Cloud Security Podcast

Empowering non-technical users to build production-grade applications requires a proactive, secure-by-design architecture. In this episode, Ashish sits down with Marcus Hallberg and Samuel Kelemen, security engineers at the AI software creation platform Lovable, to discuss how they actively secure AI-generated code and protect creators from supply chain risks.

Focusing on solutions rather than alarmism, Marcus and Samuel detail their response to an incident where malicious contractors mimicked AI agent commits. They outline their multi-layered defense strategy: securing a predefined tech stack, utilizing integrated security scanners, and tuning coding agents with strict guardrails to ensure secure output by...

Hash values, IP addresses, and domains are virtually useless as primary detection mechanisms in the era of AI-driven polymorphic malware and short-lived phishing kits. If your detection strategy is still stuck at the bottom of the Pyramid of Pain, your incident response team is doused in noise while true threats slip through undetected. In this episode, Ashish sits down with Nicole Beckwith, Senior Director of Security Engineering & Operations at Cribl (former Secret Service investigator and Kroger security ops lead), to break down Cribl's open APEX framework. Nicole explains how APEX focuses on behavioral chaining, time-boxing, and clustering over raw...

Did you know that 82% of all intrusions don't involve any sort of malware, and AI-augmented attacks are up 89% year over year? If your security operations team is solely focused on reacting to known-bad SIEM alerts, you may be missing the silent breaches. In this episode, Ashish is joined by Damien Lewke, Founder and CEO of Nebulock, to discuss the critical shift toward a "Hunt First" mindset. Damien explains why moving away from alert fatigue and focusing on raw, normalized telemetry (across endpoint, identity, and cloud) is the only way to proactively surface unknown threats. We also dive into how...

When Claude Cowork hits a roadblock, it doesn't give up, it writes a custom Python script and downloads an untrusted NPM package just to bypass its restrictions and finish its goal. Are your security tools close enough to stop it? In this episode, Ashish sits down with Michael Leland, VP, Field CTO at Island, to discuss the critical need for an Agentic Control Plane. Michael breaks down why traditional security silos (EDR, DLP, CASB) fail to provide visibility when autonomous AI agents execute tasks outside the network, and why the browser is the ultimate line of defense for monitoring...

When vulnerability disclosures shrink the wild exploit window down to less than 24 hours (or even minutes), traditional manual patching and WAF rule creation simply cannot keep up.

In this episode, Ashish sits down with Ammar Alim (Product Security Engineering Lead at Adobe) to break down how to build an automated, agentic WAF pipeline. Ammar shares how his team manages the scale and complexity of seven commercial and open-source WAFs (including AWS WAF, Cloudflare, Akamai, Azure WAF, Wallarm, and ModSecurity) by leveraging AI agents.

Discover how to construct an agentic harness, orchestrate deep research agents to...

The attack window from the discovery of a vulnerability to its exploitation has shrunk to less than 24 hours and sometimes down to just 25 minutes. Is your security team prepared for the speed of AI-driven attacks?

In this episode, Ashish sits down with Sarit Tager, who leads Cortex Cloud product management at Palo Alto Networks, to discuss why the post-Mythos era is forcing Cloud Security and AppSec out of their traditional silos. Sarit explains how AI coding agents prioritize generating code over securing it, which can sometimes result in flaws like accidentally deleting production databases within two weeks.<...

Traditional SCA and SAST tools are notorious for drowning security teams in false positives, historically flagging nine out of ten alerts incorrectly. But while generative AI seems like a magic bullet, simply wrapping an out-of-the-box LLM around your code can result in confident hallucinations and astronomical costs extrapolating to as much as $52 million a year for a large enterprise using frontier models.

In this episode, Ashish sits down with Harry Wetherald, CEO and co-founder of Maze, to discuss the evolution of AI-native AppSec and Cloud Security. Harry breaks down the critical difference between vulnerability reachability (is the...

Are overprivileged AI agents the biggest emerging threat in cybersecurity? In a recent high-profile attack, a vibe-coding company had its entire source code stolen because an attacker exploited a long-lived, overprivileged token tied to a third-party AI agent.

