WE'RE IN!

Ready to hear from top cybersecurity newsmakers, executives and storytellers? Eager for advice on how to launch a successful cyber career? Curious about hacking threats that seem to grow more menacing by the day? Get ready for Season 2 of WE'RE IN!  Co-hosted by Synack security operations engineer Bella DeShantz-Cook and longtime cybersecurity journalist Blake Sobczak, WE'RE IN! takes you inside t...

Application security maven Tanya Janca – AKA SheHacksPurple – is an accomplished author, pentester and onetime music festival organizer. But she’s perhaps best known as the founder of We Hack Purple, a community of security professionals dedicated to sharing useful cyber information including coding trainings and coursework. (Dynamic application security testing Bright Security acquired We Hack Pu...

Melanie Teplinsky fell in love with cryptography at an early age, which led her to landing her first job at the National Security Agency at 16. From there, she found her niche in cybersecurity at the intersection of technology and the law.  As a senior fellow at American University in the Law Tech, Law, and Security Program, Melanie helps craft cybersecurity policies that scale and attempt to solv...

Zinet Kemal is an infosec powerhouse. After emigrating from Ethiopia to Minnesota with her husband, she started her life over. She left behind her community and career as a lawyer and dived into the world of information security.  She has since become a children’s book author and works as a cloud security engineer for Best Buy, while raising her four kids and completing her master’s degree in cybe...

Sean Zadig has plenty to be paranoid about. The internet is a frightening place, and Yahoo’s Paranoids–the name for the company’s infosec team–have their work cut out for them protecting Yahoo’s more than one billion global users. As vice president, chief information security officer and “Chief Paranoid” for Yahoo, Sean is charged with keeping sensitive company data safe from an onslaught of cyber...

Four years ago, Jack Rhysider quit his job as a security engineer to move full time into the storytelling business. His podcast, Darknet Diaries, now boasts tens of millions of total downloads and has explored cybersecurity topics from Stuxnet to the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox. Building Darknet Diaries into a successful show was no cakewalk. In the latest episode of WE’RE IN!, Jac...

Tracy Maleeff led a successful career transition into the tech and cybersecurity world nearly seven years ago. Now a security researcher with the Krebs Stamos Group, the former librarian still uses her hard-won open source intelligence skills to sort through a deluge of cybersecurity information for clients and for subscribers of her free InfoSecSherpa news roundups. In the latest WE’RE IN! episod...

Beau Woods knows firsthand how every moment counts when it comes to medical cybersecurity. He launched his career in a hospital, where it wasn’t always possible for doctors to punch in complex passwords or spare a second thought for cybersecurity. Beau went on to found I Am the Cavalry, a group of cyber ambassadors dedicated to improving the security of devices ranging from pacemakers to connected...

Dragos CEO and founder Robert M. Lee has been talking about cybersecurity risks to critical infrastructure long before threats to utility operators and water plants were making headlines. In this episode of WE'RE IN!, he discusses the ongoing dangers to the grid from nation-state hackers and ransomware gangs, but also the progress the U.S. is making to better secure its most vulnerable assets. And...

Jim Manico is full of opinions. The founder of Manicode Security has advice on how to use the OWASP Top 10, on secure coding and especially on the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS). He has advice for people starting out in security and all around thoughts on what it means to be a decent person. Jim is definitely one of those! He's also an educator, author, investor and entrep...

Alex Holden has a knack for tracking Russian cyber criminals. The Ukrainian-born cybersecurity expert understands what it takes to infiltrate ransomware outfits, learn their secrets and help organizations protect themselves against their tactics. Beyond that, his firm is responsible for detecting some of the biggest breaches in recent history. In this episode, Alex talks about his approach to trac...

There's a flood of cybersecurity news as a result of the Ukraine War as well as Washington's recent efforts to compel organizations to report cyberattacks to federal officials. In this episode, Trey Herr and Emma Schroeder of the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative break it all down. They explore the consequences of an escalating digital battlefield in Europe, whether a hack could bring...

