TechSpective Podcast

Every time Claude stops in the middle of a task to ask permission to open a file or read an email, I get two choices. I can allow it once, or I can allow it always. I click "allow once" pretty much every time. I understand that "allow always" would make things smoother down the road, but it also opens the door to the kind of mistake you can't take back, and I'm not ready to hand over that much on faith. Businesses are facing the same decision, just on a much bigger scale. Rishi Bhargava, co-founder of Descope, joined...

Every time I pull up directions on my phone, I'm using something the government built. GPS started as a Department of Defense project and was run for decades by the Air Force, the same branch I served in. The internet traces back to a Pentagon research program. A lot of the technology that made Silicon Valley rich was paid for by taxpayers long before anyone figured out how to put an app store on top of it. That history matters when the people who got rich on that foundation start talking about tearing down the system that built it. Gil...

Remember those Facebook quizzes that made the rounds during the pandemic lockdowns? They'd ask for things like the street you grew up on or the name of your first pet, and everyone treated it as a fun way to get to know each other. I spent a good chunk of that time telling my family to stop answering them, because those are the same questions banks and websites use to verify who you are. My family mostly thought I was making a big deal out of nothing, and in fairness, each of those details is pretty harmless by itself. They...

I realize I am dating myself to some extent, but my first cell phone plan came with a fixed number of minutes and a small allotment of text messages, and anything beyond that was billed one at a time. You got in the habit of watching the clock on calls and thinking twice before you replied to a text. That model didn't last. Once enough people wanted to use their phones without doing arithmetic, the carriers moved to unlimited plans, and now nobody counts anything. AI is still in the counting stage. A company signs up with OpenAI or Anthropic...

Amihai Niederman joins me on this episode of the TechSpective Podcast to talk about what happens to identity security once AI agents start outnumbering the humans on a company's network. He's the co-founder of NewCore, a startup betting the answer isn't another tool bolted onto what companies already run. It's a rebuild. That bet is worth taking seriously. The identity stack most companies run today wasn't built for this problem. It was built for a much smaller one. Identity Grew Up As An IT Problem For most of its history, identity has been treated as plumbing, not protection. Active Directory...

Nicole Beckwith joins me on this episode of the TechSpective Podcast to talk about a problem most of the security industry still hasn't fully reckoned with. Beckwith runs security engineering and operations at Cribl, and before that she spent years in law enforcement and digital forensics, which is the lens she uses to explain why the way we've built detection for the last couple of decades is running out of road. Matching Isn't the Same as Understanding For as long as I've covered this industry, detection has mostly come down to matching something you already know is bad against something...

For most of the last year, the AI security conversation had a clear villain. Attackers were using AI to write better phishing lures, adapt malware mid-attack, and move faster than defenders could keep up with. That story was easy to tell because it fit the shape we already understood. Bad guys get a new tool, they use it against us, we build a defense. Then the defenders' own AI started breaking its own rules, and the story stopped being that simple. The Model Did What It Was Told In July, OpenAI disclosed that one of its models, running an internal...

Think about every account you've ever created and then forgotten about. A login for a gym you canceled two years ago. A free trial you signed up for and never used again. A vendor portal from a job you left. Nobody deletes those things, and nobody circles back to check whether they still work. Now multiply that across every employee at a mid-size company, running for ten or fifteen years, and you've got a rough picture of what most identity and security teams were already dealing with before AI showed up. Roy Katmor, co-founder and CEO of Orchid Security, joins...

Barak Sternberg spent a chunk of this year proving something that should worry anyone who has plugged an AI coding agent into their observability stack. His team at Tenet Security found that a single fake error report, sent to a public Sentry endpoint with no login required, was enough to get AI agents to run code they had no business running. In a controlled test, more than 100 organizations' agents acted on the injected error, including one belonging to a company worth roughly $250 billion. Tenet published the full research, including the disclosure timeline, on its blog. The attack doesn't touch the...