In this episode, Ashish sits down with Ely Kahn, CPO at Okta, to unpack the challenge of managing Non-Human Identities (NHI) in the AI era. Ely explains why traditional, static human permissions completely break down when applied to autonomous agents. To solve this, Okta has spearheaded Cross-App Access (XAA), an extension of OAuth that uses an Identity Assertion Grant...

AI isn't necessarily creating impossible new attacks, but it is drastically lowering the technical barrier to entry for cybercriminals. In this episode, Ashish Rajan speaks with Simon Biggs, Cyber Incident Response Specialist at Varonis, about how AI is accelerating the attack lifecycle.

Simon explains how attackers are using AI kits to instantly set up ephemeral phishing portals, query SQL databases in minutes, and bypass AI guardrails to compile Remote Access Trojans (RATs). We also discuss the shift in ransomware tactics from "encryption-first" to "data-theft-first," and how AI empowers attackers to post-process terabytes of stolen data to monetize...

Threat hunting has officially evolved into "vibe hunting". However, if your AI security tools lack the right semantic context, they might be doing more harm than good.

In this episode, Ashish sits down with Aqsa Taylor, Chief Security Evangelist at Exaforce, to discuss the rapidly changing landscape of Security Operations Centers. Aqsa explains how her team coined the term "vibe hunting" after autonomously tracking IOCs and exposure windows during the nationwide attack. We also explore the limitations of upstream detections, highlighting complex threats like the HackerBot Claw pull-request manipulation, TeamPCP NPM supply chain attacks, and APTs posing...

As enterprises expand across multiple cloud environments, on-premise data centers, and dynamic AI workloads, traditional perimeter defenses and siloed cloud-native tools are no longer enough to secure the modern network. In this episode, Ashish sits down with Murali Rathinasamy, Senior Director of Product at Cisco, to break down the next evolution of network security: the Hybrid Mesh Firewall. Murali explains why relying solely on cloud-native firewalls can create visibility gaps, and how unified policy orchestration allows security teams to manage enforcement points seamlessly. He shares a real-world case study of how Multicloud Defense is used to eliminate manual route...

Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) has historically been a tedious, 200-page paper exercise that felt like being catapulted back to 1979. But AI is changing that.

In this episode, Ashish sits down with Igor Andriushchenko (CISO at Lovable) and Jasper Mills (CEO of Ethira) to discuss the collision of TPRM and AI.

We dive into the hidden risks of Shadow AI, exploring the chaos that ensues when non-technical teams spin up unauthorized AI tools without security oversight. Jasper and Igor explain why the future of vendor risk involves treating AI agents like a contracted workforce, managing their...

Is your vulnerability management program ready for something like Claude Mythos? The old days of treating vulnerabilities as temporal events (like Heartbleed or Log4J) and patching them on a leisurely 30, 60, or 90-day cycle are officially over.

In this episode, Ashish sits down with Brad Hibbert, COO and Chief Strategy Officer at Brinqa. Brad explains how the release of Anthropic's Claude Mythos, an AI model capable of discovering vulnerabilities at machine speed without human intervention has compressed the time-to-exploit from months down to mere seconds.

We discuss why the traditional assumption that "sophisticated attacks require...

We are officially entering the "Multi-AI Era." Much like the multi-cloud times, organizations are no longer just using a single AI tool like Microsoft Copilot, they are building custom, agentic workflows using diverse third-party models and MCP servers . In this episode, Ashish sits down with Shawn Hays from Varonis to discuss why the security market has over-pivoted on AISPM (AI Security Posture Management) . Shawn spoke about how having visibility and an inventory of your AI models is a great start, but it fails to secure the enterprise if you lack the guardrails to actually stop an agent from going...

Is your cloud security strategy ready for the "messy middle" of AI adoption? With developers pushing code from inception to production in under three days using "vibe coding," and adversaries capable of exfiltrating data in just 25 minutes, human-led security is no longer fast enough .In this episode, Ashish sits down with Elad Koren from Palo Alto Networks (Cortex Cloud) to discuss the shift toward Agentic Cloud Security. Elad spoke to us about why bolting an AI chatbot onto legacy security tools doesn't work, and why you must run AI directly where your data lies . Elad shared a real-world case...

Is your EDR blinding you to insider threats? In this episode, Ashish is joined by Brandon Dixon (Co-Founder & CTO of Ent AI, and former Microsoft Security Copilot leader) to discuss why traditional endpoint security tools are failing in the AI era .

