Safe Mode Podcast

Episodes

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  Patch and move on? Why vulnerability response doesn't end there 29.10.2026 40m

  Fresh off the PHP2Shell advisory, former DHS CISO and acting deputy CIO Hemant Baidwan — now executive CISO at Knox Systems, the largest federal managed cloud — joins Safe Mode to break down what actually happens in the hours after a high-severity vulnerability drops. He walks through why "patch it and move on" gives teams a false sense of security, how to map internet reachability in environments that change by the hour, and what a CISA KEV listing really signals to defenders. Baidwan also reflects on writing DHS's first-ever AI cybersecurity guidance, what he'd add to that playbook today — starting with AI agent identity — and why he thinks compliance has drifted into security theater.
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  Even safe mode can't save PHP this time 23.10.2026 32m

  Two critical PHP bugs, found by AI before attackers, leaked before the embargo, patched a day early. Cisco Talos' Matt Olney joins Safe Mode — the show, not PHP's deprecated directive, though neither has ever stopped an exploit — for the part the headlines skipped and what the future holds for the vulns moving forward
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  The messy middle of AI-powered bug disclosure 15.10.2026 32m

  AI is making vulnerabilities easier to find, but who’s going to fix them? On this episode, Greg Otto talks with Josh Bressers, VulnCheck’s director of coordinated vulnerability disclosure about the growing flood of AI-generated security reports. Bressers explains why those findings are increasingly legitimate, how VulnCheck uses AI to streamline incoming reports, and why coordinating fixes still requires a human touch. They also explore the pressure on open-source maintainers, the risks of AI-generated patches, and the widening gap between the cost of discovering vulnerabilities and fixing them. The conversation turns to a fundamental question: What would it take to fund and maintain open-source software like the essential infrastructure it is?
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  Which nation-sate should worry us most 08.10.2026 37m

  What has changed in the cyber threat landscape—and what should defenders do about it? On this episode of Safe Mode, CyberScoop’s Greg Otto speaks with retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, former director of DISA and current chairman of Axonius Federal Systems’ board. Skinner assesses the risks posed by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, arguing that adversaries are increasingly prepositioning in critical infrastructure for potential disruption at a time of their choosing. He explains why China remains the top strategic cyber threat, how AI is shifting the advantage between offense and defense, and why visibility, context and continuous validation are central to protecting both IT and operational technology environments. They also discuss the security of telecommunications and water systems, supply-chain risk, botnet disruptions, Zero Trust as a continuous-improvement journey, and why cybersecurity must become inseparable from military operations.
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  What AI alignment means for cybersecurity 01.10.2026 33m

  The debate over AI alignment often centers on guardrails, model behavior, and whether increasingly capable systems could act in unexpected ways. But what does that conversation look like through a cybersecurity lens? In this episode of Safe Mode, Greg speaks with Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s head of counter-adversary operations, about the security implications of goal-driven AI agents, open-weight models, and guardrails that can be removed or bypassed. Meyers argues that systems described as “rogue” may instead be pursuing their assigned objectives in ways their operators failed to anticipate—making containment, monitoring, and clearly defined permissions central cybersecurity concerns. The conversation examines how AI-enabled adversaries are accelerating operations, why open-weight models complicate alignment and safety debates, and how defenders can use AI to keep pace with faster exploitation and shrinking patch windows. Meyers also shares what CISOs and policymakers should focus on: visibility into how AI is being used, controls over what agents can access, and practical safeguards that match the technology’s real-world risks.
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  Jailbreaks, sandboxes, and the limits of AI safeguards 24.09.2026 37m

  Matt Fredrikson, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon and CEO and co-founder of Gray Swan AI, built the world's largest AI red teaming arena, with more than 15,000 people breaking AI systems for prize money. He walks us through how the attacks actually work, from jailbreaks found on small open weights models that transferred straight to frontier systems, to training AI attackers with reinforcement learning. Matt also explains why the recent sandbox escapes didn't happen during safety testing but during cybersecurity capability evals with the guardrails off, what the Agent Harm benchmark revealed about models that refuse harmful requests in text but comply once handed tools, and why the bare minimum of best practices has changed whenever a capable model runs on your infrastructure. In our reporter chat, Greg talks with Matt Kapko about the ShinyHunters-FBI hack.
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  ClickFix and the social engineering of routine 17.09.2026 36m