Most AI-driven security tools lean on retrieval-augmented generation: pull relevant precedent, drop it into the context window, let the model reason over it. It works, but it has a cost problem and a consistency problem. The more data you feed a large language model to improve its answer, the more expensive that answer gets — and the more room there is for the model to produce inconsistent results, independent of hallucination. Torq built its "SOC brain" to get around that tradeoff. On the latest episode of the TechSpective Podcast, I sat down with Torq Co-Founder and CTO Leonid Belkind to talk ab...

Bruce Schneier joins me on this episode of the TechSpective Podcast to talk about hacking, power, and why so much of what gets blamed on AI might actually be something else. Schneier is one of the most well-known and respected names in cybersecurity. He has been working in and writing about cybersecurity since the term was invented, writing more than a dozen books in that time. Data and Goliath looked at surveillance. A Hacker's Mind looked at loopholes in the rules we all live by. His most recent book turns that same thinking toward AI and democracy. A Hacker's Way...

Beth Simone Noveck joins me on this episode of the TechSpective Podcast to talk about her book, Reboot, AI and the Race to Save Democracy. She's a professor at Northeastern, where she leads the Burns Center for Social Change. She also founded Innovate US, a training program for public sector workers. It's grown into one of the largest AI training efforts in the country. Before that, she ran AI for the state of New Jersey and worked on tech policy for the federal government under President Obama. I admit I hadn't read the book before we sat down to talk...

Most cloud security tools have a detection problem. They find misconfigurations well enough. The issue is what happens after — a ticket gets opened, someone works the queue, the fix goes in, and three weeks later the same misconfiguration is back because a different person on the team made the same call. Ariel Litmanovich watched that cycle for years, not at some mid-market company struggling with tooling, but at the Israel Defense Forces, running cloud security for one of the more demanding environments you can imagine. The team had budget, direct relationships with AWS, Azure, and GCP, and access to good to...

Before COVID forced everyone out of the office, hiring for most companies was a pretty localized exercise. You posted the job, you interviewed whoever could physically show up, and you picked someone. If you were based in a mid-sized city, you hired from a mid-sized city talent pool. Remote work changed that. Suddenly a company in Topeka, Kansas could interview candidates in Portland, Maine — or anywhere else. This meant more competition for good candidates. However, it also meant a dramatically better shot at actually finding the right person for the job. And depending on your market, the cost savings weren't tr...

Most organizations believe they have a solid handle on their AI risk. According to a new report, that confidence may be misplaced. ArmorCode partnered with the Purplebook community to survey more than 650 cybersecurity leaders to produce the State of AI Risk Management 2026 report. The results reveal a disconnect that's hard to explain away. Nearly 90% of respondents said they had complete visibility into AI usage across their organizations. However, more than 60% of those same respondents said AI usage in their organizations is essentially ungoverned. These weren't different groups of people. Instead, it was the same respondents giving contradictory answers within the...

Every few years, something comes along that reshapes the threat landscape and sends the industry scrambling for new tools, new frameworks, and new buzzwords. The perimeter died. Then it came back. Endpoints became the priority. Now they're not the whole story. Identity is the new battleground. AI is changing everything. And yet, the more I talk to people who've spent decades in the trenches, the more I keep hearing the same thing: the fundamentals still work. We just stopped trusting them. I had that conversation recently with Will Ledesma, a cybersecurity veteran with over 25 years in the field and a...

There's a pattern that shows up in incident response work that nobody talks about in the vendor briefings. You bring in forensics after something goes wrong, and somewhere in that process, you find a tool — already deployed, already licensed, sometimes running for years — that had the data to catch what happened. Nobody was looking at it. In some cases, it wasn't even turned on the right way. Max Henderson runs global digital forensics and incident response at Kroll. He's seen this enough that it's not a surprise anymore. That's part of what makes him a useful person to talk to abou...