Gabriella Coleman, a Harvard University anthropology professor, describes how she immersed  herself in hacker culture and eventually became embedded in the shadowy and mercurial world of Anonymous, the hacktivist collective she chronicled in her 2015 book, "Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous." This is such a fascinating episode that explores the often misunderstood his...

In this episode, Micah Hoffman talks about his career in Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and the value it has for investigations, cybersecurity and understanding how information is weaponized. He also gets into strategies for safeguarding personal privacy in the face of increasing digital surveillance. This episode will have you thinking twice about what you post on social media! Why you should l...

Nicolas Chaillan, former Air Force Chief Software Officer, resigned from the DoD over frustrations with what he called a lack of innovation, collaboration and agility. He gets into those issues and talks about how the U.S. can invest more in technology to compete with China in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.   --------- Why you should listen: * Nicolas offers a candid and controversial...

In this episode, Phillip Wylie talks about his journey from pro wrestling to pentesting and what motivated him to start teaching, mentoring and giving back to the infosec community. It's an inspirational story for veterans in the field and newbies alike. Phillip not only talks about his work helping others get started in ethical hacking, but the value of truly understanding the mind of the adversa...

Kim Zetter is a former staff writer at WIRED and author of the seminal cybersecurity book “Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon.” Her work has appeared in The New York Times, POLITICO, The Washington Post and regularly in her Substack newsletter, “Zero Day.” In this episode, Kim talks about her approach to reporting, what sparked her Stuxnet investigati...

Defense Digital Service Acting Director Katie Olson heads up a team of about 80 technologists working on some of the toughest challenges facing the U.S. Department of Defense. Since Katie started leading the team, often called the Pentagon’s “SWAT team of nerds," it has increasingly focused on the threat from drones, cybersecurity risks in space and the consequences of climate change. In this epis...

Earlier this year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation named Matt Mitchell, founder of CryptoHarlem, one of its 2021 Pioneer Award winners for his groundbreaking work to protect Black communities from surveillance. In this episode, Matt talks about what led him to apply his hacking skills to social justice causes and how that led to his role today as a Technology Fellow for the BUILD program at the...

Alyssa Miller, Business Information Security Officer at S&P Global Ratings and author of the forthcoming book, “Cyber Defenders' Career Guide, is one of the most provocative, unfiltered and interesting voices in the cybersecurity community. She’s essential reading on infosec Twitter and a regular draw at conferences around the world. In this episode, she dives into all sorts of issues in the cyber...

In this episode, Stephanie Wong, head of Google Cloud Developer Engagement, explores Google’s security culture, why it conducts “blameless” postmortems after security testing and how it’s working to dispel lingering misconceptions about the cloud. She also talks about her journey in Silicon Valley and how her experiences winning pageants such as Miss Asian North America 2020 helped her become one...

Cory Doctorow, activist, journalist, and author who wrote the influential Little Brother cyberpunk series, gets into some big issues like surveillance capitalism and his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He doesn’t hold anything back. -------- Why you should listen: * Hear from one of the smartest and most engaged technologists today on how technology can be used both for malicious pur...

In this episode, Nick Merrill, a research fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, makes a cybersecurity case for nationalizing major CDNs such as Cloudflare, issues some pretty stark warnings about the dangers of machine learning, and digs into why stereotypical images of hackers in hoodies doesn’t help anyone. His viewpoints are sobering if not controversial and worth listen...

Ryan Rutan has worked in tech support, as a computer repairman, application developer, software engineer, entrepreneur, and head of community…and most recently, fiction writer. Listen to this episode to hear what inspired Fork This Life , a novel that follows the life of a teenager growing up with the early internet of the 90s who eventually gets into hacking, and how it relates to today’s cyberse...

In this episode, Girl Security CEO Lauren Bean Buitta discusses the importance of supporting, encouraging, and training girls for careers in cybersecurity. She gets into why it's so critical to create — and protect — pathways for young women in order to build a more diverse industry, and why that really matters when it comes to making tough national security decisions that affect the entire popula...