Brandon talks about the reality of modern "Insider Risk." Attackers are no longer relying on malware; they are "living off the land" by using legitimate enterprise software (like Zoom or Microsoft Office) to look like everyday employees . Why EDR tools can see that Zoom is running, but are completely blind to a user granting remote control...

Are AI agents functioning like adversarial malware inside your network? In this episode of the Cloud Security Podcast, Ashish sits down with Jasson Casey, Co-founder and CEO of Beyond Identity, to speak about the security risks introduced by Shadow AI and code assistants .Jasson explains why an AI agent executing a tool is the perfect opportunity for prompt injection or proprietary data exfiltration comparing unchecked agents to Ron Burgundy reading whatever is on the teleprompter . We discuss the "barbell" reaction of CISOs (either blocking AI entirely or blindly accepting the risk) and why placing device-bound identity at the core...

Is your security team treating your Identity Provider (IDP) like a firewall? In this episode, Adam Bateman (CEO & Co-founder of Push Security) explains why that's a dangerous mistake and how modern attackers are bypassing SSO entirely .Drawing from his background leading red teams that simulated nation-state attacks , Adam breaks down the massive architectural shift from network-based attacks to browser-native exploits. We dive into the terrifying evolution of phishing, from "Click Fix" attacks that trick users into running malicious commands via their clipboard, to "Consent Phishing" that completely takes over Azure without ever touching the endpoint .If your company relies...

Are attackers really using AI to run end-to-end cyber campaigns? In this episode, Edward Wu (Founder and CEO, DropzoneAI) joins Ashish to separate the hype from reality when it comes to AI-driven attacks .Edward explains how attackers are currently using open-source LLMs for reconnaissance and spear-phishing , and why the major commercial models now explicitly prohibit users from generating exploits without vetting . On the defense side, Edward shares how AI agents have successfully automated over 160 years' worth of alert investigations in the real world proving that 100% software-delivered SOC triage is already here .We also debunk the myth of AI "hallucinations,"...

Is AI security just "Cloud Security 2.0"? Toni De La Fuente, creator of the open-source tool Prowler, joins Ashish to explain why securing AI workloads requires a fundamentally different approach than traditional cloud infrastructure.

We dive deep into the "Shared Responsibility Gap" emerging with managed AI services like AWS Bedrock and OpenAI. Toni spoke about the hidden dangers of default AI architectures, why you should never connect an MCP (Model Context Protocol) directly to a database.

We discuss the new AI-driven SDLC, where tools like Claude Code can generate infrastructure but also create massive security blind...

In the world of Generative AI, natural language has become the new executable. Attackers no longer need complex code to breach your systems, sometimes, asking for a "poem" is enough to steal your passwords .

In this episode, Eduardo Garcia (Global Head of Cloud Security Architecture at Check Point) joins Ashish to explain the paradigm shift in AI security. He shares his experience building AI-powered fraud detection systems and why traditional security controls fail against intent-based attacks like prompt injection and data poisoning .

We dive deep into the reality of Shadow AI, where employees unknowingly train...

In this episode, Brad Hibbert (COO & Chief Strategy Officer at Brinqa) joins Ashish to explain why traditional risk-based vulnerability management (RBVM) is no longer enough in a cloud-first world .

We explore the evolution from simple patch management to Exposure Management a holistic approach that sits above your security tools to connect infrastructure, code, and cloud risks to actual business impact . Brad breaks down the critical difference between a "Risk Owner" (the service owner) and a "Remediation Owner" (the team fixing the bug) and why this distinction solves the "who fixes this?" problem .

This conversation covers...

Is "developer-friendly" AI security actually possible? In this episode, Bryan Woolgar-O'Neil (CTO & Co-founder of Harmonic Security) joins Ashish to dismantle the traditional "block everything" approach to security.

Bryan explains why 70% of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers are running locally on developer laptops and why trying to block them is a losing battle . Instead, he advocates for a "coaching" approach, intervening in real-time to guide engineers rather than stopping their flow .

We dive deep into the technical realities of MCP (Model Context Protocol), why it's becoming the standard for connecting AI to data, and the security...

Is the AI SOC a reality, or just vendor hype? In this episode, Antoinette Stevens (Principal Security Engineer at Ramp) joins Ashish to dissect the true state of AI in detection engineering.

