Épisodes

  • The Equifax Breach | One of the Largest Data Exposures in History

    The Equifax Breach | One of the Largest Data Exposures in History
    Apr 3 2026

    The Equifax Breach | One of the Largest Data Exposures in History

    🎙 With Jeremy Ladner and guest co-hosts Kavitha Mariappan and Mark Dorsi

    For months, the warning was sitting in plain sight.

    A critical vulnerability.

    Publicly disclosed.

    Actively exploited.

    A patch was available.

    Inside one of the largest credit reporting agencies in the world, the system remained exposed.

    No zero-day.

    No advanced exploit chain.

    Just a missed update.

    In May 2017, attackers began exploiting a known flaw in the Apache Struts framework.

    The vulnerability allowed remote code execution.

    Unauthenticated.

    Unrestricted.

    From the outside, it looked like routine traffic.

    Inside the network, it was something else.

    They accessed databases.

    Queried records.

    And began extracting one of the most sensitive datasets imaginable.

    Names.

    Social Security numbers.

    Birth dates.

    Addresses.

    The identity layer of nearly half the United States population.

    For 76 days, the activity continued.

    No alarms.

    No interruption.

    Until it was too late.

    By the time Equifax disclosed the breach in September 2017, approximately 147 million individuals had been affected.

    Executives resigned.

    Investigations launched.

    Congress intervened.

    But the breach itself had already unfolded.

    Because this was not a story about attackers breaking through hardened defenses. It was a story about what happens when a known vulnerability remains unpatched inside a system that holds national-scale data.

    In this episode of The CISO Signal | True Cybercrime Podcast, host Jeremy Ladner is joined by Kavitha Mariappan of Rubrik and Mark Dorsi, CISO at Netlify, to examine how a single missed control can cascade into systemic failure, why patch management must be operationalized not assumed, and what resilience actually means when prevention fails.

    Because in cybersecurity, the most dangerous vulnerabilities are often the ones already documented. And already waiting.

    🎙 Guest CISO Co-Host

    Mark Dorsi

    Chief Information Security Officer

    Netlify

    https://www.netlify.com

    🤝 Sponsor Expert

    Kavitha Mariappan

    Chief Transformation Officer, Rubrik

    https://www.rubrik.com

    Rubrik delivers cyber resilience by securing data across enterprise, cloud, and SaaS environments, enabling organizations to recover quickly from cyber incidents and maintain operational continuity.

    🔎 Episode Topics

    • The Apache Struts vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) and how it was exploited

    • Why patch management failures still drive catastrophic breaches

    • How attackers operated undetected inside Equifax systems for over two months

    • The difference between prevention failure and resilience failure

    • What security leaders must operationalize to avoid systemic exposure

    🧩 About The CISO Signal

    True cybercrime storytelling with real CISO lessons.

    ▶️ / @thecisosignal

    💼 / the-ciso-signal

    🌐 https://www.thecisosignal.com

    👥 Join the Conversation

    The CISO Signal Cybersecurity Leadership Forum

    / 17974008

    #CISOSignal #EquifaxBreach #CyberSecurity

    #DataBreach #PatchManagement #CyberResilience

    #CISO #TrueCybercrime
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    43 min
  • The Age of Agentic Attacks | The GTG-1002 Campaign and the Birth of AI-Directed Cyber Espionage Operations

