Safe Mode Podcast

In this week's episode, Greg Otto talks with Howard Ting, CEO of Opal Security, about the growing security challenges created by AI agents inside the enterprise, especially around identity governance, access control, and runtime authorization. As organizations adopt coding agents, workplace assistants, and other AI tools, traditional approaches to managing human access are being pushed beyond thei...

Sophos CEO Joe Levy and Director of Government Partnerships Alex Rose join Safe Mode from Washington, D.C. to discuss what meaningful public-private cybersecurity partnership looks like right now—moving beyond “window dressing” to real operational collaboration with agencies like CISA and the FBI. They break down the shift from Secure by Design to Secure by Demand, arguing that procurement and mar...

As AI makes deepfakes and voice cloning more convincing, attackers are shifting away from traditional vulnerabilities and focusing on identity as the easiest path to account takeover and fraud. In this conversation, Eran Haggiag of Glide Identity discusses what it will take to protect identity in an agentic world—how to prove a real user approved an action, how to establish accountability when sof...

In this episode of Safe Mode, we sit down with Philip George, Executive Technical Strategist at Merlin Group to talk about the real challenges federal agencies face at the intersection of cybersecurity, AI adoption, and post-quantum cryptography. Philip breaks down the disconnect between cyber spending and mission outcomes, why rushing into AI without sound identity management and data integrity i...

Bob Ackerman (founder of Allegis Cyber and a partner at DataTribe) joins Safe Mode to talk about where the new national cybersecurity strategy is trying to push the industry—especially around more open, coordinated “active disruption” with government support (and what that does not mean, like hack-back). He shares what he’s hearing from leaders who want clearer “rules of the road,” and why it’s to...

A sophisticated iPhone exploit kit known as DarkSword has escaped the world of targeted espionage and landed in public view—leaked on GitHub in a form that researchers say is trivial to repurpose and deploy. With the barrier to entry collapsing to “copy, paste, host,” the immediate concern is no longer whether advanced actors can use it, but how quickly criminal groups and opportunistic attackers...

In this episode, we sit down with Chris Formosa to break down the Socksescort disruption—a proxy botnet powered by AVRecon that compromised edge devices at scale. Chris walks us through why the operation was so dangerous, how investigators tracked its command-and-control infrastructure, and what changed between the 2023 disclosure and the eventual takedown in coordination with the Department of Ju...

On this episode of Safe Mode, Greg Otto and Tim Starks look past the headline release of President Trump’s new cyber strategy and focus on what comes next: the promised follow-on guidance, the rollout of an interagency “cell” spanning DOJ, State, FBI, DoD and others that pairs cyber operations with diplomacy and arrests, and the state-by-state critical infrastructure pilot programs designed to tes...

In this episode, we sit down with Gharun Lacy, Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Cyber and Technology Security Directorate at the U.S. Department of State, who issues a stark warning: no organization can defend against quantum-enabled cyber threats alone. Hear Lacy explain why adversaries like China are already harvesting encrypted data today—planning to crack it years from now when quantum compu...

One year into the second Trump administration, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is facing what former officials and industry partners describe in stark terms: “decimated,” “amateur hour,” and “pretty much fallen apart.” In this episode, Greg Otto dives in with Tim Starks to unpack what’s happened inside the nation’s lead civilian cyber defense agency—and what it could me...

In this episode, Greg explores the gap between password manager marketing claims of "Zero Knowledge Encryption" and the reality uncovered by Swiss researchers who found 25 attacks against Bitwarden, LastPass, and Dashlane. Professor Kenny Patterson joins Greg to discuss why the industry's "honest-but-curious" security model is dangerously inadequate compared to a "malicious server" threat model, d...

In this episode, we sit down with Stephen Schmidt, SVP & Chief Security Officer at Amazon, to explore the engineering and leadership required to run a "no exceptions" identity program at a global scale. Most organizations suffer from the "fragmentation problem"—a mix of high-security cloud apps and vulnerable legacy systems. Stephen explains how Amazon unified its authentication standard to ensure...

AI is reshaping cybersecurity faster than most organizations can govern it—and the risk no longer stops at the edge of the enterprise. In this episode, Greg speaks with Brian Dye, CEO of Corelight, about the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026: why fraud and phishing are rising on the CEO agenda, why ransomware still dominates operations, and how leaders can build measurable r...