Antoinette shares her experience building detection program from scratch, explaining why she doesn't trust AI to close alerts due to hallucinations and faulty logic . We explore the "engineering-led" approach to detection, moving beyond simple hunting to building rigorous testing suites for detection-as-code .

We discuss the shrinking entry-level job market for security roles , why software engineering skills are becoming non-negotiable , and the critical importance...

Traditional vulnerability management is simple: find the flaw, patch it, and verify the fix. But what happens when the "asset" is a neural network that has learned something ethically wrong? In this episode, Sapna Paul (Senior Manager at Dayforce) explains why there are no "Patch Tuesdays" for AI models .

Sapna breaks down the three critical layers of AI vulnerability management: protecting production models, securing the data layer against poisoning, and monitoring model behavior for technically correct but ethically flawed outcomes . We discuss how to update your risk register to speak the language of business and the essential...

Think your cloud backups will save you from a ransomware attack? Think again. In this episode, Matt Castriotta (Field CTO at Rubrik) explains why the traditional "I have backups" mindset is dangerous. He distinguishes between Disaster Recovery (business continuity for operational errors) and Cyber Resilience (recovering from a malicious attack where data and identity are untrusted) .

Matt speaks about the "dirty secrets" of cloud-native recovery, explaining why S3 versioning and replication are not valid cyber recovery strategies . The conversation shifts to the critical, often overlooked aspect of Identity Recovery. If your Active Directory or Entra ID is...

Transitioning a mature organization from an API-first model to an AI-first model is no small feat. In this episode, Yash Kosaraju, CISO of Sendbird, shares the story of how they pivoted from a traditional chat API platform to an AI agent platform and how security had to evolve to keep up.

Yash spoke about the industry's obsession with "Zero Trust," arguing instead for a practical "Multi-Layer Trust" approach that assumes controls will fail . We dive deep into the specific architecture of securing AI agents, including the concept of a "Trust OS," dealing with new incident response definitions...

Thinking of building your own AI security tool? In this episode, Santiago Castiñeira, CTO of Maze, breaks down the realities of the "Build vs. Buy" debate for AI-first vulnerability management.

While building a prototype script is easy, scaling it into a maintainable, audit-proof system is a massive undertaking requiring specialized skills often missing in security teams. The "RAG drug" relies too heavily on Retrieval-Augmented Generation for precise technical data like version numbers, which often fails .

The conversation gets into the architecture required for a true AI-first system, moving beyond simple chatbots to complex multi-agent w...

In this episode, Cliff Crosland, CEO & co-founder of Scanner.dev, shares his candid journey of trying (and initially failing) to build an in-house security data lake to replace an expensive traditional SIEM.

Cliff explains the economic breaking point where scaling a SIEM became "more expensive than the entire budget for the engineering team". He details the technical challenges of moving terabytes of logs to S3 and the painful realization that querying them with Amazon Athena was slow and costly for security use cases .

This episode is a deep dive into the evolution of logging architecture...

How do you establish trust in an AI SOC, especially in a regulated environment? Grant Oviatt, Head of SOC at Prophet Security and a former SOC leader at Mandiant and Red Canary, tackles this head-on as a self-proclaimed "AI skeptic". Grant shared that after 15 years of being "scared to death" by high-false-positive AI, modern LLMs have changed the game .

The key to trust lies in two pillars: explainability (is the decision reasonable?) and traceability (can you audit the entire data trail, including all 40-50 queries?) . Grant talks about yje critical architectural components for regulated industries, including single-tenancy...

Are we underestimating how the agentic world is impacting cybersecurity? We spoke to Mohan Kumar, who did production security at Box for a deep dive into the threats of true autonomous AI agents.

The conversation moves beyond simple LLM applications (like chatbots) to the new world of dynamic, goal-driven agents that can take autonomous actions. Mohan took us through why this shift introduces a new class of threats we aren't prepared for, such as agents developing new, unmonitorable communication methods ("Jibber-link" mode).

Mohan shared his top three security threats for AI agents in production:

The silos between Application Security and Cloud Security are officially breaking down, and AI is the primary catalyst. In this episode, Tejas Dakve, Senior Manager, Application Security, Bloomberg Industry Group and Aditya Patel, VP of Cybersecurity Architecture discuss how the AI-driven landscape is forcing a fundamental change in how we secure our applications and infrastructure.

