHP2Shell advisory, former DHS CISO and acting deputy CIO Hamad Baidwan — now executive CISO at Knox Systems, the largest federal managed cloud — joins Safe Mode to break down what actually happens in the hours after a high-severity vulnerability drops. He walks through why "patch it and move on" gives teams a false sense of security, how to map internet reachability in environments...

Two critical PHP bugs, found by AI before attackers, leaked before the embargo, patched a day early. Cisco Talos' Matt Olney joins Safe Mode — the show, not PHP's deprecated directive, though neither has ever stopped an exploit — for the part the headlines skipped and what the future holds for the vulns moving forward

AI is making vulnerabilities easier to find, but who’s going to fix them? On this episode, Greg Otto talks with Josh Bressers, VulnCheck’s director of coordinated vulnerability disclosure about the growing flood of AI-generated security reports. Bressers explains why those findings are increasingly legitimate, how VulnCheck uses AI to streamline incoming reports, and why coordinating fixes still r...

What has changed in the cyber threat landscape—and what should defenders do about it? On this episode of Safe Mode, CyberScoop’s Greg Otto speaks with retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, former director of DISA and current chairman of Axonius Federal Systems’ board. Skinner assesses the risks posed by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, arguing that adversaries are increasingly prepos...

The debate over AI alignment often centers on guardrails, model behavior, and whether increasingly capable systems could act in unexpected ways. But what does that conversation look like through a cybersecurity lens? In this episode of Safe Mode, Greg speaks with Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s head of counter-adversary operations, about the security implications of goal-driven AI agents, open-weight m...

Matt Fredrikson, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon and CEO and co-founder of Gray Swan AI, built the world's largest AI red teaming arena, with more than 15,000 people breaking AI systems for prize money. He walks us through how the attacks actually work, from jailbreaks found on small open weights models that transferred straight to frontier systems, to training AI attackers with reinforceme...

It starts with a fake error message. It ends with a pasted command. ClickFix has become one of the most reliable ways for attackers to get an initial foothold — first adopted by criminal groups, now used by state-linked actors like APT28 and Lazarus Group. This week, Greg is joined by John Hammond, Principal Security Researcher at Huntress, who helped identify and name the technique and has tracke...

CyberScoop editor-in-chief Greg Otto talks with WatchTowr founder and CEO Ben Harris about how cybersecurity teams are adapting as AI accelerates vulnerability discovery, public proof-of-concepts, and exploitation timelines. They discuss the WordPress-to-shell case study, why mitigation has become essential when patching cannot happen instantly, and why Harris argues that traditional vulnerability...

NEA partner Aaron Jacobson put $250 million behind autonomous pen testing company Horizon3.ai on the bet that cybersecurity has entered an AI-versus-AI era — and he argues the "vulnpocalypse" defenders were warned about has already arrived, with AI-discovered vulnerabilities now the primary way attackers get into enterprises. He explains why overprovisioned AI agents are the new phishing target, s...

The federal government can't reliably say how many cybersecurity workers it has or what they cost — and that uncertainty sits at the heart of a much bigger question: is federal cyber training working, and can it keep pace with a field that's changing by the month? On this episode of Safe Mode, host Greg Otto talks with Christopher Bloor, Defense Director at the SANS Institute, about the state of t...

Kat Sommer, head of government affairs at NCC Group, joins Safe Mode to unpack the DEF CON talk she gave on how governments around the world are — and mostly aren't — protecting security researchers. Of the roughly 195 jurisdictions on the planet, Sommer found only about 15 have enacted any form of legal safe harbor for vulnerability research, and just one, Portugal, has what she'd call a proper o...

Security operations centers have run on the same playbook for decades — collect, queue, triage, investigate, escalate. But attackers now move at machine speed: one recent breach that cost a company 3,600 repos got underway in roughly 87 seconds, far outpacing even a fast 10-minute log-enrichment pipeline. This week, host Greg Otto talks with ExtraHop CEO Greg Clark about the newly announced Agenti...

