Hacker Valley Studio

Latest Episodes:

Giving Your AI Agent Its Own Identity with Ashish Rajan Sep 30, 2026

Show notes

Your newest hire has a Google Workspace account, a Slack login and a laptop. It never sleeps, and it never asks before it acts. So who owns its identity? Ron welcomes back Ashish Rajan, CISO at Techriot.io and researcher with AI Security Lab, who spent 17 years in identity, cloud security and security leadership. His take: vendors haven't solved AI identity, and the open questions are on your side, not the product's.
Ashish got into identity after failing his OSCP three times: if he couldn't break in, he wouldn't let anyone else in. Now he reviews Ron's own setup, where Hacker Valley's AI agent, Jennifer Romani, has her own accounts just like an employee. Ashish explains how that call changes from a one-laptop small business to an enterprise where every developer's machine acts like five. They also cover the Gemini breach headlines, swarms of agents and AI Security Lab, which Ashish describes as what OWASP is for AppSec, but for AI security.
The uncomfortable truth: defenders have the same models attackers do, but attackers don't wait for a pull request review. Ashish calls that a people problem, not a technology problem. He also shares the question he asks before handing anything to an AI agent: can this be reversed?
Impactful Moments

00:00 - Introduction
02:30 - Busting a myth: AI identity isn't solved
05:30 - Three OSCP attempts and a pivot to IAM
07:00 - Why AI identity is more complex than ever
09:15 - Hot or not: giving an AI agent its own accounts
11:10 - One laptop, five machines in the enterprise
12:50 - AI gateways and developer observability
14:05 - Where Ashish would spend his AI security budget
18:20 - Why defenders don't hack themselves first
19:05 - The real problem is people
22:15 - Swarms of agents are coming
23:50 - What AI Security Lab is building
26:35 - Never share your credit card with AI
28:40 - Ron's callback: can it be reversed?

Links
Connect with Ashish Rajan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashishrajan/

Listen to Ashish's first Hacker Valley Studio episode: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-bpaij-51b280
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From Read Access to Admin with just an AI Agent Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

What if someone got full admin access to your company's platform, including your CRM, your payments app, and your private messages, and the only tool they used was an AI chatbot? Can AI models really find zero-days on their own, or is that just the headline? And if AI can do the attacker's job, who's actually holding the scissors?

In this solo episode, Ron Eddings shares his own methodology for offensive assessments with AI. He talks about the models he trusts, the tools he uses to get agents working together, and a real assessment where his agents turned SQL read access into admin control and unlocked the API keys stored inside. Ron also calls out what's hype and what's real with today's models, and why the agent still needs a skilled person behind it.

For defenders, Ron covers what attackers go after once they're in, and why the fundamentals like asset inventory are still where every strong security program starts. He closes with the bigger picture: anyone, good or bad, now has powerful intelligence on hand, and it's on all of us to look out for each other.

Impactful Moments

00:00 - Introduction
02:25 - Can AI Really Find Zero-Days Alone?
04:20 - The Real Danger Is Human Intent
05:00 - Why Grok 4.6 Tops Ron's List
07:55 - Ron's Three-Model Assessment Workflow
09:50 - Maestro, Interceptor, and Agent Ensembles
11:20 - Privilege Escalation and Persistence With LLMs
12:50 - Why AI Hacking Feels Like Cheating
14:20 - Ron Called Automated Security in 2015
16:05 - The Lazy Way to Hack
17:55 - From SQL Read Access to Admin
21:05 - What Attackers Want After Getting In
23:40 - Asset Inventory Is Security Flossing
27:05 - Why AI Is Like Scissors
29:05 - Waymos, Robotaxis, and Physical AI Risk

Links

Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams

Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com

Become a sponsor of the show: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/

Do You Know What Your Agent is Doing at 3AM? with Amir Ofek Sep 16, 2026

Show notes

Every AI agent in your environment inherits someone's permissions, and most teams have no idea what those agents are actually doing with them. Amir Ofek, CEO and co-founder of Aizome, shares how to make every agent accountable before the damage shows up as a $150,000 bill.
In this episode, Amir explains why human and machine identity tools both fail for AI, why agents act more like eager, naive interns than employees, and how a new category called ARISE (Agentic Runtime Identity Security Enforcement) is emerging to fix it.
This one's for anyone building with AI agents right now (so, most of us). Amir's take: the biggest danger isn't a breach. It's agents quietly doing the wrong thing at scale while nobody's watching.

