Hacker Valley Studio

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
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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/ 

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/ 
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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/ 

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/ 

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/