Hacker Valley Studio

What if the same psychology that threat actors use to manipulate their targets is the same psychology that marketers use to earn your trust?  In this episode, Ron sits down with Antu Buck, Senior Director of Customer Marketing & Community at Gigamon, who spent two decades building trust between vendors and the practitioners who use their tools.  Antu walks us through the three pillars she's bu...

In 2025, out of all 70+ guests we had on our show, not one of them said they’d trust AI to run their SOC. Now in 2026, that mindset is shifting. In this episode, Ron sits down with Aqsa Taylor, Chief Security Evangelist at Exaforce, to find out what changed, and what's still standing in the way of security teams being able to trust AI agents with response.  The conversation covers what's really be...

Is AI really coming for your red teaming job? What does it actually take to build a team that thinks like the adversary, and what happens when that team stops caring? And what do you do when you've been in this field long enough that the job that once fired you up has started to feel hollow? In this episode, Ron catches up with Johnny Xmas, Head of Offensive Security at a Fortune 150 Global Food M...

What does a calf kick have to do with vulnerability management? What can a fighter's mindset teach a security practitioner about operating against an adversary they've never faced?  Ron Eddings brings back fan-favorite combat sports analyst and commentator Robin Black for a conversation that was never meant to be about cybersecurity, and ends up being one of the most insightful episodes on the hum...

What happens when AI writes all the code and nobody reads it? What if the security prompt you trusted still produced software designed to leak your secrets? And who exactly is on the hook when an AI-generated application takes down your company? In this episode, Ron sits down with returning guest Tanya Janca, Secure Coding Trainer at SheHacksPurple Consulting, to dig into one of the most underesti...

What if the most sophisticated attack has nothing to do with your firewall? In a world where AI can clone voices, re-lip-sync politicians, and spread a fake newscast to 200,000 people in days, the real target has always been your brain. Ron sits down with Perry Carpenter, Chief Deception Strategist at KnowBe4, to unpack why we're still getting fooled in 2026  and what we can actually do about it....

Right now, someone in your organization is probably feeding sensitive data into an AI system that nobody approved. So when something goes wrong, who's responsible? And more critically, do you even have a policy in place to answer that question? Ron Eddings sits down with his Hacker Valley co-founder, Chris Cochran, now serving as SANS Field CISO and VP of AI Security, to talk about his freshly rel...

Mythos just found 30,000 new vulnerabilities, and now every security team is asking the same question: what actually matters? In this episode, Ron Eddings sits down with Dan Pagel, CEO at Brinqa, and Brad Hibbert COO & CSO at Brinqa, to break down the Anthropic Mythos moment that rattled the security industry. From the panic of millions of new findings dropping overnight to the strategy of nar...

SOAR promised to close the loop in the SOC and fell flat. Agentic AI is finally delivering what a decade of playbooks couldn’t. In this episode, Ron sits down with Allan Alford, SVP at NTT Global Data Centers, and Tom Findling, co-founder and CEO of Conifers.ai. They cover why static playbooks broke under real-world conditions and how agentic systems are flipping the SOC operating model. They get...

In 2025, Torq brought a monster truck to RSAC. And Don Jeter, Torq's CMO, will be the first to tell you: nobody's buying an AI SOC platform because of a grave digger in the booth. In this episode, Ron sits down with Don to discuss what Torq is actually doing in a category packed with 60 near-identical vendors, and why "the epidemic of sameness" is the real threat to every cybersecurity brand right...

Most organizations are prepping for disaster recovery when they should be building for cyber recovery, and those are not the same thing.  Recorded live at RSAC Conference 2026, Ron sat down with Chris Bevil, Principal Security AI Strategist at Commvault, to break down what actually happens after a breach hits and why most teams are caught flat-footed.  Chris walks us through Commvault's Minutes to...

AI adoption is outpacing governance at every level, and the cost of waiting is getting higher by the day. Guru Sethupathy, General Manager of AI Governance at Optro and former Founder of FairNow, breaks down what it really takes to build trust in AI systems before things go sideways.  Guru lays out a simple but powerful 3 P’s Framework: policies, process, and people, connecting it to what teams ar...

