Hacker Valley Studio

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, and we do so in a fun and enthusiastic way. We’re making cybersecurity accessible, creating a whole new form of entertainment: cybertainment.

Hacker Valley Studio is a technology podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 442 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Hacker Valley Studio, a technology show with 442 episodes published.

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  Episode #445

  Giving Your AI Agent Its Own Identity with Ashish Rajan

  Sep 30, 202632 minS6

  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 – 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/

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  Episode #444

  From Read Access to Admin with just an AI Agent

  Sep 23, 202632 minS6

  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/

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  Episode #443

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

  Sep 16, 202638 minS6

  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/ – 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/

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  Episode #442

  Cloud Broke My World Before AI Did with Dr. Jay Abdullah

  Sep 9, 202637 minS6

  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/ – 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/

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  Episode #441

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

  Sep 1, 202636 minS6

  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/ – 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/

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