I keep having versions of the same conversation. The names and logos change, but the underlying tension doesn't: organizations are deploying AI agents fast, they're deploying them into production, and a lot of them weren't ready when they did it. Monte Carlo's co-founder and CTO Lior Gavish joined me on the TechSpective Podcast recently, and we got into why that's happening and what it actually means. Monte Carlo published the Agents in Production report, and the numbers are worth paying attention to. Nearly half of enterprises surveyed already have agentic solutions running on mission-critical work — not pilots, not proofs of co...

There's a moment in my conversation with Bob Bobel where he mentions that customers are having a harder time finding people who actually know Active Directory. Not cloud identity — the old on-premise stuff that most large organizations still run. Even if they've also got Entra ID and Office 365 sitting on top of it, they maintain those older systems. That expertise is retiring. Moreover, it's not being replaced fast enough. Bob is the CEO of Cayosoft, which builds management, auditing, and recovery tools for Microsoft environments. He's been in this space for a long time — long enough to have sold to some...

Every conversation I’ve had for the past couple of years has followed the same arc. First, it was generative AI. Then agentic AI. Now the question everyone is circling is how you actually secure agentic AI — and it turns out that’s a harder problem than most people expected. I sat down with Naor Paz, CEO and co-founder of Capsule Security, to talk through it. Naor spent years as a security practitioner and incident responder, moved into product leadership at F5, and is now focused on what he sees as one of the most underserved problems in enterprise security: stoppi...

Fresh off RSAC 2026, I sat down with Ramin Farassat, Chief Product Officer at Menlo Security, to work through what agentic AI is actually doing to the enterprise attack surface. Menlo has spent 13 years focused specifically on browser security. The idea is that the browser, not the endpoint, not the network perimeter, is where most enterprise work happens and most exposure lives. That was already a hard enough problem. Then you add AI agents into the mix. The Next Billion "Users" The framing Ramin kept coming back to is that the next billion users aren't going to be human. That's not...

Ransomware has been a persistent headline topic for years now. As a result, a lot of people have probably gotten numb to it. I know I had. It starts to feel like background noise — another attack, another breach, another company paying out. So when I sat down with Derek Manky, Chief Security Strategist and Global VP of Threat Intelligence at Fortinet, he started walking through the numbers from Fortinet's latest Global Threat Landscape Report. That got my attention again. The data isn't background noise. In fact, it's a pretty clear signal. This shows that things are getting more serious, not le...

Everyone is talking about agentic AI. And that's part of the problem. Over the last couple of years, the term has gone the way of every other buzzword in tech — slapped onto products and platforms regardless of whether it actually applies. Marketing departments are busy. As Adi Kuruganti, Chief AI and Development Officer at Automation Anywhere, put it, we sat down to record the latest TechSpective podcast episode. When marketing departments get busy, clarity tends to suffer. Automation Anywhere has been in the automation space for over a decade. They helped create the Robotic Process Automation category. So, Adi has a...

Cloud was supposed to make everything easier. In some ways, it absolutely has. You can spin up infrastructure in minutes, scale on demand, and deploy globally without ever touching a piece of hardware. That’s a massive shift from the days when a “deployment” meant racking servers and hoping you sized things correctly six months in advance. But if you’ve actually been in the trenches—even recently—you know the reality is a little messier. Meet FluidCloud That’s where this episode of the TechSpective Podcast starts. I sat down with Harshit Omar, co-founder and CTO of FluidCloud, and we ended up di...

Everybody's got an AI strategy. Every platform claims to be AI-powered. Every vendor deck has a slide about how their product uses machine learning to deliver transformative outcomes. Most of it is still theater. I had a conversation with David DeSanto, CEO at Anaconda, recently for the TechSpective Podcast, and what struck me most was how honest he was about where enterprise AI actually stands. Not where vendors want it to be. Not where the headlines say it is. Where it actually is. A lot of organizations have run pilots. Some have solid proof-of-concept projects. A handful have built internal...

