Safe Mode Podcast

October’s wave of vulnerabilities and attacks earned a stark nickname: “Black October.” But was it an unprecedented crisis—or a glimpse of what’s becoming normal? On this episode of CyberScoop’s Safe Mode, Greg discusses the month’s events with Tom Hagel, distinguished threat researcher and research lead at SentinelOne’s SentinelLabs. Hagel explains why many incidents that surfaced in October began months earlier, how automation and AI tools are lowering the barrier to large-scale attacks, and why defenders may have only minutes to respond once a patch is released. The conversation also examines the risks of relying on patches alone, the need to assess what an attacker could do after gaining access, and how security teams can avoid letting high-profile vulnerabilities distract from other threats.

Fresh off the PHP2Shell advisory, former DHS CISO and acting deputy CIO Hemant Baidwan — now executive CISO at Knox Systems, the largest federal managed cloud — joins Safe Mode to break down what actually happens in the hours after a high-severity vulnerability drops. He walks through why "patch it and move on" gives teams a false sense of security, how to map internet reachability in environments that change by the hour, and what a CISA KEV listing really signals to defenders. Baidwan also reflects on writing DHS's first-ever AI cybersecurity guidance, what he'd add to that playbook today — starting with AI agent identity — and why he thinks compliance has drifted into security theater.

Two critical PHP bugs, found by AI before attackers, leaked before the embargo, patched a day early. Cisco Talos' Matt Olney joins Safe Mode — the show, not PHP's deprecated directive, though neither has ever stopped an exploit — for the part the headlines skipped and what the future holds for the vulns moving forward

AI is making vulnerabilities easier to find, but who’s going to fix them? On this episode, Greg Otto talks with Josh Bressers, VulnCheck’s director of coordinated vulnerability disclosure about the growing flood of AI-generated security reports. Bressers explains why those findings are increasingly legitimate, how VulnCheck uses AI to streamline incoming reports, and why coordinating fixes still requires a human touch. They also explore the pressure on open-source maintainers, the risks of AI-generated patches, and the widening gap between the cost of discovering vulnerabilities and fixing them. The conversation turns to a fundamental question: What would it take to fund and maintain open-source software like the essential infrastructure it is?

What has changed in the cyber threat landscape—and what should defenders do about it? On this episode of Safe Mode, CyberScoop’s Greg Otto speaks with retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, former director of DISA and current chairman of Axonius Federal Systems’ board. Skinner assesses the risks posed by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, arguing that adversaries are increasingly prepositioning in critical infrastructure for potential disruption at a time of their choosing. He explains why China remains the top strategic cyber threat, how AI is shifting the advantage between offense and defense, and why visibility, context and continuous validation are central to protecting both IT and operational technology environments. They also discuss the security of telecommunications and water systems, supply-chain risk, botnet disruptions, Zero Trust as a continuous-improvement journey, and why cybersecurity must become inseparable from military operations.

The debate over AI alignment often centers on guardrails, model behavior, and whether increasingly capable systems could act in unexpected ways. But what does that conversation look like through a cybersecurity lens? In this episode of Safe Mode, Greg speaks with Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s head of counter-adversary operations, about the security implications of goal-driven AI agents, open-weight models, and guardrails that can be removed or bypassed. Meyers argues that systems described as “rogue” may instead be pursuing their assigned objectives in ways their operators failed to anticipate—making containment, monitoring, and clearly defined permissions central cybersecurity concerns. The conversation examines how AI-enabled adversaries are accelerating operations, why open-weight models complicate alignment and safety debates, and how defenders can use AI to keep pace with faster exploitation and shrinking patch windows. Meyers also shares what CISOs and policymakers should focus on: visibility into how AI is being used, controls over what agents can access, and practical safeguards that match the technology’s real-world risks.

Matt Fredrikson, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon and CEO and co-founder of Gray Swan AI, built the world's largest AI red teaming arena, with more than 15,000 people breaking AI systems for prize money. He walks us through how the attacks actually work, from jailbreaks found on small open weights models that transferred straight to frontier systems, to training AI attackers with reinforcement learning. Matt also explains why the recent sandbox escapes didn't happen during safety testing but during cybersecurity capability evals with the guardrails off, what the Agent Harm benchmark revealed about models that refuse harmful requests in text but comply once handed tools, and why the bare minimum of best practices has changed whenever a capable model runs on your infrastructure. In our reporter chat, Greg talks with Matt Kapko about the ShinyHunters-FBI hack.

It starts with a fake error message. It ends with a pasted command. ClickFix has become one of the most reliable ways for attackers to get an initial foothold — first adopted by criminal groups, now used by state-linked actors like APT28 and Lazarus Group. This week, Greg is joined by John Hammond, Principal Security Researcher at Huntress, who helped identify and name the technique and has tracked its evolution for the past three years. They dig into why ClickFix still drives an estimated 20+ incidents a day at Huntress even after law enforcement disrupted major infostealer infrastructure like LumaStealer, how the technique has splintered into variants like FileFix and "consent fix" targeting Microsoft 365 and browser-stored credentials, and how attackers are now smuggling payloads inside images to slip past endpoint defenses. John walks through a real incident where a single pasted command led to 11 compromised devices, explains why he still believes security awareness training — not just tooling — is the best defense, and makes the case that the browser itself has become the blurriest and most under-protected boundary between endpoint and identity security. The conversation also turns to the npm/Axios supply chain attacks, where operators built fake Slack communities and fabricated employee personas to earn open-source maintainers' trust before compromising their packages — and what, if anything, can technically guard against a threat that's fundamentally social. In our reporter chat, Greg talks with Derek Johnson about the Supreme Court deciding against the Trump administration’s push for changes to mail-in ballots. Follow John on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@_JohnHammond

CyberScoop editor-in-chief Greg Otto talks with WatchTowr founder and CEO Ben Harris about how cybersecurity teams are adapting as AI accelerates vulnerability discovery, public proof-of-concepts, and exploitation timelines. They discuss the WordPress-to-shell case study, why mitigation has become essential when patching cannot happen instantly, and why Harris argues that traditional vulnerability management is “effectively dead.” Also in this episode, senior reporter Tim Starks explains Project Watershed 250, a new effort involving Texas, the private sector, and the water industry to strengthen critical-infrastructure cybersecurity.

NEA partner Aaron Jacobson put $250 million behind autonomous pen testing company Horizon3.ai on the bet that cybersecurity has entered an AI-versus-AI era — and he argues the "vulnpocalypse" defenders were warned about has already arrived, with AI-discovered vulnerabilities now the primary way attackers get into enterprises. He explains why overprovisioned AI agents are the new phishing target, since an agent with a user's credentials and no common sense can be prompt-injected into exfiltrating data a human would never touch. Jacobson also separates the open weights debate from the open source one, makes the case that cheap open competition ultimately favors defenders, and closes with the thing he got most wrong 18 months ago. In our reporter segment, Greg talks with Matt Kapko about the cybersecurity implications of the GTA VI leaks.