Impactful Moments

00:00 - Introduction
02:30 - Busting the Myth: "I Know What My Agents Are Doing"
05:30 - The Samurai Story Behind Aizome's Name
08:25 - Why Not All AI Agents Are Born Equal
11:15 - Where Enterprises Are Actually Deploying AI Agents Today
14:25 - What Claude Cowork Inherits Without You Realizing It
17:15 - Machine Identity vs. Human Identity vs. AI Identity
19:35 - Treating AI Agents Like Eager, Naive Interns
23:00 - The Biggest AI Risk Isn't Security, It's Cost
25:45 - Meet Ito: Aizome's Supervisor Agent
26:40 - Inside the New ARISE Category
33:35 - What Aizome Actually Does
35:30 - The Callback: Was the Myth Wrong, or Dangerously Wrong?

Links

Connect with Amir Ofek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirofek/
Learn more about Aizome: https://www.aizome.ai/
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Cloud Broke My World Before AI Did with Dr. Jay Abdullah Sep 09, 2026

Show notes

Cybersecurity has survived cloud, mobile, and a dozen other "biggest disruptions of our lifetime," and each one felt unprecedented in the moment. In this episode, Ron sits down with Alyssa "Dr. Jay" Abdullah, Deputy CISO at MasterCard, who started her career as a radio DJ and has since worked inside the White House, Lockheed Martin, Stryker, and Xerox before landing in payments security.

Ron and Dr. Jay trace her path from spinning records to securing global payment infrastructure, and dig into why she'd argue cloud, not AI, was the real turning point in her career. They cover what convergence actually looks like when AI, cloud, and synthetic identity start overlapping, why curiosity matters more than fast answers, and what it means when employees start bringing their own trained AI agents to work.

The conversation closes on something most teams haven't fully reckoned with yet: AI agents that carry their own identity, independent of the humans who built them, and what that shift demands from the people responsible for securing them.

Impactful Moments

00:00 - Introduction
02:25 - Busting the AI hype myth
04:40 - From radio DJ to Dr. Jay
06:10 - A day in the life as Deputy CISO at Mastercard
07:25 - Why AI hasn't disrupted her world
08:50 - White House tech through the decades
12:30 - Smartphones, wearables, and what's next
13:30 - Defining convergence for 2026
14:50 - When AI meets quantum computing
17:20 - Bring your own AI agent to work
19:00 - Negotiating salary in tokens
21:05 - Teaching curiosity over answers
23:50 - Overhype equals overtrust
27:10 - The future of tier one and autonomous SOC
29:50 - Hot take: AI in the SOC
31:35 - Predictions: AI identities and the human outside the loop

Links

Connect with Alissa "Dr. Jay" Abdullah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dralissajay/

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Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams

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The Dashboard Is Dead, Long Live the Harness with Myke Lyons Sep 01, 2026

Show notes

Security teams spent decades begging for more logs. Now the enterprise is generating petabytes a day, and the thing drowning in it isn't just the SOC anymore, it's your AI agents too. In this episode, Ron sits down with Myke Lyons, CISO at Cribl, who cut his teeth in telemetry and logging decades ago and has landed right back there in the age of AI.

Ron and Myke dig into why most telemetry failures aren't data problems at all, they're decisions nobody made about why the logs are being collected in the first place. Myke breaks down what to track on every agent in your environment, why token spend belongs on the security team's plate, why dashboards are quietly dying, and why treating an AI agent like just another employee is a mistake that's going to bite security teams hard.

Underneath it all is one question Myke keeps circling back to: do you actually know what normal looks like for every agent in your environment?

Impactful Moments

00:00 - Introduction
01:50 - Myth Busting: AI Agents Aren't Just Another User Account
04:25 - Meet Myke Lyons, CISO at Cribl
05:05 - What it means to run security at a telemetry company
06:10 - From gigabytes of logs at GE to petabytes today
07:45 - MITRE ATT&CK, Cribl's new APEX framework, and orienting telemetry
10:20 - Why most telemetry problems are decision problems, not data problems
13:20 - OCSF and how security teams are rethinking their schemas
14:25 - Why the dashboard is dying
17:35 - What Myke wants to track about every AI agent
20:10 - How to spot an agent going rogue
23:15 - Making your data AI-ready and the case for schematizing everything
27:10 - Tokenomics: treating AI spend as a security responsibility
29:05 - The non-negotiable logs every org should be collecting
31:50 - Hot takes: build vs. buy, tier two to three, and Myke's daily AI briefing
33:35 - Closing thoughts and outro

Links

Connect with Myke Lyons on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mykelyons/

Learn more about Cribl: https://cribl.io/

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The AI Already Inside Your Company with Russell Spitler & Richard Penshorn Aug 25, 2026

Show notes

A year ago, the average employee held about 30 OAuth grants. Today that number has risen to 88, and it isn't slowing down. Ron sits down with Russell Spitler, co-founder and CEO of Nudge Security, and Richard Penshorn, a senior security engineer at a top financial services company, to talk about the AI already living inside your business.