In this episode of Safe Mode, we look at how opportunistic campaigns—often starting as loud disruption like DDoS—can probe for weak points and, in some cases, move closer to operational technology and industrial control systems. Using a recent Justice Department case tied to pro‑Russia hacktivist groups as a jumping-off point, we discuss what this pattern says about the OT threat landscape in 2025...

Retired Lt. Gen. Charlie “Tuna” Moore, former deputy commander of U.S. Cyber Command, joins Safe Mode to break down his new paper on “dominating the digital space” and a whole-of-society strategy for defending the United States from cyber aggression. Host Greg Otto digs into why cyber deterrence often fails below the threshold of armed conflict and what a National Cyber Operations Team—integrating...

Greg sits down with Adam Myers, Head of Counter Adversary Operations at CrowdStrike, and Elia Zaitsev, CTO of CrowdStrike, to discuss why 2025 has been dubbed the "steroid era" for cybercrime due to AI's transformative impact on both attackers and defenders. The conversation reveals alarming statistics—a 442% increase in AI-powered voice-based phishing attacks, average adversary breakout times dro...

In our final episode of 2025, Dave Lewis, global advisory CISO for 1Password, joins Greg Otto to unpack the “access‑trust gap”: the growing mismatch between what employees (and tools like AI assistants) can access at work and what security teams can actually see, verify, and control. Dav explains how this gap shows up in everyday ways—logins that bypass intended controls, personal devices used for...

In this episode of Safe Mode, Jim Dolce, CEO of Lookout, reveals that 40% of phishing attacks now target mobile devices—yet CISOs are drastically underspending on mobile security compared to email protection. Jim demonstrates how AI-powered attacks have become devastatingly effective, showing how his team created a voice-cloning impersonation attack in 15 minutes that fooled over half their employ...

In this episode, we sit down with Nate Beach-Westmoreland, Head of Strategic Cyber Threat Intelligence at Booz Allen, to explore the evolving sophistication of Chinese cyber operations and their implications for U.S. national security. Our guest breaks down how the PRC leverages trusted-relationship abuse, network edge exploitation, and AI-powered influence campaigns to infiltrate critical infrast...

Visa CISO Subra Kumaraswamy joins Safe Mode to discuss the global scale and complexities of cybersecurity at Visa, from managing a billion transactions daily to maintaining a resilient, “paranoid” defensive posture. Subra reveals how his team blends innovation, threat intelligence, and layered security architectures—not just to protect Visa, but to uplift the wider payment ecosystem—including stra...

Rebecca Krauthamer, CEO of QSecure, joins Safe Mode to delve into the rapidly shifting landscape of quantum computing and cybersecurity. The conversation covers the latest government and industry responses to the quantum threat, the urgency of adopting post-quantum encryption, and practical metrics for agencies and organizations. Listen in as the complexities and urgency of preparing for “Q-Day” a...

On this week’s Safe Mode, Greg welcomes Jason Pufahl, VP of Security Services at Vancord. Jason shares deep insights into the evolving managed security landscape, focusing on challenges faced by small and mid-sized businesses and the practical fundamentals they need for strong cybersecurity. He also discusses the evolving role of CISA and the importance of making threat intelligence and resources...

In this episode of Safe Mode, Betsy Cooper, founding director of the Aspen Institute’s Policy Academy, details a new initiative designed to mobilize ordinary citizens as cybersecurity policy advocates. The Cyber Civic Engagement program, supported by Craig Newmark Philanthropies’ Take9 campaign, offers virtual training sessions to equip participants with effective communication techniques, policy...

Kevin Greene, chief cybersecurity technologist for the public sector at BeyondTrust, joins Greg to unpack the fallout from the recent lapse of the CISA information sharing bill and what it means for both public and private sector cyber defenses. The conversation dives into how the threat landscape has shifted since the bill’s original passage, the limitations of relying solely on indicators of com...

This episode of Safe Mode features a nuanced conversation with Ben Harris, CEO of Watchtower, who delves into the complexities of vulnerability management in today’s threat landscape. Harris discusses why traditional patching is no longer a guarantee of security, revealing how sophisticated attackers are staying persistent even after organizations update and remediate systems—particularly in the c...