Dark Reading Confidential

Dark Reading Confidential

At any moment around the world, cybercriminals and nation-state sponsored hackers are targeting businesses, government entities, and nonprofits for financial gain, cyber espionage, or geopolitical advantage. But behind every organization facing this nonstop barrage of cyberattack activity are dedicated cybersecurity professionals working to defend their organizations’ networks, systems, and sensitive information. Dark Reading Confidential brings you rare, firsthand stories from the cybersecurity practitioners in the cyber trenches, as well high-profile industry experts and headline-makers. Subscribe, and treat your ears to compelling stories and insights from the actual people fighting back against these hackers, and the experts helping to shape ever-evolving cybersecurity defenses.

Episodes

July 28, 2026 27 mins

Expert Rich Mogull explains how the OpenAI agent's attack on Hugging Face exposes fresh risks for every cyber team. 

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Kickbacks, no-show jobs, "dirty" VCs, and shelf ware — industry expert Robert "RSnake" Hansen explains why he thinks its time for a CISO code of ethics to ensure cybersecurity bosses aren't engaged in self-dealing that could risk enterprise, and even national, security.

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Two decades ago Dark Reading posted its first blockbuster — a story from a pen tester who sprinkled rigged thumb drives around a credit union parking lot and let curious employees do the rest. This episode looks back at the history-making column with its author Steve Stasiukonis and Dark Reading's editor-in-chief Kelly Jackson Higgins.

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Chris Inglis was the head civilian in charge at the NSA when the Snowden leak exploded. He gets candid about mistakes the organization made, and what CISOs need to know about spotting potential threats, media disclosures, and 'enculturation.' 

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CISOs are bullish on AI and have big plans to roll out future tools. We talk to Reddit CISO, Fredrick Lee and leading analyst Dave Gruber about how AI is working out in the real world, as well as its future promise. 

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Interpol relied on Will Thomas and team to help break up a sprawling cybercrime ring, leading to the arrest of 574 suspects, the recovery of more than $3 million, and the decryption of six malware variants. Here's his story. 

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Dark Reading Confidential Episode 14: This episode features teen hackers who grew up to become cybersecurity executives Michael Coates and Tal Kollender who discuss how curious, ethical problem solving can continue to serve as a guiding principle for an evolving cybersecurity sector.

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Developers are exposing their organizations' most sensitive information; our guests explain why it's happening and how to stop it.

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Dark Reading Confidential Episode 12: Experts Fred Kwong and Jessica Sica help cyber job seekers get noticed; make an argument for a need to return to the hacker ethos of a bygone era; and have a stark conversation about keeping AI from breaking the sector's talent pipeline for years to come. 

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Enterprise cyber teams are in prime position to push back against our current "Golden Age of Surveillance," according to our guests Ronald Deibert from Citizen Lab and David Greene from the EFF. 

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Dark Reading Confidential Episode 10: It’s past time for a cohesive plan to protect vital US systems from nation-state cyberattacks, and increasingly, that responsibility is falling to cybersecurity professionals and asset owners across a vast swath of organizations, who likely never bargained for a full-blown international conflict landing in their environments. But here we are. And here’s what comes next, according to...

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August 28, 2025 32 mins

Join us for a look around today's Dark Web, and find out how law enforcement, AI, nation-state activities, and more are reshaping the way cybercriminals conduct their dirty business online. Keith Jarvis, senior security researcher at Sophos' Counter Threat Unit joins Dark Reading's Alex Culafi for a conversation you don't want to miss. 

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July 30, 2025 52 mins

Dark Reading Confidential Episode 8: Federal funding for the CVE Program expires in April and a trio of experts agree the industry isn't doing enough to deal with the looming crisis. Bugcrowd's Trey Ford, expert Adam Shostack, and vulnerability historian Brian Martin sit down with Dark Reading to help us figure out what a "good" future of the CVE Program would look like, and how to get there. 

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Dark Reading Confidential sits down with two cybersecurity leaders to find out what cuts at CISA mean for the business of cyber.

Featuring: Tom Parker, CEO of Hubble Technology

Jake Williams, aka "@malwarejake", VP of R&D at Hunter Strategy

In today’s episode, we’ll cover…

  • The impact of CISA's workforce reduction
  • How the private sector can fill the gap left by shrinking CISA
  • Advice for cybersecurity pr...
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Cyber researchers Ismael Valenzuela and Vitor Ventura share riveting stories about the creative tricks they used to track down advanced persistent threat groups, and the surprises they discovered along the way.

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March 27, 2025 32 mins

Dark Reading Confidential Episode 5: Christofer Hoff, chief secure technology officer at LastPass, shares the human side of the story of how he led his team through a major cyber incident and built from the ground up a security team and security culture. In this frank conversation, Hoff has some valuable advice for how to handle and rebound from a cybersecurity incident.

Have a listen.

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November 5, 2024 30 mins

Episode 4: The National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) release of its new post-quantum cryptography standards last summer was the quiet start of a new chapter in cybersecurity. Now no longer something that can be filed away for future reference, post-quantum encryption has officially landed on the desks of cybersecurity leaders worldwide.

We wanted to explore what comes next, so we recruited some world-class expert...

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September 10, 2024 41 mins

Episode 3: On September 11, 2019, two cybersecurity professionals were arrested in Dallas County, Iowa and forced to spend the night in jail -- just for doing their jobs. Gary De Mercurio and Justin Wynn ultimately found themselves used as pawns in a very public and ugly power dispute between the local county Sheriff's office and the state, forced to justify the physical penetration test that the state of Iowa had hired them to con...

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June 27, 2024 54 mins

Episode 2: When a business gets infected with ransomware - its systems and data locked down by cybercriminals - there is rarely a quick fix to get back up and running. Sometimes the nature of the attack and the lack of backup options force the victim organization to pony up and pay ransom to the attackers. That's typically where a ransomware negotiator – often a third-party incident responder – steps in. These are the e...

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May 9, 2024 51 mins

The first episode of Dark Reading Confidential dives into the complicated relationship between the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) within publicly traded companies. Frederick “Flee” Lee, CISO of Reddit, Beth Waller, a practicing cyber attorney who represents many CISOs, and Ben Lee, Chief Legal Officer of Reddit, chat with Dark Reading’s editor-in-chief Kell...

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