    The Age of Agentic Attacks | The GTG-1002 Campaign and the Birth of AI-Directed Cyber Espionage Operations
    Mar 18 2026
    The Age of Agentic AttacksThe GTG-1002 Campaign and the Birth of AI-Directed Cyber Operations🎙 With guest co-hosts Ev Kontsevoy, CEO and Co-founder of Teleport, and Marius Poskus Global VP of Cyber Security at Glow Financial ServicesFor years, attackers have used artificial intelligence.It helped them write malware faster.Scan networks more efficiently.Refine phishing campaigns.Automate reconnaissance.But the humans were still in charge.They chose the targets.They wrote the scripts.They decided what happened next.That era has ended.The GTG-1002 campaign revealed something new on the cybersecurity battlefield:Agentic attackers.Not tools.Not assistants.Autonomous attackers capable of planning, testing, refining, and executing operational steps with minimal human direction.Armies of them.Once deployed, these systems do not pause.They iterate.And they move at a speed no human operator can match.In September 2025, security teams at Anthropic began noticing unusual activity inside Claude Code, the company’s powerful AI coding system designed to help engineers write software and automate development tasks.At first glance, the activity looked legitimate.Infrastructure validation.Authentication testing.Compliance reviews.But the sessions ran deeper than expected.Prompts chained together in recursive loops.Scripts generated, executed, refined, and redeployed in rapid succession.Reconnaissance disguised as routine engineering workflows.The system was not simply answering questions.It was executing operational sequences.Investigators eventually linked the activity to a threat cluster designated GTG-1002, touching organizations across technology, finance, manufacturing, and government environments.Human operators were still present.But they were no longer directing every move.Instead, the system generated scripts, mapped environments, refined exploit logic, and iterated through operational pathways at machine speed.Tasks that once required weeks compressed into cycles measured in minutes.Anthropic detected abnormal behavior patterns and suspended the accounts. On November 13, 2025, the company publicly disclosed what it described as the first known large-scale AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign.Attribution remains assessed rather than proven. Some analysts noted characteristics consistent with Chinese state-aligned operations. Chinese officials denied involvement.But the geopolitical debate may not be the most important part of this story.Because the real significance of GTG-1002 is not simply that attackers used AI.It is that agentic systems began managing parts of the operation themselves.In this episode of The CISO Signal | True Cybercrime Podcast, host Jeremy Ladner is joined by Ev Kontsevoy, Co-founder and CEO of Teleport, and Marius Poskus, Global VP of Cyber Security and CISO at Glow Financial Services, to examine how agentic AI systems can be manipulated into operational roles, why identity and infrastructure controls become critical in an agentic world, and what security leaders must understand when trusted automation begins directing attack workflows.Because once cyber operations move at machine speed, the rules change.And the age of agentic attacks has already begun.🎙 Guest CISO Co-HostsMarius PoskusGlobal Vice President of Cyber Security | CISOGlow Financial Services Limitedhttps://www.glowservices.com🤝 Sponsor ExpertEv KontsevoyCo-founder & CEO, Teleporthttps://goteleport.comTeleport is the AI Infrastructure Identity company, providing a unified identity layer that orchestrates identities for humans, machines, workloads, and AI agents while eliminating static credentials from infrastructure.🔎 Episode Topics• The GTG-1002 AI-orchestrated espionage campaign• Claude Code and the rise of agentic attack workflows• How prompt manipulation can redirect autonomous AI systems• The difference between AI-assisted and AI-directed attacks• Why agentic systems compress attack timelines dramatically🧩 About The CISO SignalTrue cybercrime storytelling with real CISO lessons.▶️ / @thecisosignal 💼 / the-ciso-signal 🌐
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    44 min
  • The AT&T Beijing Breach | Metadata Maps That Intelligence Services Want

    The AT&T Beijing Breach | Metadata Maps That Intelligence Services Want
    Mar 3 2026

    The AT&T Beijing Breach | Metadata Maps That Intelligence Services Want

    With guest co-host John Carse, Field CISO at SquareX

    In 2024, attackers did not steal call recordings.
    They did not intercept encrypted text messages.
    They went after something quieter.
    Call detail records.
    The outlines of conversations.
    Phone numbers.
    Timestamps.
    Durations.
    Cell tower connections.
    Metadata that, on its own, seems technical. Harmless. Operational.
    But at telecom scale, metadata becomes something else.
    Between April and early June 2024, attackers accessed systems containing call and text metadata tied to approximately 86 million AT&T customers. The intrusion was traced to a third-party cloud environment associated with AT&T’s data operations. Investigators later pointed to compromised credentials discovered in a Snowflake environment after a phishing attack and infostealer infection inside a vendor ecosystem.
    No ransomware encryption.
    No service outage.
    No dramatic system shutdown.
    Instead, approximately $370,000 in cryptocurrency was reportedly paid in an effort to prevent public exposure of the dataset.
    Some analysts linked the activity to a cluster labeled UNC5537.