What happens when attackers collaborate better than defenders?  Recorded live from RSAC 2026, this solo episode with Ron breaks down the biggest themes shaping cybersecurity right now, from organized threat groups and massive data breaches to the growing tension between productivity and control inside modern organizations. This conversation highlights a hard truth. The threat landscape is evolving...

What does it mean when your smart doorbell becomes an entry point for surveillance? What happens when a single hacker can jailbreak every major AI model within hours of its release? And why are the same tools being used by both nation-state attackers and the defenders trying to stop them? In this solo episode, Ron Eddings breaks down the urgent case for practitioner unity in cybersecurity, from AI...

What does it look like when a cybersecurity founder who built a $2.5 billion company decides to level up, again? Dean Sysman, co-founder of Axonius, sits down with Ron Eddings to pull back the curtain on what it really took to go from zero to $100M ARR in four and a half years, and what came next. Dean breaks down the founder mindset, the emotional weight of tying your identity to your company, an...

Last episode, Ron and Marcus made predictions. This episode, they brought the receipts. A journalist built an app with vibe coding and got hacked on live television.  A social network built entirely by AI (not a single line of human code!) exposed 1.5 million authentication tokens and private messages between agents.  And 88% of organizations have already had an AI security incident, while barely...

The CISO role isn’t the finish line, it’s a launchpad. 69% of security executives are eyeing the exit, and Anthony Johnson is proof that what comes next can be even bigger. Anthony Johnson, former Global CISO at JP Morgan and Fannie Mae, now founder and managing partner at Delve Risk, breaks down what really happens when a security leader stops buying tools and starts building companies. From the...

Your email gateway isn't enough anymore, attackers are already inside the workspace through OAuth apps, browser extensions, and account takeover.  In this episode, Ron sits down with Rajan Kapoor, VP of Security at Material Security, to break down the real risks hiding inside Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. They cover how phishing has evolved into full-blown business email compromise, why mali...

Security doesn’t fail because you missed a tool, it fails because “secure today” tricks you into relaxing tomorrow. This episode exposes why the real fight isn’t compliance… it’s whether your defenses hold up once attackers hit you with machine-speed pressure. Ron sits down with Sonali Shah, CEO of Cobalt, to talk about how human-led, AI-powered penetration testing is evolving into full-spectrum o...

Text threads made AI feel personal, then agents made it productive, and suddenly “success” turns into chaos you can’t even track. In this episode, Ron sits down with Pedram Amini, creator of Maestro, to show what agent work looks like when you stop babysitting and start orchestrating. Pedram lays out why context windows are the limiter, why harnessing beats model-chasing right now, and how Auto Ru...

Phishing didn’t get smarter, it got better at looking normal. What used to be obvious scams now blend directly into the platforms, workflows, and security controls people trust every day. In this episode, Ron sits down with Yaamini Barathi Mohan, 2024 DMA Rising Star, to break down how modern phishing attacks bypass MFA, abuse trusted services like Microsoft 365, and ultimately succeed inside the...

Cybersecurity didn’t start as a billion-dollar crime machine. It started as pranks, ego, and curiosity. That origin story explains almost everything that’s breaking today. Ron sits down with Graham Cluley, one of the earliest antivirus developers turned trusted cyber voice, to trace how malware evolved from digital graffiti into organized financial warfare. From floppy disks and casino-style virus...

AI doesn’t break security, it exposes where it was already fragile. When automation starts making decisions faster than humans can audit, AppSec becomes the only thing standing between scale and catastrophe. In this episode, Ron sits down with Joshua Bregler, Senior Security Manager at McKinsey’s QuantumBlack, to dissect how AI agents, pipelines, and dynamic permissions are reshaping application s...

AI didn’t quietly evolve, it crossed the line from recommendation to execution. Once agents stopped advising humans and started acting inside real systems, trust replaced experimentation and consequences became unavoidable. In this episode, Ron sits down with Marcus J. Carey, Principal Research Scientist at ReliaQuest, to examine what happens after AI is given authority: agents running in producti...

AI isn’t quietly changing software development… it’s rewriting the rules while most security programs are still playing defense. When agents write code at machine speed, the real risk isn’t velocity, it’s invisible security debt compounding faster than teams can see it. In this episode, Ron Eddings sits down with Varun Badhwar, Co-Founder & CEO of Endor Labs, and Henrik Plate, Principal Securi...