Hacker Valley Studio

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...

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 th...

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 cryptogra...

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...

What does the world's most prolific cybercrime operation look like from the inside? And why does it operate suspiciously like a mid-sized tech company, complete with HR headaches, salary negotiations, and a distracted boss nobody respects?

Ron Eddings sits down with investigative journalist and author, Geoff White, who has spent over 20 years covering cybercrime for the BBC, Channel 4 News, and Sky News. Geoff has read 47,000 of Co...

What happens when the adversary moves at machine speed, and your SOC is still responding at human speed? Why does nearly every security team say AI should handle L1 work, while 64% of organizations still have zero agents in production? And how long until the "coworker" resolving your ticket in Slack turns out not to be human at all?

Tim Leehealey, VP of Strategy and Operations at Strike 48, joins us this week to talk about what it ...

Think about everything you could accomplish if you don’t have to be the one driving your browser. In this solo episode, Ron Eddings introduces Interceptor, Hacker Valley Media's first piece of software. 

Interceptor is an open-source Chrome extension that lets an AI agent drive your real browser, logged-in sessions and all, with no vendor lock-in. Ron shares how it works and describes the use cases that matter most to se...

What if the same psychology that threat actors use to manipulate their targets is the same psychology that marketers use to earn your trust? 

In this episode, Ron sits down with Antu Buck, Senior Director of Customer Marketing & Community at Gigamon, who spent two decades building trust between vendors and the practitioners who use their tools. 

Antu walks us through the three pillars she's built her career around, ...

In 2025, out of all 70+ guests we had on our show, not one of them said they’d trust AI to run their SOC. Now in 2026, that mindset is shifting. In this episode, Ron sits down with Aqsa Taylor, Chief Security Evangelist at Exaforce, to find out what changed, and what's still standing in the way of security teams being able to trust AI agents with response. 

The conversation covers what's really behind the agentic SOC hy...

Is AI really coming for your red teaming job? What does it actually take to build a team that thinks like the adversary, and what happens when that team stops caring? And what do you do when you've been in this field long enough that the job that once fired you up has started to feel hollow?

In this episode, Ron catches up with Johnny Xmas, Head of Offensive Security at a Fortune 150 Global Food Manufacturer, and one of the most ca...

What does a calf kick have to do with vulnerability management? What can a fighter's mindset teach a security practitioner about operating against an adversary they've never faced? 

Ron Eddings brings back fan-favorite combat sports analyst and commentator Robin Black for a conversation that was never meant to be about cybersecurity, and ends up being one of the most insightful episodes on the human side of the field. They di...

What happens when AI writes all the code and nobody reads it? What if the security prompt you trusted still produced software designed to leak your secrets? And who exactly is on the hook when an AI-generated application takes down your company?

In this episode, Ron sits down with returning guest Tanya Janca, Secure Coding Trainer at SheHacksPurple Consulting, to dig into one of the most underestimated risks in software development...

What if the most sophisticated attack has nothing to do with your firewall? In a world where AI can clone voices, re-lip-sync politicians, and spread a fake newscast to 200,000 people in days, the real target has always been your brain.

Ron sits down with Perry Carpenter, Chief Deception Strategist at KnowBe4, to unpack why we're still getting fooled in 2026  and what we can actually do about it. Perry gets into the neuroscien...

Right now, someone in your organization is probably feeding sensitive data into an AI system that nobody approved. So when something goes wrong, who's responsible? And more critically, do you even have a policy in place to answer that question?

Ron Eddings sits down with his Hacker Valley co-founder, Chris Cochran, now serving as SANS Field CISO and VP of AI Security, to talk about his freshly released SANS AI Security Maturity Mod...

Mythos just found 30,000 new vulnerabilities, and now every security team is asking the same question: what actually matters?

In this episode, Ron Eddings sits down with Dan Pagel, CEO at Brinqa, and Brad Hibbert COO & CSO at Brinqa, to break down the Anthropic Mythos moment that rattled the security industry. From the panic of millions of new findings dropping overnight to the strategy of narrowing them down to the 50 that act...

SOAR promised to close the loop in the SOC and fell flat. Agentic AI is finally delivering what a decade of playbooks couldn’t.

In this episode, Ron sits down with Allan Alford, SVP at NTT Global Data Centers, and Tom Findling, co-founder and CEO of Conifers.ai. They cover why static playbooks broke under real-world conditions and how agentic systems are flipping the SOC operating model. They get into hallucination guardrail...

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 ...

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 exerci...

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 ...