I spend a lot of time talking with people in cybersecurity. Founders, analysts, CISOs, researchers. One thing that comes up again and again is that the problem space keeps getting bigger. Not just more threats—more complexity. That’s really the thread running through my recent TechSpective Podcast conversation with Clarence Chio, co-founder and CEO of Coverbase. Security used to be easier to conceptualize. Not easier to solve, necessarily—but easier to frame. You had networks, endpoints, users, and a perimeter. Protect the edge. Monitor what’s inside. Respond when something goes wrong. That model doesn’t really exist anymore. Today, mos...

Trust on the internet used to be a fairly simple calculation. You looked for familiar names, recognizable brands, maybe a blue checkmark, and you made a judgment call. Today, that math often fails. AI has changed the game. Deepfakes are convincing. Entire personas can be spun up in minutes. Fraud doesn’t look sloppy anymore—it looks professional. And in many cases, it looks exactly like the people and platforms we already rely on. That’s the backdrop for my latest episode of the TechSpective Podcast, where I sat down with Oscar Rodriguez, who leads product efforts around trust at Linked...

If you’ve been following trends in cybersecurity and enterprise tech, you already know that AI has become more than a buzzword—it’s a foundational shift. What may surprise you, though, is just how central identity has become in that evolution. In the latest episode of the TechSpective Podcast, I had the chance to speak with Naresh Persaud, Principal at Deloitte, who has spent more than two decades working in identity and cybersecurity. Today, he leads Deloitte’s Cyber AI Blueprint initiative—an effort aimed at reimagining cybersecurity from the ground up using AI. Our conversation explores why identity—something ma...

How do you know your cybersecurity investments are actually making you safer? That’s the question at the heart of the latest TechSpective Podcast episode, where Dr. Chase Cunningham—better known to many as “Dr. Zero Trust”—joins me for an unfiltered, candid conversation about the state of modern cybersecurity. And no, this isn’t a puff piece on policy frameworks or the latest silver bullet tool. If you’ve read Chase’s recent LinkedIn post “Misaligned Zero Trust Spend = 1999 Firewall FOMO, But Worse,” you already know where this is going: straight into the hard truths about how organizations are still getting Zero T...

It’s getting harder to have a “normal” conversation about content, social media, or visibility anymore—mostly because the rules keep changing while you're still mid-sentence. Just a few years ago, you could create a blog post, optimize it for SEO, promote it on Twitter (back when it was still Twitter and not a dumpster fire of right-wing conspiracy lunacy rebranded as X), and expect a decent number of eyeballs to land on it. That’s not the game anymore. Now we’re living in a world of algorithmic gatekeeping, AI-generated content slop, and platforms that are slowly morphing into echo chamber...

The cybersecurity landscape never sits still—and neither do the conversations I aim to have on the TechSpective Podcast. In the latest episode, I sit down with Etay Maor, Chief Security Strategist at Cato Networks and a founding member of Cato CTRL, the company’s cyber threats research lab. Etay brings a rare mix of technical depth and practical perspective—something increasingly necessary as we navigate the murky waters of modern cyber threats. This time, the conversation centers on the rise of Shadow AI—a topic gaining urgency but still underappreciated in many organizations. If Shadow IT was the quiet rule-bre...

I’ve had a lot of conversations about AI over the past couple years—some insightful, some overhyped, and a few that left me questioning whether we’re even talking about the same technology. But every now and then, I get the opportunity to sit down with someone who not only understands the technology but also sees its broader implications with clarity and honesty. This episode of the TechSpective Podcast is one of those moments. Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, joins me for an unscripted, unfiltered conversation that covers more ground than I could have outlined in a s...

