Hacker Valley Studio

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, and make sure sensitive data never lands there in the first place. He and Ron cover MDM and MAM's blind spots, executive protection, and the shadow AI habits quietly becoming every security leader's next headache.

The episode also lands at a tense moment for the defense industrial base with the Pentagon having just paused third party CMMC assessments, now putting the burden of proof back on self attestation. If you're still trusting the edge device to protect you, this episode is your wake up call.

Impactful Moments 

00:00 - Introduction 
02:00 - Hack The Headlines: Top new from around the industry
07:30 - Meet Jared Shepard, founder and CEO of Hypori 
10:00 - What Hypori does and how it started 
15:40 - MDM vs. MAM: why both miss the real problem 
18:45 - Shadow AI and the security habits practitioners can't ignore 
20:30 - Collapsing the attack surface and bringing back BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) 
22:40 - The 4-gigabit-speed "parlor trick" that proves the Cloud beats your device
25:20 - What the 60-day CMMC pause really changes (and what it doesn't)
29:20 - China, stolen tech, and the rise of AI models like Mythos 
36:00 - Closing the loop on the CMMC pause 

 

Links 
Connect with Jared Shepard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shepardj 

Learn more about Hypori: https://hypori.com 

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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 Conti’s 300,000 leaked internal chats, the gang that dominated the ransomware world in 2021 and 2022, pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in ransoms. From the Moscow movie studio the gang's leader used to launder money years previously, to the Ukraine war leak that brought the whole Conti empire down, this one plays like true crime… because it is.

Geoff makes the case that defenders should think the same way: you're not buying security tools to fend off a hoodie in a basement, you're investing to outcompete a rival business. For anyone trying to integrate a better incident response plan, this episode reframes the whole conversation.

Impactful Moments
00:00 - Introduction
01:45 - The Rewind: Colonial Pipeline and the week the East Coast ran dry
03:50 - How Geoff went from tech news to cybercrime reporting
05:10 - The difference between threat groups, APTs, and crime gangs
07:25 - Inside the Conti leaks: 300,000 messages
08:55 - Meet the gang: Stern, Mango, and Target
13:20 - Stern's origin story: Zeus malware, money mules, and the 25th Floor front company
16:50 - Ransomware gangs vs. the mafia: where's the protection?
18:10 - The money: $2.5M single payouts and 400 years of wages
19:30 - The Conti member arrested on a layover in Miami
20:35 - The downfall: the Ukraine war and the leak that ended it all
23:05 - What businesses can learn from Conti: recruitment, retention, reputation
27:45 - Advice for defenders: response waves, segmentation, and negotiating down
31:05 - Ron's takeaway: belonging and the thin line between operator and criminal

 

Links

Connect with Geoff White on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffwhitetech/

Get your own copy of Geoff's books (Crime Dot Com, The Lazarus Heist, Rinsed): https://geoffwhite.tech/book/

Want more information on Conti? Check out Geoff’s BBC podcast series, Cyber Hack: The Conti Files, available on BBC Sounds, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts

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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 actually takes to get AI agents out of the demo and into production. Tim agenticized his own company's IT, watched it blow up, and came out the other side with lessons from Fortune 100 SOCs running agents at serious scale. 

He shares where AI actually belongs in the alert pipeline, the objections holding teams back, and a blunt warning for any leader still waiting on the sidelines in 2027. If AI in the SOC is on your roadmap before the end of this year, start here.

 

Impactful Moments

00:00 - Introduction
01:55 - Busting a myth: AI will replace analysts
04:45 - Introducing Tim Leehealey 
05:30 - The Strike48 survey: 84% say hand L1 to AI
08:00 - Fear the low-and-slow attacker, not the loud one
13:00 - Getting breached without agents in 2027
15:00 - When Tim's own rollout blew up
19:00 - Micro agents inside deterministic workflows
21:25 - Skills advice for L1 analysts
26:00 - The next 18 months of agentic adoption
28:00 - Jim Bob in your Slack is an agent
21:30 - Ron's take: transparency is the trust unlock

Links

Connect with Tim Leehealey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-leehealey-b8b04321 

Learn more about Strike48: https://strike48.com

Check out the 2026 State of Agentic Security report here: https://hubs.ly/Q04p49S20

Go deeper on Strike 48's technology: https://labs.strike48.com

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Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams 

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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 security practitioners: OSINT and recon, bug bounty operations, prompt-injection testing, and threat-intelligence automation.

Ron also puts himself in the hot seat, answering the hardest questions he's gotten about the tool, including why anyone should trust an open-source tool from a podcast company over a polished product from a billion-dollar AI lab. The delegation is coming, and we would rather the security community be the ones who understand it.

Impactful Moments: 
00:00 - Introduction
02:35 - The Rewind: Same Origin Policy and the Web's Foundation
04:40 - Rapid-fire facts: AI agents got hands, and attacks followed
07:00 - What is Interceptor and why was it built? 
10:20 - How Interceptor works: stealth, network visibility, teach and replay
13:10 - Live use-case: dynamic dashboard without writing code
17:05 - Cybersecurity use-cases: OSINT, bug bounty, prompt injection testing
21:50 - Ron answers the hard questions about Interceptor
24:10 - Why trust an open source tool from a podcast company? 
25:20 - What a practitioner can do tomorrow 
27:30 - Closing reflection: knocking down the vendor lock-in wall

 

Links 

Download Interceptor on GitHub: https://github.com/hackervalleymedia/interceptor

Connect with Ron on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronaldeddings/ 

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Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams

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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, and makes the case that advocacy shouldn't be an afterthought, but the very first marketing move a company invests in. The conversation lands on something the community doesn't talk about enough: customer marketing is hard to put a number on, so it consistently loses the budget fight to demand gen. 

Impactful Moments
00:00 - Introduction
02:15 - Myth Buster: "I don't fall for marketing tactics"
04:15 - Meet Antu Buck, Senior Director of Customer Marketing & Community at Gigamon
06:45 - From cold-calling BDR to customer marketing leader
09:40 - Antu’s three pillars: advocacy, community, lifecycle management
13:05 - Why customer advocacy is the most underrated pillar
14:40 - The problem with chasing the CISO
16:40 - From transactional selling to relationship building
17:20 - The cold call that became a lifelong champion
20:20 - Are threat actors borrowing tactics from sales and marketing?
23:00 - Why AI tools are off-limits with customer data
27:50 - Why customer marketing loses the budget fight

Links

Antu Buck on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antu-buck/

– 

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/