Hacker Valley Studio

Why Smart People Fall for Deepfakes with Perry Carpenter

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 neuroscience behind why our brains are wired the way they are, how attackers exploit that, and what it really takes to build better instincts in a world full of AI-generated content. You'll also want to stick around for the live demos, where Perry breaks down why they worked and how to spot the tells. 

Impactful Moments
00:00 - Introduction
02:15 - The myth: smart people don't get fooled
05:20 - Flashback segment: the Ireland deepfake and why it went viral
06:15 - Guest introduction: Perry Carpenter 
09:50 - Exploiting cultural bias and tribal instincts
13:45 - Live deepfake demo: face and body replacement in real time
15:30 - Synthetic media vs. deepfake: what's the difference?
20:40 - Breaking down a deepfake: what made it convincing
23:00 - Overproof: why bad deepfakes try too hard
27:15 - System 1 vs. System 2 thinking in cybersecurity
29:45 - The FAIK framework: freeze, analyze, investigate, know
32:40 - Ron's closing reflection

Links

Connect with our guest, Perry Carpenter, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/perrycarpenter

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/

Who Owns Your AI Security Policy? with Chris Cochran

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 Model, a practical framework built for security leaders who need to stop philosophizing and start making decisions. 

They cover the three pillars of AI security maturity: utilizing AI for defense, protecting AI itself, and governing it across the organization. Chris then gets real about where most enterprises actually stand (hint: not as far along as they think). Listen for a conversation that meets you wherever you are: skeptic, early adopter, or somewhere in between.

Impactful Moments

00:00 - Introduction 

03:00 - Chris Cochran: from Co-Founder to SANS Field CISO 

04:20 - Your board is pushing AI before security is ready 

06:00 - Tiers of AI uses: summarization to full automation 

07:50 - When AI shouldn't make the final call 

10:10 - Bite-sized AI: starting small in the enterprise 

11:45 - Introducing the SANS AI Security Maturity Model 

13:20 - You can no longer afford to be an AI skeptic 

16:30 - Three buckets: utilize, protect, and govern AI 

18:50 - Fact or Cap: what level of maturity is your enterprise? 

21:00 - Retroactive vendor risk and the AI explosion 

23:05 - Agentic Identity: workforce, non-human, and beyond 

25:00 - What works in the agentic identity space? 

27:05 - Blockchain for agent identity: promising or hype? 

29:00 - A Message for the next generation of practitioners 

31:30 - Ron's closing take: who owns your AI policy?

Links

Connect with Chris Cochran on LinkedIn: ​​https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishvm/

Download the SANS AI Security Maturity Model: https://www.sans.org/mlp/2026-ai-security-maturity-model-ebook

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

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Turning 30,000 Findings Into 50 That Matter with Dan Pagel and Brad Hibbert

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 actually matter in YOUR environment, this episode is a masterclass in exposure management at machine speed.

Dan and Brad share how Brinqa helps organizations make sense of massive volumes of findings, correlating data across 260+ connectors, enriching vulnerability context, and delivering clear, explainable actions to IT operations teams.

They also tackle the bigger question: how do you build enough trust in AI to let it take autonomous action on your behalf? The answer starts with better data, better explainability, and knowing when to keep humans in (or on) the loop.

Impactful Moments

00:00 - Introduction

02:00 - What just happened? Breaking down the Anthropic Mythos moment

04:10 - Why most new findings don’t apply to your environment

07:12 - What Mythos means to the broader market

09:09 - Why AI-driven discovery isn’t slowing down

11:00 - The gap between security and IT ops: how explainability closes it

13:38 - How fast you should go through findings 

15:53 - Why MTTR is the wrong metric and what businesses actually care about

18:03 - Why real-time visibility is replacing scheduled scanning

19:50 - Human IN the loop vs. human ON the loop

22:14 - What happens when AI hallucinates? 

27:20 - Why we’re over and under-estimating the impact of AI

29:54 - The immediate win Brinqa achieves for its customers

31:50 - What CISOs are really asking now: "What does good look like?"

Links

Connect with our guest, Dan Pagel, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpagel/

Connect with our guest, Brad Hibbert, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradhibbert/

Learn more about Brinqa: https://www.brinqa.com/

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 to amplify your brand: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/

Killing the Playbook with Agentic AI with Allan Alford and Tom Findling

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 guardrails, human-on-the-loop versus human-in-the-loop, and the QR-code phishing investigation an agent solved on its own without being told how. The conversation closes on trust thresholds, the speed of enterprise adoption, and Allan's blunt warning to any CISO trying to slow this train down… you're already on the tracks.

Impactful Moments
00:00 - Intro
02:30 - Why the lazy sysadmin always wins
05:15 - Why SOAR fell flat
08:00 - Guardrails, hallucinations, and showing the work
13:00 - The SOC AI holy grail
15:30 - The moment you start saying we
17:30 - QR-code phishing the agent solved alone
19:00 - Why playbooks were never going to scale
28:00 - Earning trust at enterprise scale
33:30 - Stand in front of this revolution and lose
35:40 - Risk quantification on business steroids

 

Links
Connect with our guest, Tom Findling, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomfindling/ 

Learn more about Conifers.ai at https://www.conifers.ai 

Connect with our guest, Allan Alford, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allanalford/ 

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The Epidemic of Sameness Is Killing Your Brand with Don Jeter

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 everything in-house, why he starts every strategy by listening instead of pitching the product, and why the only differentiator left in cyber marketing is how much you genuinely care. It's a conversation about brand, but it's really a conversation about trust, community, and what it takes to make a CISO text you back.

 

Impactful Moments
00:00 - Introduction
03:50 - How Don landed at Torq
06:09 - What the Torq brand stands for
07:41 - Giving cybersecurity pros their flowers
09:09 - Cookie-cutter booths, cookie-cutter brands
12:00 - Why Torq built everything in-house
15:34 - Start with listening, not the product
18:13 - "We have to out-care the other teams"
21:45 - Nobody buys because of a monster truck
24:06 - Welcome to the experience age
28:30 - Entertain them or lose them

Links
Connect with our guest, Don Jeter, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donjeter/ 

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 to amplify your brand: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/