The conversation explores why traditional security models and gates are "absolutely impossible" to maintain against the sheer speed and volume of AI-generated code .

Learn why traditional threat modeling is no longer a one-time event, how the lines between AppSec and...

Is the AI SOC analyst just hype, or is there measurable ROI? We spoke to Edward Wu, founder of Dropzone AI about this and he shared insights from a recent Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) benchmark report that quantified the impact of AI augmentation on SOC teams. The study revealed significant improvements in speed (45-60% faster investigations) and completeness, even for analysts using the tech for the first time.

Edward spoke about the "robotic" limitations of traditional SOAR playbooks with the adaptive capabilities of agentic AI systems, which can autonomously investigate alerts end-to-end without pre-defined scripts . He shared...

Can you just use Claude Code or another LLM to "vibe code" your way into building an AI SOC? In this episode, Ariful Huq, Co-Founder and Head of Product at Exaforce spoke about the reality being far more complex than the hype suggests. He explains why a simple "bolt-on" approach to AI in the SOC is insufficient if you're looking for real security outcomes.

We speak about foundational elements required to build a true AI SOC, starting with the data. It's "well more than just logs and event data," requiring the integration of config, code, and business...

How do you perform incident response on a Kubernetes cluster when you're not even on the same network? In this episode, Damien Burks, Senior Security engineer breaks down the immense challenges of container security and why most commercial tools are failing at automated response.

While many CNAPPs provide runtime detection, they lack a "sophisticated approach to automating incident response or containment" in complex environments like private EKS . He shares his hands-on experience building a platform that uses a dynamically deployed Lambda function to achieve containment of a compromised EKS node in just 10 minutes, a process that would...

"The next five years are gonna be wild." That's the verdict from Forrester Principal Analyst Allie Mellen on the state of Security Operations. This episode dives into the "massive reset" that is transforming the SOC, driven by the rise of generative AI and a revolution in data management.

Allie explains why the traditional L1, L2, L3 SOC model, long considered a "rite of passage" that leads to burnout is being replaced by a more agile and effective Detection Engineering structure. As a self-proclaimed "AI skeptic," she cuts through the marketing hype to reveal what's real and what's...

The race to deploy AI is on, but are the cloud platforms we rely on secure by default? This episode features a practical, in-the-weeds discussion with Kyler Middleton, Principal Developer, Internal AI Solutions, Veradigm and Sai Gunaranjan, Lead Architect, Veradigm as they compare the security realities of building AI applications on the two largest cloud providers.

The conversation uncovers critical security gaps you need to be aware of. Sai reveals that Azure AI defaults to sending customer data globally for processing to keep costs low, a major compliance risk that must be manually disabled . Kyler breaks down...

For the last 30 years, email security has been stuck in the past, focusing almost entirely on stopping bad things from getting into the inbox. In this episode, Rajan Kapoor, Field CISO at Material Security and former Director of Security at Dropbox, argues that this pre-breach mindset is dangerously outdated. The real challenge today is post-breach: protecting the sensitive data that already lives inside your mailboxes.

The conversation explores why we must evolve from "email security" to the broader concept of "workspace security" . Rajan explains how interconnected productivity suites like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 have turned the inbox...

You have the visibility, you see the alerts, but your security backlog is still growing faster than your team can fix it. So, are you actually getting more secure? In this episode, Snir Ben Shimol, CEO of Zest Security, argues that "knowing about an open door or an open window don't make you more secure... just make you more aware" .

We spoke about the traditional "whack-a-mole" approach to vulnerability management. Snir shared an analogy: when planning a trip, the most important question isn't who goes first, but "what is the vehicle?" . He explains how AI's ability to...

The conversation around cloud security is maturing beyond simple threat detection. As the industry grapples with alert fatigue, we explore the necessary shift from a reactive to a proactive security posture, questioning if a traditional SecOps model is sufficient for modern cloud environments.

We spoke with Gil Geron, CEO of Orca Security, to examine the limitations of a SecOps-centric defense. SecOps teams are inherently reactive, they cannot be the sole guardians of cloud infrastructure. Instead, the conversation centers on a new blueprint: viewing cloud security as an end-to-end workflow that integrates development, deployment, and production runtime with...