Ron, Russell, and Richard dig into why shadow AI doesn't behave like shadow IT, how one forgotten grant became the door into a real world breach, and whether AI agents should ever get access to a corporate inbox.

Underneath all of it is the one thing Russell and Richard keep coming back to: ownership. Give an AI agent access with no owner attached and it becomes invisible. Give every employee an approved, low-friction path to use AI and they stop wandering off it. Find out how you can get ahead of the AI already running inside your walls.

Impactful Moments

00:00 - Introduction
02:00 - Busting the "shadow AI is just shadow IT" myth
03:45 - Meet Russell Spitler and Richard Penshorn
05:50 - The surprising long tail of AI tool usage
07:00 - Entertainment vs. finance: build vs. buy culture
08:50 - How 30 OAuth grants became 88 in 2026
10:25 - Why manual OAuth audits became untenable
11:30 - The Canva example: what "click to connect" really grants
15:20 - Benign vs. malicious: how a stolen OAuth grant gets exploited
17:00 - Shadow IT vs. Shadow AI: what's actually different now
21:00 - Hot take: should AI agents ever touch corporate email?
25:10 - The three buckets of AI agent discovery
27:55 - Russell's best practices for locking down agents
31:00 - Fundamentals for the next 18 months: visibility and easy paths

Links

Connect with Russell Spitler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/russell-spitler/

Connect with Richard Penshorn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardpenshorn/

Learn more about Nudge Security: https://www.nudgesecurity.com/

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Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams

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Humans First: Adobe's Rule for Building AI Security Tools with John Gillis Aug 19, 2026

Show notes

Imagine how much investigation time your SOC could get back if the busywork just disappeared. Ron sits down with John Gillis, Staff Security AI Engineer at Adobe, who built an in-house AI investigation platform from scratch.

John's system runs on more than 30 specialized agents that reason through cases instead of following a script. In one run, that meant over 140 detections investigated in under four hours at an 80 to 85% quality rating. Ron and John dig into the hard lesson that made John rip out his own tooling and rebuild it around function calling, why "humans first" drives every decision his team makes, and whether AI SOC is actually different from SOAR or just the same promise with way better marketing.

Underneath all of it is the one thing John says decides whether any of this actually works: context. Give the AI too little and it's guessing, give it too much and it drowns just like a human would. Listen to find out what it actually takes to build an AI SOC that reasons instead of just automates.

Impactful Moments

00:00 - Introduction
02:05 - The rewind: how SOAR promised to save the SOC in 2015
03:35 - Meet John Gillis, Adobe's Staff AI Security Engineer
05:30 - What cybersecurity looked like before AI at enterprise scale
07:00 - The "humans first" strategy behind Adobe's AI investigator
09:30 - Why careless context management is the biggest pitfall in agent design
14:45 - Solving the speed problem: is it tooling, process, or people?
17:10 - From monolith to microservices: rebuilding the platform for scale
24:05 - What actually makes an AI agent's "persona" work
26:00 - John's prediction for the SOC three years from now
28:50 - The three skills every security practitioner needs for 2026
32:10 - Final verdict: is AI SOC really different, or SOAR with new branding?

Links

Connect with John Gillis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-gillis/

If you're a researcher ready to make an impact, check out the announcement about Adobe’s new home for the Adobe Bug Bounty Program here: https://blog.adobe.com/security/a-new-home-for-the-adobe-bug-bounty-program

Check out Adobe’s Bug Bounty profile on Intigriti: https://app.intigriti.com/programs/adobe/adobepublic/detail

Learn more about Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/

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Let AI Do More Without Surrendering Your Judgment with Jen Easterly Aug 14, 2026

Show notes

Fresh off the showroom floor at Black Hat 2026, Ron brings back some hot takes from the crowd. Nearly every booth he visited, including the Exaforce booth, was pushing in the same direction. Trust in AI isn’t a philosophy debate anymore, it’s an engineering problem people are actively solving.

