Can AI help critical infrastructure, the state of the cyber market, and weekly news - Mike Privette, Kara Sprague - ESW #451

So much of appsec’s efforts can be consumed by vuln management and a race to patch security flaws. But that’s more a symptom of the ease of scanning and the volume of CVEs. Erik Nost walks through the principles behind proactive security, why the concept sounds familiar to secure by design, and why organizations still struggle with creating effective practices for visibility. Resources https://www.forrester.com/blogs/proactive-security-platforms-will-cumulate-visibility-prioritization-and-remediation/ Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-375

Interview with Kara Sprague - The AI Fix for Infrastructure’s Oldest Security Risks. Critical infrastructure, often built on decades-old systems and legacy code, remains vulnerable to cyberattacks. From pipelines and energy grids to transportation networks, we break down where critical infrastructure is vulnerable and how AI could potentially help strengthen defenses. Interview with Mike Privette - The State of the Cybersecurity Market Here at ESW, we use Mike Privette's Security, Funded newsletter to prepare for every news segment. His newsletter covers the latest fundings, acquisitions, public market performance, layoffs, and other pertinent market details every week. We particularly enjoy the weekly Vibe Check. In this interview, he joins us for the third year in a row, to discuss the most interesting insights from his annual State of Market Report. Post recording Adrian here: Whooooo, so this conversation was SO good, I decided to punt the news segment in favor of a part 2 with Mike, so enjoy! Also, though I punted the news segment, I did collect these stories and annotated them, so I think there's still some value in leaving them in the show notes. Scroll down for the links and my comments on each of these! Weekly Enterprise News Finally, in the enterprise security news, funding announcements seem to be ramping up before RSA Should security architects be shifting right? How McKinsley’s AI platform got hacked… by AI Amazon is having a bad time with AI lately Europe announces a Google Workspace/Microsoft 365 replacement Robot dogs are apparently guarding datacenters now Some much needed security humor in our squirrel stories before we all fly to San Francisco and lose our minds for a week All that and more, on this episode of Enterprise Security Weekly. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/esw-451

Macbeth, Ahab, Peewee Herman, Microsoft, Zoom, Vibe Hacking, SharePoint, Meta, AgeID, Josh Marpet, and More on this episode of the Security Weekly News. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-565

In this episode, we sit down with the Radare community leader, Pancake, the creator of the Radare2 reverse engineering framework. Whether you’ve never heard of Radare, already use it daily, or are thinking about contributing to its development, this conversation will demystify what makes Radare unique, why thousands of engineers rely on it, and how you can step into the community. This segment is sponsored by NowSecure. Discover how AI-powered mobile app security testing finds hidden vulns and leaks at https://securityweekly.com/nowsecure. In the security news: The US national cyber strategy in the category of dumb laws and 3d printing guns Iranian threat analysis ESP32 Bus Pirate gets some amazing updates I can reset the admin password Rick-rolling yourself Chrome 0days Re-purposing those old Ubiquiti cloud keys The new TLS certificate lifecycle A Flipper Zero add-on and news on the FlipperOne glassword malware Do you care about exploits or patching? attacking nuclear research centers how we uncovered 9 vulnerabilities in IP KVMs and hacking your laundry card with Claude Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw-918

Security metrics often fail because they measure activity rather than actual risk, often failing to connect with business impact, making them difficult to explain to boards and executives. How do you build efffective metrics that are actionable, contextual, and valuable? Ben Wilcox, CTO & CISO at ProArch, joins Business Security Weekly to help us speak the language of the board. Ben will cover how to develop measurable, strategic, and AI-ready security metrics. In the leadership and communications segment, Only 30 minutes per quarter on cyber risk: Why CISO-board conversations are falling short, When the Team Gets the Recognition, Your Leadership Is Working, The communication lesson that changed my career, and more! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/bsw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/bsw-439

AI Spicy Mode, Steam, Glassworm, Samsung, Stryker, Waymo, Cole Porter, and More on the Security Weekly News. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-564

What happens when secure coding guidance goes stale? What happens LLMs write code from scratch? Mark Curphy walks us through his experience updating documentation for writing secure code in Go and recreating one of his own startups. One of the themes of this conversation is how important documentation is, whether it's intended for humans or for prompts to LLMs. Importantly, LLMs don't innovate on their own -- they rely on the data they're trained on. And that means there should be good authoritative sources for what secure code looks like. It also means that instructions to LLMs need to be clear and precise enough to produce something useful. Watch what happens when Mark prompts his agents to run a live demo for us! Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/asw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/asw-374

Interview with Jeremy Snyder from FireTail about AI Governance Death by a thousand cuts: the AI shadow IT problem I think the best description of the AI governance problem during this interview was the title of the award-winning movie, Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. Generative AI has been disrupting businesses, products, and vendor risk management for a few years now. FireTail is one of the companies trying to address this problem for enterprises, so we check in with Jeremy Snyder to see how things are going. Segment 1 Resources: https://www.firetail.ai/ai-breach-tracker Interview with Allie Mellen about her new book, Code War: How Nations Hack, Spy, and Shape the Digital Battlefield We're VERY excited to check out Allie's new book, which will be released on St. Patrick's Day 2026! The timing could not be better, as her book is perfectly positioned to provide some much needed perspective on the cyber aspects of the ongoing war in Iran. Is it normal to see the use of wipers on healthcare companies in the midst of the conflict? Is there any precedent for hyperscaler datacenters getting targeted (some of AWS's EMEA regions are still recovering)? Check out the conversation to find out! Pick up the book! from Wiley from Barnes & Noble from Amazon Allie's personal website The Weekly Enterprise News Finally, in the enterprise security news, Vibes and funding! Starting to see some disruption in the vuln mgmt space (finally!) Tons of new free tools lots of essays lots of reports logs of breaches the talks our hosts are giving at RSAC conference and someone is selling an actual cone of silence??? All that and more, on this episode of Enterprise Security Weekly. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/esw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/esw-450

This episode is all about trust getting abused at scale. We start with Chinese-nexus operators pivoting fast onto Qatar using conflict lures and familiar tradecraft. Then we hit banking, because they deserve it: Lloyds, Halifax, and Bank of Scotland customers seeing other people’s transactions in-app, a straight confidentiality failure, not “someone hacked my phone”. From there it’s the Middle East conflict exposing what “cloud resilience” really means when the problem isn’t cyber, it’s physical disruption and dependency chains. Then Meta’s takedown of 150,000 scam-linked accounts shows the fraud supply chain is still running hot, and the platforms are now part of the battleground whether they like it or not. The Microsoft story is the one to watch: a critical Excel bug that turns Copilot Agent into a zero-click data leak path. And the AI agent theme keeps going with Context7: attackers slipping instructions into “helpful” context and getting agents to do dumb, destructive things on their behalf. We finish with Stryker having the worst day with a major outage, disputed claims, and a reminder that if your management plane gets hit, you can lose the whole estate fast. Look at Intune. No hype. Just the stuff that actually breaks systems, me talking too fast, which to be honest 'slow' is why I turn most podcasts off. Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/swn for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/swn-563

In the security news this week: The XZ backdoor documentary Zero days - the clock isn't ticking Vulnerability Mis-Management Reversing traffic light controllers Reversing with Claude Don't curl to bash! Reading CVEs makes my head hurt Dumping browser secrets I open-sourced a new(ish) tool D-LINK exploits There is no password I control the building When old vulnerabilities become new Tile is for stalkers Hacking AI Iran War: What cybersecurity needs to know National cyber strategy Coruna I got phished and I want a refund Visit https://www.securityweekly.com/psw for all the latest episodes! Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw-917