Full Metal Packet

Andrew Wertkin is Chief Strategy Officer at BlueCat and has spent over a decade working with some of the world's largest enterprises on DNS, DHCP, and IP address management. BlueCat has been in the DDI business for 24 years, processing hundreds of billions of DNS queries a month across customers in finance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and education. Andrew spends a significant amount of tha...

Micah Czigan is Chief Information Security Officer at Georgetown University and formerly served as Director of Defensive Cyber Operations at Symantec, with prior roles across the Department of Defense and Department of Energy. He came to security through an unusual path: marine biology, commercial shipping, the Navy as a cryptographic communications specialist, and eventually the Pentagon running...

Konrads Klints is CISO at Rajah & Tann Asia and formerly served as a senior incident response and red team consultant at KPMG. He spent years on the offensive side, running red team engagements against ATMs, mainframes, and telecoms infrastructure before crossing over to defense as the first full-time, dedicated CISO at a law firm in all of Asia. This episode covers how ransomware actually lan...

Mohana "Mo" Balakrishnan is CTO at Schools Insurance Authority and the former security architect at SonicWall. He started his career as a geophysicist in a tent in northern Canada at minus 60, pivoted to tech in London, and joined SonicWall at the bottom. Years later he was the architect at the keyboard when SonicWall's own systems were compromised through a zero day in its remote access product....

Paul Bleicher is Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Convo, building agentic vulnerability triage for security teams drowning in scanner noise. After a decade as an early employee across security and dev-tool startups, Paul and his co-founders spent two months interviewing 100+ security leaders before landing on the problem: most CVEs flagged by scanners are never actually exploitable. What we...

Zach Lewis, CIO and CISO at the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis, breaks down the LockBit ransomware attack that hit his university in April 2023 and how it impacts CISOs and security leaders navigating the same threat today. ◼ Incident response takeaway: why the first 24 hours matter more than any tool in your stack ◼ Threat intelligence insight: how LockBit's negotiation t...

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...

What can CISOs and MSPs learn from a ransomware attack that disrupted 26 client businesses and caused millions in losses? Matt Lee reconstructs the incident and its aftermath. Security leaders will learn how merger due diligence, supply-chain visibility, cyber insurance, incident leadership, and secure-by-default software affect ransomware resilience. Matt is a battle-tested cybersecurity leader k...

When a breach hits, the first 72 hours decide everything. But the stories, decisions, and philosophies behind those critical hours rarely make it into public conversation. That’s what Full Metal Packet is here to change. Hosted by Yegor and Alex - the founders of Control D (and before that, Windscribe, now trusted by 90M+ people) - this podcast is where operators, CISOs, and security leaders final...