Full Metal Packet

Ross Young was inside Capital One when the 2019 breach happened and he's breaking down what the headlines got wrong. From WAF misconfigurations to AI-powered attacks moving at machine speed, this episode is a tactical masterclass for security leaders who want to stop wasting budget and start building real defences. Ross Young is a former intelligence officer turned enterprise CISO. He was at Capit...

Ben Lipczynski is the Director of Security and Regulatory Services at Origina and a former British Royal Navy officer with 12 years operating nuclear submarines and global networks. He brings an operator-level perspective on what separates a contained incident from a months-long operational nightmare. In this episode, Ben breaks down why patching is not a silver bullet, why legacy systems are more...

John Verry is the Managing Director at CBIZ Cybersecurity, ISO 27001 certified lead auditor since 2006, and has guided hundreds of organizations through ISO 27001, SOC 2, CMMC, FedRAMP, and HITRUST. He has seen firsthand what separates organizations that get genuinely secure from those that just collect certifications. In this episode, John breaks down the gap between compliance and actual securit...

Devon Ackerman is the Global Head of Digital Forensics and Incident Response at Cyber Reason and a former FBI Supervisory Special Agent focused on counterintelligence and cyber investigations. He is also the author of Diving In: An Incident Responder's Journey and one of the most experienced breach investigators working today. In this episode, Devon walks Alex and Yegor through exactly how modern...

Matan Eli Matalon breaks down AI-driven cyberwarfare, Iran-linked threat intelligence, and what CISOs must protect when attackers are trying to cause disruption. This episode had to pause mid-recording after Matan, a former CISO who reverse-engineered Iran’s Handala malware, received a missile warning and had to take shelter. We picked the conversation back up the next day. Matan Eli Matalon break...

Matthew Rosenquist, longtime security strategist and former Intel CISO, gives his insights into why 2026 is unlike any year before it in cybersecurity, and what security leaders need to do right now to stay ahead. He explains: Why AI is a force multiplier for attackers first and what that means for defenders How the vulnerability discovery-to-exploit window has collapsed from months to hours The e...

Randy Barr has held the CISO title at over 10 companies — including Cisco, Zoom, and BioRender — and has seen every version of how security programs succeed and fall apart. He now leads security at Sequence Security, focused on API security, bot management, and AI protection. In this episode, Randy takes us through what security teams think they're doing well but aren't, what incidents actually lo...

Alejandro Rivas Vazquez has spent nearly two decades running DFIR services and now advises on preparedness through his boutique consultancy, VeraBeam. He’s sat in boardrooms, testified as an expert witness, and been on the phone at 1am when OFAC changed the rules mid-ransomware negotiation. In this episode, Alejandro breaks down why the EU and US approach cyber incidents from fundamentally differe...

Ralph Chammah, Co-Founder & CEO of Blacklight AI, shares a builder’s perspective shaped by years in cybersecurity analytics—what breaks in real SOC environments, and what it takes to make detection actually usable at scale. In this episode, Ralph explains why “AI-first” security isn’t a label—it’s an operating model for reducing alert noise, improving context, and helping teams detect behavior...

Maxime Lamothe-Brassard, Founder and CEO of LimaCharlie, brings a rare perspective shaped by government cyber operations, Big Tech, and building security platforms from first principles. In this episode, Maxime breaks down why modern security fails when it relies on black boxes, and what changes when you treat security like cloud infrastructure in an AI-driven world. He explains: Why “trust me bro...