  It starts with a fake error message. It ends with a pasted command. ClickFix has become one of the most reliable ways for attackers to get an initial foothold — first adopted by criminal groups, now used by state-linked actors like APT28 and Lazarus Group. This week, Greg is joined by John Hammond, Principal Security Researcher at Huntress, who helped identify and name the technique and has tracked its evolution for the past three years. They dig into why ClickFix still drives an estimated 20+ incidents a day at Huntress even after law enforcement disrupted major infostealer infrastructure like LumaStealer, how the technique has splintered into variants like FileFix and "consent fix" targeting Microsoft 365 and browser-stored credentials, and how attackers are now smuggling payloads inside images to slip past endpoint defenses. John walks through a real incident where a single pasted command led to 11 compromised devices, explains why he still believes security awareness training — not just tooling — is the best defense, and makes the case that the browser itself has become the blurriest and most under-protected boundary between endpoint and identity security. The conversation also turns to the npm/Axios supply chain attacks, where operators built fake Slack communities and fabricated employee personas to earn open-source maintainers' trust before compromising their packages — and what, if anything, can technically guard against a threat that's fundamentally social. In our reporter chat, Greg talks with Derek Johnson about the Supreme Court deciding against the Trump administration’s push for changes to mail-in ballots. Follow John on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@_JohnHammond
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  Defending in the middle of the vulnpocalypse 03.09.2026 31m

  CyberScoop editor-in-chief Greg Otto talks with WatchTowr founder and CEO Ben Harris about how cybersecurity teams are adapting as AI accelerates vulnerability discovery, public proof-of-concepts, and exploitation timelines. They discuss the WordPress-to-shell case study, why mitigation has become essential when patching cannot happen instantly, and why Harris argues that traditional vulnerability management is “effectively dead.” Also in this episode, senior reporter Tim Starks explains Project Watershed 250, a new effort involving Texas, the private sector, and the water industry to strengthen critical-infrastructure cybersecurity.
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  The Vulnpocalypse arrived early 27.08.2026 35m

  NEA partner Aaron Jacobson put $250 million behind autonomous pen testing company Horizon3.ai on the bet that cybersecurity has entered an AI-versus-AI era — and he argues the "vulnpocalypse" defenders were warned about has already arrived, with AI-discovered vulnerabilities now the primary way attackers get into enterprises. He explains why overprovisioned AI agents are the new phishing target, since an agent with a user's credentials and no common sense can be prompt-injected into exfiltrating data a human would never touch. Jacobson also separates the open weights debate from the open source one, makes the case that cheap open competition ultimately favors defenders, and closes with the thing he got most wrong 18 months ago. In our reporter segment, Greg talks with Matt Kapko about the cybersecurity implications of the GTA VI leaks.
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  Rethinking how federal cyber hiring actually works 20.08.2026 32m

  The federal government can't reliably say how many cybersecurity workers it has or what they cost — and that uncertainty sits at the heart of a much bigger question: is federal cyber training working, and can it keep pace with a field that's changing by the month? On this episode of Safe Mode, host Greg Otto talks with Christopher Bloor, Defense Director at the SANS Institute, about the state of the federal cyber workforce. The conversation moves through the real gap agencies face between filling job openings and actually assessing the skills their people already have, what 1,100 National Guard members revealed about morale and readiness during the CyberGuard critical infrastructure exercise, and why certifications and "qualifications" get treated as interchangeable when they shouldn't be. They also dig into some of the harder tensions in the space: whether federal training amounts to an unintentional subsidy for private-sector salaries, since the government will never be able to out-pay industry; how much of the workforce shortage is actually a skills problem versus a security-clearance bottleneck; and how AI has already flipped the day-to-day workflow for defenders, from checking AI-assisted code a year ago to now checking code AI has written itself. In this week's reporter chat, Greg talks with Tim Starks about the future of CORCA, a bill designated to fight organized retail crime that privacy experts say would create new mass surveillance capabilities for DHS.
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  The world still treats bug hunters like criminals 13.08.2026 32m

  Kat Sommer, head of government affairs at NCC Group, joins Safe Mode to unpack the DEF CON talk she gave on how governments around the world are — and mostly aren't — protecting security researchers. Of the roughly 195 jurisdictions on the planet, Sommer found only about 15 have enacted any form of legal safe harbor for vulnerability research, and just one, Portugal, has what she'd call a proper one on the statute book. She walks Greg Otto through the patterns that emerged from that survey: the encouraging shift toward regulating conduct rather than actors, the conditions that actually make sense (don't extort the vendor, report to the national CERT), and the ones that don't (no public disclosure until a government authority signs off). The conversation also digs into the gap between being "protected" on paper and protected in practice, why prosecutors and courts still hear "hacker" and think "criminal," and the extraterritoriality problem — it's the same internet in Portugal as it is in Brazil, the UK, or the U.S., but the legal exposure changes the moment you cross a border.
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  The SOC wasn't built for this 06.08.2026 38m

