CyberWire Daily

Kevin Magee, Global Director of Cybersecurity Startups at Microsoft for Startups, returns from RSAC with on-the-floor interviews. He discusses AI reshaping cyber risk, telecom backbone implants, CISA warnings about weakened defenses, ransomware resurfacing, and startups blending psychology with security. Short, lively street-level reporting from the conference floor.

Dale Hoak, CISO at RegScale, speaks about AI security and compliance automation. Intern Kevin (Kevin McGee/Magee), Microsoft’s Global Director of Cybersecurity Startups, files lively reports from the RSAC floor. They discuss AI risk, supply-chain compromises, critical router and platform vulnerabilities, phishing scams, and browser extensions harvesting AI chats.

Jake Braun, longtime DEF CON organizer and former White House official, discusses hacker community projects and the DEF CON 33 Hackers' Almanack. He talks about mesh networks and resilient backups for cultural artifacts. He outlines volunteer efforts helping small water utilities and highlights youth researchers and unconventional tech like bio-cryptography.

Ed Vasko, CEO of High Wire Networks and serial cybersecurity entrepreneur, shares decades of hands-on SOC-building and workforce development experience. He explores gaps between academic training and real-world ops. He advocates experiential SOCs tied to universities, a three-legged model of knowledge, skills, and experience, and steps to professionalize and scale cyber talent development.

Brandon Karpf, Director of Public-Private Partnerships at NTT, offers a concise take on orbital data centers. He explains cooling and solar-size hurdles, updated power-and-heat models, and why inter-satellite bandwidth limits GPU clustering. He also discusses single-satellite GPU caps and a niche sovereign-cloud business case for space-based infrastructure.

Roya Gordon, a Security Research Evangelist and former U.S. Navy intelligence specialist, shares her winding career path from naval cryptology to national lab research and industry roles. She talks about a rescinded NSA offer, breaking into control-systems cyber, mentoring others shifting into cyber, and advocating for women and people of color in the field.

Peter Kilpe, CEO of N2K and co-founder of The CyberWire, recounts the show’s rise from a newsletter to a media-and-education company. Hear stories about the original five-minute prototype, early audience traction and sponsorship, the team’s production standards and editorial integrity, and how growth led to acquisitions and expanding into certification prep and educational offerings.

Yuval Avrahami, vulnerability researcher at Wiz who led the CodeBreach investigation, explains how a tiny CI/CD misconfiguration opened the door to hijacking major AWS GitHub repositories. He describes the unanchored regex flaw, how builds could be triggered to steal credentials, and why public repos and pipelines are high-value targets. The discussion covers attack steps and AWS’s remediation.

Peter Kilpie, CEO and publisher at N2K, reflects on founding the CyberWire and growing it into a trusted security news outlet. Conversations cover disruptive IoT botnet takedowns, a major hacktivist infrastructure seizure, and a string of high-profile breaches and scams. They also revisit the podcast’s early format, team-building, and memorable milestones.

Jeff Welgin, CEO of SkillRex and former intelligence analyst, builds data-driven cyber workforce strategy. He discusses mapping skills to roles and using analytics to predict needs. He compares workforce metrics to a Moneyball approach and explains how strategic training and measurement turn teams into talent engines.