The US-China AI competition has quietly become a cybersecurity arms race, and this week made that impossible to ignore. Booz Allen's Brad Medairy joins Safe Mode to unpack the milestones behind that shift — from China's Villager red-teaming framework to last December's frontier model jailbreak — and a report his team ran finding Chinese models like DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi carry policy bias and ge...

It's been a wild six weeks for frontier AI models — Mythos launched, got yanked offline by the Department of Commerce over export controls, and came back online with new guardrails, all while Five Eyes agencies warned that AI is months away from reshaping the threat landscape. This week on Safe Mode, Greg Otto talks with Armadin's David Slater, who is building directly on top of these frontier mod...

For the first time in its operational history, FISA Section 702 has lapsed, plunging U.S. intelligence agencies and telecom providers into a highly uncertain "grey zone." In this episode of Safe Mode, host Greg Otto sits down with Glenn Gerstell, former NSA General Counsel and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), to navigate the fog of this unprecedented lap...

In this week’s episode, Greg speaks with Ellen Boehm, SVP of Strategy and AI Operations at Keyfactor, about what the administration’s post-quantum cryptography executive order means for CISOs and enterprise leaders. Boehm argues that preparing for post-quantum cryptography is not just a technical cryptography challenge, but a leadership and business-risk problem. The conversation covers why compli...

This week on Safe Mode, Greg sits down with Dov Yoran, CEO and co-founder of Command Zero, to talk about one of the most persistent problems in enterprise security: the investigation gap. Alert volumes keep climbing, SOC teams are drowning in triage, and the tools meant to help are aggregating data without actually reasoning through it. Dov breaks down how the real bottleneck in security operation...

What does it actually take to dismantle an industrial-scale scam operation running bulletproof hosting, distributed ASNs, and crypto laundering across multiple countries? Mike Sweeney of Silent Push was in the room during Operation Disruption Week and tells us exactly how it went down — the intelligence, the coordination, and why this public-private model could be a blueprint for future cyber disr...

The rules of responsible disclosure were written for a different era — one where humans found bugs, humans reported them, and 90 days felt like plenty of time to patch. That era is over. In this episode, Greg sits down with Gal Elbaz, co-founder and CTO of Oligo Security, to unpack how AI-assisted vulnerability research is breaking the frameworks the security industry has relied on for decades. Fr...

On this week's episode, we're joined by Mike Nichols, General Manager of Security at Elastic, fresh off the Gartner Security and Risk Summit in the D.C. area, where AI dominated every conversation on the conference floor. Mike walks us through what CISOs are actually asking about, what a real agentic SOC looks like in practice, and why keeping humans on the loop is the key philosophical distinctio...

What happens when an "assume breach" scenario turns into a total corporate wipeout? In this episode of Safe Mode, host Greg welcomes Brandon Willitts, Director of Cyber Resilience at Everpure, to pull back the curtain on a devastating "malwareless" attack that deleted over 80,000 endpoints at a Fortune 100 company. When adversaries exploit valid credentials to compromise the entire identity plane,...

Drawing on his experience from his time in government working directly on CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, Todd Beardsley, VP of Security Research at runZero, explains what it actually took behind the scenes to get a vulnerability added: verifying that real exploitation occurred, confirming the incident mattered to federal interests (including state/local governments, critical...

In this episode, we sit down with Lior Div, CEO of 7AI, at a moment when the ground is shifting under the entire security industry. With AI lowering the barrier to entry for attackers, supply chain compromises spreading at worm speed, and OpenAI and Anthropic racing to plant their flags in enterprise cyber defense, the pressure on defenders has never been more acute. We push Div on the hard stuff...

Anna Pham of Huntress joins Safe Mode to discuss the current landscape of initial access brokers and how their tactics continue to support ransomware operations. She explains that attackers are still finding success with drive-by downloads, Trojanized installers, fake browser updates, click-fix attacks, exposed RDP, VPN weaknesses, and vulnerable edge devices. The conversation also covers how acce...