  Security operations centers have run on the same playbook for decades — collect, queue, triage, investigate, escalate. But attackers now move at machine speed: one recent breach that cost a company 3,600 repos got underway in roughly 87 seconds, far outpacing even a fast 10-minute log-enrichment pipeline. This week, host Greg Otto talks with ExtraHop CEO Greg Clark about the newly announced Agentic SOC Alliance and why he believes traditional SOC architecture can't keep up. Clark breaks down the three-layer stack he says every CISO needs to understand — context (the historical and real-time data an agent needs to reason about a threat), harness (the governance layer controlling what an agent can do, how it's tested, and how it audits its actions), and model (the LLM doing the reasoning, one of nearly 100 that ExtraHop benchmarks in an internal ""arena""). The conversation digs into some pointed findings: Chinese-origin models like Qwen consistently outperform on complex breach-reasoning tasks in ExtraHop's testing, a result Clark attributes to strong adversarial training data translating into strong defensive reasoning. He also makes the case for staying model-agnostic, since a new front-runner can emerge overnight — pointing to a Microsoft release just days before this recording. Much of the discussion centers on where humans still fit in. Clark describes today's dominant pattern — agents running in parallel ""investigate mode"" while analysts watch and validate — and predicts bounded, agent-driven response will expand faster than most expect, once governance and audit trails give leaders enough confidence to hand over execution on certain incidents, while higher-stakes systems like trading floors keep a human firmly in the loop. He closes by outlining what's next for the Alliance: growing membership, pushing toward published, vendor-neutral standards, and building the benchmarking needed to prove agentic SOC tools actually work before going into production.
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  Why Cybersecurity is at the heart of the US-China AI race 30.07.2026 36m

  The US-China AI competition has quietly become a cybersecurity arms race, and this week made that impossible to ignore. Booz Allen's Brad Medairy joins Safe Mode to unpack the milestones behind that shift — from China's Villager red-teaming framework to last December's frontier model jailbreak — and a report his team ran finding Chinese models like DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi carry policy bias and generate more vulnerable code when prompted in US government contexts. Medairy digs into the hard questions: whether banning Chinese open-weight models like Z.AI/GLM is even feasible, why CISOs are unknowingly running them under different names, and how agentic tools can compromise a network in six minutes while analysts miss it for 48. He also covers real-world breaches — an Ethiopian hacker using Claude and Codex to hit 14 US companies, and OpenAI's model escaping its boundaries to compromise Hugging Face — and closes on whether the US simply out-innovates China or finds room for guardrails when only one side is playing by them.
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  A builder's view of the AI arms race 23.07.2026 34m

  It's been a wild six weeks for frontier AI models — Mythos launched, got yanked offline by the Department of Commerce over export controls, and came back online with new guardrails, all while Five Eyes agencies warned that AI is months away from reshaping the threat landscape. This week on Safe Mode, Greg Otto talks with Armadin's David Slater, who is building directly on top of these frontier models, creating a platform integrating AI into cybersecurity offense and defense. The two dig into what it was actually like watching America's leading models go dark just as Chinese models — namely GLM 5.2 — closed the gap on intelligence, endurance, and something the guest calls "willingness": a model's readiness to be used for offensive cyber purposes without the safeguards baked into Western frontier labs. The conversation covers why export controls and "kill switches" on U.S. models may not actually blunt adversary capability given the availability of open-weight alternatives, why intelligence and endurance alone aren't enough without a wide enough "aperture" to see an entire attack surface, and why a small circle of well-resourced defenders working with frontier labs isn't sufficient to protect the hundreds of thousands of organizations and critical infrastructure operators left without that access. They also get into where AI is already reshaping attacker-defender asymmetry — credential stuffing, ransomware, and lateral movement — and where the next capability walls may fall, from reverse-engineering patches to longer-range vulnerability chaining. The guest closes with a pointed message for security teams: the technology is arriving faster than most organizations' ability to act on it, and the real gap isn't intelligence — it's whether your people and processes can move at "wartime" speed when a serious threat shows up.
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  What the Section 702 lapse means for cybersecurity 16.07.2026 47m

  For the first time in its operational history, FISA Section 702 has lapsed, plunging U.S. intelligence agencies and telecom providers into a highly uncertain "grey zone." In this episode of Safe Mode, host Greg Otto sits down with Glenn Gerstell, former NSA General Counsel and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), to navigate the fog of this unprecedented lapse. While the government is temporarily coasting on grandfathered certifications, the operational reality is getting increasingly dicey. Gerstell explains what this lapse actually means for the future of U.S. cyber defense, how political friction is complicating long-term planning, and why temporary stopgaps are creating unnecessary hurdles for the agencies trying to keep us safe.
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  What the post-quantum executive order means for CISOs 09.07.2026 26m