Ron then catches up with Jen Easterly, CEO of RSAC, for a wide-ranging conversation on what it actually takes to build that trust. From her move out of government to her hard line on AI regulation and liability, the conversation takes an unexpected turn when Jen opens up about "cognitive surrender" and why she believes good judgment can't be automated away. Couldn't make it to Black Hat this year? This episode has you covered.

Impactful Moments

00:00 - Introduction

02:45 - Reporting live from Black Hat 2026: hot takes from the showroom floor

05:05 - Welcoming Jen Easterly, CEO of RSAC

07:55 - A day in the life running RSAC and the Innovation Sandbox

10:00 - AI whack-a-mole and the sweet spot for regulation

11:00 - Governance vs. regulation, the EU AI Act, and state laws

13:30 - Why accountability and liability need to catch up to AI makers

14:45 - The case for autonomous patching and healing code like "The Matrix"

17:50 - The hot take Jen hasn't said before: not outsourcing our humanity

20:30 - Why in-person conferences matter more in the AI era

21:55 - Ron's takeaway: who decides when AI has earned our trust?

Links

Connect with Jen Easterly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jen-easterly

Learn more about Exaforce: https://www.exaforce.com

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Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams

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Post-Quantum Cryptography: What Every Organization Needs to Know with Michael Fasulo Aug 12, 2026

Show notes

What if the encrypted traffic flowing across the internet right now (emails, files, logins) is already being quietly collected and stored by someone waiting for the day they can finally crack it open? That's the threat behind "harvest now, decrypt later," and it's closer than most people think.

Ron Eddings sits down with Michael Fasulo, Senior Director of Portfolio Marketing at Commvault, to talk about where post-quantum cryptography (PQC) really stands in 2026. They discuss "harvest now, decrypt later," the specific industries quietly racing to prepare, and why a commercially viable quantum machine might only be four years away.

Ron and Michael trace the journey from a 1998 hack to today's quantum race, and the good news is there's still time to get ahead of it. Listen to hear where the real opportunity is, and how to start building your defense today.

Impactful Moments
00:00 - Introduction
01:40 - Rewind: the 1998 Deep Crack story
04:10 - Michael Fasulo and the current state of post-quantum cryptography in 2026
05:05 - Harvest now, decrypt later: do people really have the storage to do this?
06:10 - Where is this actually happening? Nation-states vs. coffee shops
08:50 - Who the real targets are: government, financial services, oil and gas
10:05 - Are everyday SaaS tools like Zoom and Gmail implicated?
12:25 - How Commvault helps organizations inventory their crypto footprint
17:00 - Trust, vendor partnerships, and the Commvault / Microsoft Sentinel integration
18:30 - Signs that a commercial quantum machine may be closer than we think
24:45 - Are we already behind? What to do starting next week
28:20 - Deep Crack revisited

Links

Connect with Michael Fasulo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-fasulo

Learn more about Commvault: https://www.commvault.com

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Stop Defending the Edge: How to Rethink Your Mobile Security with Jared Shepard Aug 07, 2026

Show notes

What if the biggest risk to your organization isn't the device that gets lost, but the data that lives on it? Ron Eddings sits down with Jared Shepard, Founder and CEO of Hypori, whose path ran from homeless high school dropout to Army infantry to building a company that rethinks mobile security from the ground up.

Jared makes the case for something more radical than most vendors will admit: stop defending the edge device entirely, and make sure sensitive data never lands there in the first place. He and Ron cover MDM and MAM's blind spots, executive protection, and the shadow AI habits quietly becoming every security leader's next headache.

The episode also lands at a tense moment for the defense industrial base with the Pentagon having just paused third party CMMC assessments, now putting the burden of proof back on self attestation. If you're still trusting the edge device to protect you, this episode is your wake up call.

Impactful Moments

00:00 - Introduction
02:00 - Hack The Headlines: Top new from around the industry
07:30 - Meet Jared Shepard, founder and CEO of Hypori
10:00 - What Hypori does and how it started
15:40 - MDM vs. MAM: why both miss the real problem
18:45 - Shadow AI and the security habits practitioners can't ignore
20:30 - Collapsing the attack surface and bringing back BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)
22:40 - The 4-gigabit-speed "parlor trick" that proves the Cloud beats your device
25:20 - What the 60-day CMMC pause really changes (and what it doesn't)
29:20 - China, stolen tech, and the rise of AI models like Mythos
36:00 - Closing the loop on the CMMC pause

Links
Connect with Jared Shepard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shepardj

Learn more about Hypori: https://hypori.com

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Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams

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