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What happens when attackers collaborate better than defenders? Recorded live from RSAC 2026, this solo episode with Ron breaks down the biggest themes shaping cybersecurity right now, from organized threat groups and massive data breaches to the growing tension between productivity and control inside modern organizations. This conversation highlights a hard truth. The threat landscape is evolving through collaboration. From phishing-as-a-service platforms like Tycoon 2FA to supply chain breaches impacting entire ecosystems, attackers are sharing tools and moving faster than ever. But there’s…

Hacker Valley Studio

by Hacker Valley Media · English · Tech & Science

Welcome back to the show! Hacker Valley Studio podcast features Host Ron Eddings, as he explores the world of cybersecurity through the eyes of professionals in the industry. We cover everything from inspirational real-life stories in tech, to highlighting influential cybersecurity companies,…

More from Hacker Valley Studio

  1. S6 · E423 · 17 Apr 2026 · 35 min

    The Epidemic of Sameness Is Killing Your Brand with Don Jeter

    In 2025, Torq brought a monster truck to RSAC. And Don Jeter, Torq's CMO, will be the first to tell you: nobody's buying an AI SOC platform because of a grave digger in the booth. In this episode, Ron sits down with Don to discuss what Torq is actually doing in a category packed with 60 near-identical vendors, and why "the epidemic of sameness" is the real threat to every cybersecurity brand right now. Don explains why Torq builds everything in-house, why he starts every strategy by listening instead of pitching the product, and why the only differentiator left in cyber marketing is how much…

  2. S6 · E422 · 7 Apr 2026 · 29 min

    Minutes to Meltdown: Cyber Recovery When It Counts with Chris Bevil

    Most organizations are prepping for disaster recovery when they should be building for cyber recovery, and those are not the same thing. Recorded live at RSAC Conference 2026, Ron sat down with Chris Bevil, Principal Security AI Strategist at Commvault, to break down what actually happens after a breach hits and why most teams are caught flat-footed. Chris walks us through Commvault's Minutes to Meltdown tabletop exercise, why isolated recovery environments matter, and how clean data determines whether you get your company back in hours or in 200+ days. This episode will tell you what…

  3. S6 · E421 · 1 Apr 2026 · 24 min

    Building AI Governance Before the Incidents Hit with Guru Sethupathy

    AI adoption is outpacing governance at every level, and the cost of waiting is getting higher by the day. Guru Sethupathy, General Manager of AI Governance at Optro and former Founder of FairNow, breaks down what it really takes to build trust in AI systems before things go sideways. Guru lays out a simple but powerful 3 P’s Framework: policies, process, and people, connecting it to what teams are actually dealing with right now, from shadow AI to security threats that don’t look like anything we’ve seen before. If 2026 is the year AI moves from experiments to real operations, this…

  4. S6 · E419 · 20 Mar 2026 · 21 min

    RSAC 2026: Show Up or Fall Behind

    What does it mean when your smart doorbell becomes an entry point for surveillance? What happens when a single hacker can jailbreak every major AI model within hours of its release? And why are the same tools being used by both nation-state attackers and the defenders trying to stop them? In this solo episode, Ron Eddings breaks down the urgent case for practitioner unity in cybersecurity, from AI-powered jailbreaking and IoT surveillance creep to geopolitical cyber operations. With RSAC 2026 just around the corner, this episode is a rallying cry for the community to come together, share…

  5. S6 · E418 · 16 Mar 2026 · 37 min

    What’s Next After Building a $2.5B Cybersecurity Company with Dean Sysman

    What does it look like when a cybersecurity founder who built a $2.5 billion company decides to level up, again? Dean Sysman, co-founder of Axonius, sits down with Ron Eddings to pull back the curtain on what it really took to go from zero to $100M ARR in four and a half years, and what came next. Dean breaks down the founder mindset, the emotional weight of tying your identity to your company, and why he stepped into the Executive Chairman role while simultaneously pursuing a PhD in AI systems at Columbia University. He gets into how boxing taught him what solo performance reveals about…

  6. S6 · E417 · 6 Mar 2026 · 39 min

    Can AI Do Your Cyber Job? Post Your Job Req and Find Out with Marcus J. Carey

    Last episode, Ron and Marcus made predictions. This episode, they brought the receipts. A journalist built an app with vibe coding and got hacked on live television. A social network built entirely by AI (not a single line of human code!) exposed 1.5 million authentication tokens and private messages between agents. And 88% of organizations have already had an AI security incident, while barely 14% of deployed agents ever saw a security review. The warnings from last episode aged fast. Marcus J. Carey is back to talk about what that actually means for the people building right now, not the…

  7. S6 · E446 · 7 Oct 2026 · 37 minNew

    Securing the Apps Everyone Is Building with Roi Nisimi and Yonatan Levi

    What happens when your marketing team, your sales team, and the person down the hall can all ship a full app from a single prompt? And what is that app quietly connected to? In this episode, Ron sits down with Roi Nisimi, Principal Security Researcher, and Yonatan Levi, AI Security Researcher, of Orca Security. They built apps on the most popular AppGen platforms and then tried to break into them.Ron, Roi, and Yonatan get into what's really running behind a prompt-built app, and what Orca's team found when they went looking for trouble. In one case, a single misconfigured app gave them a way…

  8. S6 · E445 · 30 Sep 2026 · 32 min

    Giving Your AI Agent Its Own Identity with Ashish Rajan

    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…

  9. S6 · E444 · 23 Sep 2026 · 32 min

    From Read Access to Admin with just an AI Agent

    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…

  10. S6 · E443 · 16 Sep 2026 · 38 min

    Do You Know What Your Agent is Doing at 3AM? with Amir Ofek

    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…

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