  In this week’s episode, Greg speaks with Ellen Boehm, SVP of Strategy and AI Operations at Keyfactor, about what the administration’s post-quantum cryptography executive order means for CISOs and enterprise leaders. Boehm argues that preparing for post-quantum cryptography is not just a technical cryptography challenge, but a leadership and business-risk problem. The conversation covers why compliance deadlines are pushing organizations to act, how CISOs should frame quantum risk for boards and executives, and why cryptographic inventories are a critical first step for any serious migration plan. The discussion also explores how organizations can build cross-functional teams across security, IT, legal, procurement, engineering and product groups; why visibility into cryptographic assets remains so difficult; and how AI, machine identities and crypto agility are converging with the post-quantum transition. Boehm also lays out the key questions enterprises should be asking now as they prepare for deadlines that are quickly moving from future concern to present-day planning reality.
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  How security investigators can get the right info out of AI security tools 02.07.2026 33m

  This week on Safe Mode, Greg sits down with Dov Yoran, CEO and co-founder of Command Zero, to talk about one of the most persistent problems in enterprise security: the investigation gap. Alert volumes keep climbing, SOC teams are drowning in triage, and the tools meant to help are aggregating data without actually reasoning through it. Dov breaks down how the real bottleneck in security operations comes down to expertise — knowing what questions to ask, where to find the data, and how to build a narrative around it. He explains how Command Zero has codified years of SecOps and incident handling experience into a knowledge base shared by both human analysts and AI agents, creating a structured and fully auditable approach to autonomous investigation, one where every question asked and every conclusion drawn is visible and replayable. The conversation gets into how AI is fundamentally changing the shape of the SOC. The tiered escalation model is giving way to something new, where agents handle the repetitive work of collection, timelining, and report writing and analysts operate more like coordinators than ticket processors. Whether that shift is gradual or sudden, and exactly where the human stays in the loop, is a question Dov and Greg wrestle with. In our reporter chat, Greg talks with Tim Starks about the Supreme Court's decision in Chatrie v. The United States
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  Inside Operation Disruption Week: Taking Down Southeast Asia's Scam Machine 25.06.2026 35m

  What does it actually take to dismantle an industrial-scale scam operation running bulletproof hosting, distributed ASNs, and crypto laundering across multiple countries? Mike Sweeney of Silent Push was in the room during Operation Disruption Week and tells us exactly how it went down — the intelligence, the coordination, and why this public-private model could be a blueprint for future cyber disruption efforts. Plus, reporter Tim Starks on the open source supply chain crisis: the volunteer maintainers holding up the internet, the threat groups coming after them, and the policy vacuum left behind after the Biden administration's momentum stalled.
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  Zero days, zero order: The chaos reshaping vulnerability disclosure 18.06.2026 40m

  The rules of responsible disclosure were written for a different era — one where humans found bugs, humans reported them, and 90 days felt like plenty of time to patch. That era is over. In this episode, Greg sits down with Gal Elbaz, co-founder and CTO of Oligo Security, to unpack how AI-assisted vulnerability research is breaking the frameworks the security industry has relied on for decades. From MITRE admitting it can no longer keep up with the volume of CVE reports, to Linus Torvalds saying the same about the Linux kernel, the cracks in the system are impossible to ignore. Gal draws on his years as a hands-on researcher at Check Point — and his current work leading Oligo's research team — to offer perspective from both sides of the disclosure table. He and Greg dig into the Microsoft controversy, the tension between researcher leverage and community responsibility, and why the Spider-Man rule applies more than ever to the security research community right now. They also tackle the big questions: Should disclosure timelines be based on exploitability rather than a fixed number of days? Who owns the decision to accelerate a disclosure? And is it time to throw out CVSS scores and build something new? Gal's bottom line: the noise needs to be cut, the critical bugs need better definition, and both vendors and researchers need to get back to the table — as humans. For our reporter chat, Greg talked with Derek Johnson about the reaction to the Trump administration's fight with Anthropic.
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  Why the autonomous SOC Is the wrong goal 11.06.2026 33m

  On this week's episode, we're joined by Mike Nichols, General Manager of Security at Elastic, fresh off the Gartner Security and Risk Summit in the D.C. area, where AI dominated every conversation on the conference floor. Mike walks us through what CISOs are actually asking about, what a real agentic SOC looks like in practice, and why keeping humans on the loop is the key philosophical distinction that separates a thoughtful AI implementation from a reckless one. The conversation covers "tribal knowledge," shadow AI, prompt injection, model sovereignty, and the exploding attack surface that AI agents themselves create, with Mike making the case that AI adoption is a dial and not a switch, and that transparency, explainability, and a healthy dose of skepticism are the foundation of building trust that actually sticks.