Guest:

• Allie Mellen, Principal Analyst @ Forrester, author of "Code War: How Nations Hack, Spy, and Shape the Digital Battlefield"

Topics:

• Your book focuses on the US, China, and Russia. When you were planning the book did you also want to cover players like Israel, Iran, and North Korea?
• Most of our listeners are migrating to or operating heavily in the cloud. As nations refine their "digital battlefield" strategies, does the "shared responsibility model" actually hold up against a nation-state actor?
• How does a company's detection strategy need to change when the adversary isn't a teenager looking for a ransom, but a state-funded group whose goal might be long-term persistence or subtle data manipulation? How should people allocate their resources to defending against both of these threats?
• How afraid are you of a "bad guy with AI" scenarios? Mild anxiety or apocalyptic fears?
• Do you see AI primarily helping "Tier 2" nations close the capability gap with the "Big Three," or does it just further cement the dominance of the nations that own the underlying compute and models?
• You've spent a lot of time as an analyst looking at how enterprises buy and run security tech. For a CISO at (say) mid-tier logistics company, should 'nation-state cyberattacks' even be on their threat model? Or is worrying about the spies just a form of security theater when they haven't even solved basic credential theft yet?

Resource:

• Video version
• "Code War: How Nations Hack, Spy, and Shape the Digital Battlefield" by Allie Mellen
• Allie Mellen substack
• The source for the original "air defense on the roof" argument (2008)
• EP255 Separating Hype from Hazard: The Truth About Autonomous AI Hacking
• EP256 Rewiring Democracy & Hacking Trust: Bruce Schneier on the AI Offense-Defense Balance
• EP156 Living Off the Land and Attacking Critical Infrastructure: Mandiant Incident Deep Dive
• "Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign" report

Guest:

• Alastair Paterson, CEO and co-founder @ Harmonic Security

Topics:

• Harmonic Security focuses on securing generative AI in use. Can you walk us through a real, anonymized example of a data leak caused by employee AI usage that your platform has identified?
• AI governance gets thrown around a lot. What does this mean in the context of Shadow AI? How should organizations be thinking about governing AI in light of upcoming AI regulations in the US and in the EU?
• If we generally agree that employees are using AI tools before they are sanctioned, how can organizations control this? Network, API, endpoint?
• Many organizations struggle with the "ban vs. embrace" debate for generative AI. Based on your experience, what's a compelling argument for moving from a blanket ban to a managed, secure adoption model? Can you share a success story where this approach demonstrably reduced risk?
• The term "shadow AI" is often used interchangeably with "shadow IT" (but for AI-powered applications) but you've highlighted that AI is a different beast. What is the single biggest distinction between managing the risk of unsanctioned AI tools versus unsanctioned IT applications?
• Looking forward, where do you see the biggest risks in the evolution of shadow AI? For instance, will the next threat be from highly specialized AI agents trained on proprietary data, or from the rapid proliferation of new, unmonitored open-source models?
• Given the speed of change in this space, what's one piece of advice you'd give to a CISO today who is just beginning to get a handle on their organization's shadow AI problem?

Resources:

• Video version
• Harmonic Security research
• Shadow AI Strikes Back: Enterprise AI Absent Oversight in the Age of Gen AI blog
• Shadow Agents: A New Era of Shadow AI Risk in the Enterprise blog (RSA 2026 presentation coming!)
• Spotlighting 'shadow AI': How to protect against risky AI practices blog
• EP171 GenAI in the Wrong Hands: Unmasking the Threat of Malicious AI and Defending Against the Dark Side (aka "dirty bomb episode")
• A Conversation with Alastair Paterson from Harmonic Security video

Guests:

• Alexander Pabst, Global Deputy CISO, Allianz SE
• Michael Sinno, Director of D&R, Google

Topics:

• We've spent decades obsessed with MTTD (Mean Time to Detect) and MTTR (Mean Time to Respond). As AI agents begin to handle the bulk of triage at machine speed, do these metrics become "vanity metrics"? If an AI resolves an alert in seconds, does measuring the "mean" still tell us anything about the health of our security program, or should we be looking at "Time to Context" instead?
• You mentioned the Maturity Triangle. Can you walk us through that framework? Specifically, how does AI change the balance between the three points of that triangle—is it shifting us from a "People-heavy" model to something more "Engineering-led," and where does the "Measurement" piece sit?
• Google is famous for its "Engineering-led" approach to D&R. How is Google currently measuring the success of its own internal D&R program? Specifically, how are you quantifying "Toil Reduction"? Are we measuring how many hours we saved, or are we measuring the complexity of the threats our humans are now free to hunt?
• Toil reduction is a laudable goal for the team members, what are the metrics we track and report up to document the overall improvement in D&R for Google's board?
• When you talk to your board about the success of AI in your security program, what are the 2 or 3 "Golden Metrics" that actually move the needle for them? How do you prove that an AI-driven SOC is actually better, not just faster?
• We often talk about AI as an "assistant," but we're moving toward Agentic SOCs. How should organizations measure the "unit economics" of their SOC? Should we be tracking the ratio of AI-handled vs. Human-handled incidents, and at what point does a high AI-handle rate become a risk rather than a success?

Resources:

• Video version
• EP252 The Agentic SOC Reality: Governing AI Agents, Data Fidelity, and Measuring Success
• EP238 Google Lessons for Using AI Agents for Securing Our Enterprise
• EP91 "Hacking Google", Op Aurora and Insider Threat at Google
• EP236 Accelerated SIEM Journey: A SOC Leader's Playbook for Modernization and AI
• EP189 How Google Does Security Programs at Scale: CISO Insights
• EP75 How We Scale Detection and Response at Google: Automation, Metrics, Toil
• The SOC Metrics that Matter…or Do They? blog
• An Actual Complete List Of SOC Metrics (And Your Path To DIY) blog
• Achieving Autonomic Security Operations: Why metrics matter (but not how you think) blog