There’s a question I’ve been sitting with lately: Are we prepared for what AI is about to expose in our organizations—not just technically, but operationally? In this episode of the TechSpective Podcast, I sit down with Kavitha Mariappan, Rubrik’s Chief Transformation Officer, to unpack some of the less flashy but arguably more urgent questions about enterprise security, AI readiness, and business continuity. If your organization is still treating identity as a login issue or AI as a future-state conversation, you might be missing the bigger picture. Kavitha doesn’t speak in clichés. She’s been in the trench...

There’s something happening in cybersecurity right now that’s both exciting and a little disorienting. As generative and agentic AI take over headlines, conference keynotes, and investor decks, it’s easy to assume we’re on the verge of some great leap forward. The reality is more complicated—and more interesting. In the latest episode of the TechSpective Podcast, I had the chance to sit down with Sachin Jade, Chief Product Officer at Cyware, for a conversation that cuts through the buzzwords. We cover a lot of ground—from AI’s place in the SOC to the underrated power of relevance i...

Every once in a while, a conversation forces you to stop and rethink something you thought you already understood. Recording this latest TechSpective Podcast episode with Semperis CEO Mickey Bresman did exactly that—and it has everything to do with how AI is quietly rewriting the rules of identity security. If you’ve been following the industry for a while, you know the story: hybrid environments are the norm, identity is the new perimeter, and permissions hygiene is the decades-old chore nobody has enough time—or patience—to do well. None of that is breaking news. What is new is what hap...

Every once in a while, I end up in a conversation that hits at exactly the right moment—when the industry is shifting, the vocabulary is changing, and everyone is quietly circling the same questions. This new episode of the TechSpective Podcast is one of those. Art Poghosyan, CEO and co-founder of Britive, joined me on this episode of the TechSpective Podcast for a fluid and surprisingly energizing dive into where identity security meets agentic AI. If you’ve followed the podcast this year, you know the pattern: gen AI defines the early hype cycle, but 2025 belongs to agents. Not the...

One thing I’ve learned after years of covering cybersecurity is that the “state of the threat landscape” rarely sits still long enough to fit neatly into a headline. Every time you think you’ve understood the latest trend, something shifts under your feet. That’s part of the fun—and part of the challenge. That dynamic energy is exactly why I invited Brad LaPorte onto the TechSpective Podcast for this latest episode. Brad has lived just about every angle of cybersecurity you can think of: military intelligence, consulting, analyst work at Gartner, and now CMO of Morphisec. He’s been in the ro...

The latest episode of the TechSpective Podcast dives straight into one of the most pressing questions in cybersecurity right now: what happens when the vast majority of identities in your environment aren’t human anymore? I sat down with Danny Brickman, co-founder and CEO of Oasis Security, for a wide-ranging conversation about the future of identity, the rise of agentic AI, and why enterprises may be sprinting into an AI-powered future without realizing just how much risk they’re accumulating along the way. Danny brings a background that blends offensive experience, deep identity expertise, and a pragmatic understanding of what secu...

Cybersecurity has a long memory—and an even longer list of recurring frustrations. Chief among them: alert fatigue. For as long as security teams have existed, they’ve been drowning in notifications, dashboards, and blinking red lights. Each new platform promises to separate signal from noise, and yet, years later, analysts are still buried under an avalanche of “critical” alerts that turn out to be anything but. In the latest episode of the TechSpective Podcast, I sat down with Raghu Nandakumara, VP of Industry Strategy at Illumio, to explore why this problem refuses to die—and whether the rise of agentic AI...

Cybersecurity has always been a race against time—but in the era of artificial intelligence, it’s become a race against the machine. In this episode of the TechSpective Podcast, I sit down with Ankur Singla, founder and CEO of Exaforce, to explore what it really means to build an AI-powered SOC. We talk about the shift from manual detection and response to automation at machine speed, and what happens when AI agents begin to take on specialized roles in security operations—an idea that sounds futuristic, but is already unfolding across the industry. Singla brings deep experience from years at com...