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Safe Mode Podcast

Safe Mode Podcast

By: Safe Mode Podcast
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Podcast by Safe Mode PodcastAll rights reserved Politics & Government
Episodes
  • Why the autonomous SOC Is the wrong goal

    Why the autonomous SOC Is the wrong goal
    Jun 11 2026
    On this week's episode, we're joined by Mike Nichols, General Manager of Security at Elastic, fresh off the Gartner Security and Risk Summit in the D.C. area, where AI dominated every conversation on the conference floor. Mike walks us through what CISOs are actually asking about, what a real agentic SOC looks like in practice, and why keeping humans on the loop is the key philosophical distinction that separates a thoughtful AI implementation from a reckless one. The conversation covers "tribal knowledge," shadow AI, prompt injection, model sovereignty, and the exploding attack surface that AI agents themselves create, with Mike making the case that AI adoption is a dial and not a switch, and that transparency, explainability, and a healthy dose of skepticism are the foundation of building trust that actually sticks.
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    34 mins
  • The last layer standing

    The last layer standing
    Jun 4 2026
    What happens when an "assume breach" scenario turns into a total corporate wipeout? In this episode of Safe Mode, host Greg welcomes Brandon Willitts, Director of Cyber Resilience at Everpure, to pull back the curtain on a devastating "malwareless" attack that deleted over 80,000 endpoints at a Fortune 100 company. When adversaries exploit valid credentials to compromise the entire identity plane, your own endpoint management tools can be weaponized against you. Brandon breaks down how separating the storage layer from the identity blast radius—and leveraging immutable snapshot technology—allowed a non-technical engineer to jumpstart a full recovery in just days rather than months. In our reporter chat, Greg talks with Derek Johnson about all the AI security news that has happened over the past week.
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    36 mins
  • From Two Weeks to Three Days: The KEV Deadline Debate

    From Two Weeks to Three Days: The KEV Deadline Debate
    May 29 2026
    Drawing on his experience from his time in government working directly on CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, Todd Beardsley, VP of Security Research at runZero, explains what it actually took behind the scenes to get a vulnerability added: verifying that real exploitation occurred, confirming the incident mattered to federal interests (including state/local governments, critical infrastructure, or allied nations), and ensuring there was a concrete remediation option before publishing. He walks Greg through how those judgments tied back to Binding Operational Directive 22-01 and how deadlines were set and adjusted from the two-week baseline—context that frames the recent trend toward three-day turnaround requirements. From that insider perspective, Beardsley outlines the practical risks of compressing timelines (especially around testing and change-control realities across 100+ civilian agencies) and why ultra-short deadlines can dilute KEV’s value as an “urgency signal,” even as they may push agencies to modernize staffing, automation, and patch processes to respond faster.
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    37 mins
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