    Other reporting mentioned data brokerage ecosystems such as ShinyHunters. Researchers, including those at Mandiant, urged caution on attribution, noting behavior consistent with criminal monetization rather than confirmed state-sponsored espionage.

    There is no public evidence that this dataset was used for intelligence operations.
    There is also no way to prove that it was not.

    Because telecom metadata does not just describe calls.
    It describes relationships.
    Who speaks to whom.
    How often.
    From where.
    Which towers were touched along the way.

    For criminals, that information enables SIM swapping, fraud, and targeted phishing.
    For nation states, it can illuminate social graphs, travel patterns, and networks of influence.

    In this episode of The CISO Signal | True Cybercrime Podcast, we examine how third-party access became the breach path, why metadata is often more strategically valuable than content, and what happens when operational data quietly becomes intelligence-grade material.
    This is not a story about encryption failing.
    It is a story about accumulation.

    🎙 Guest Co-Host
    John Carse
    Field CISO, SquareX
    Three-time CISO and host of Be Fearless: The CISO Perspective

    🔍 Episode Topics
    • What telecom metadata actually reveals beyond call content
    • Why large telecom providers are high-value intelligence targets
    • How third-party access and credential reuse created the breach path
    • Snowflake, vendor risk, and the anatomy of cloud miscalculation
    • The criminal data brokerage ecosystem and resale supply chains
    • Why metadata can be more operationally useful than call recordings
    • Inside the first 24 hours of executive response and board escalation
    • How security debt surfaces after a third-party breach
    • Why threat models must evolve when operational systems become intelligence repositories

    🧊 The Aftershock
    On July 12, 2024, AT&T publicly acknowledged the breach, confirming that call and text content were not accessed.
    But the exposure shifted the conversation.
    Privacy experts noted that metadata can reveal business relationships, political activity, religious observance, romantic connections, and movement patterns, without ever recording a single word.
    Later reporting connected the broader Snowflake-related campaign to individuals including John Erin Binns and Connor Moucka, though attribution questions remain complex and evolving.
    What makes the AT&T breach different is not technical spectacle.
    It is the quiet reality that behavioral data, once accumulated at scale, becomes strategic.
    Every organization that logs user behavior now holds a map.
    And every map attracts attention.

    🧩 About The CISO Signal
    True cybercrime storytelling with real CISO lessons.
    Subscribe so you never miss an investigation.
    👉 @thecisosignal
    👉 www.linkedin.com/company/the-ciso-signal
    👉 www.theCISOsignal.com

    #CISOSignal #ATTBreach #Metadata #Snowflake
    #CyberEspionage #ThirdPartyRisk #TelecomSecurity #CISO #TrueCybercrime
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    35 min
  • Accellion FTA | How a Legacy File Transfer Tool Fueled a Global Extortion Campaign

    Accellion FTA | How a Legacy File Transfer Tool Fueled a Global Extortion Campaign
    Feb 5 2026
    Accellion FTA | How a Legacy File Transfer Tool Fueled a Global Extortion CampaignWith guest co-hosts Christopher Russell, CISO at tZERO Groupand Benjamin Lipczynski, Director of Cyber Security & Regulatory Services at OriginaIn late 2020, attackers did not target the cloud.They did not exploit a modern SaaS platform.They went after a quiet, aging file transfer appliance that had been sitting in enterprise environments for nearly two decades.The Accellion File Transfer Appliance (FTA) was still moving contracts, legal documents, financial records, and sensitive data across governments, universities, and global enterprises. Long past its intended design horizon, it remained trusted. And largely unseen.Then a cluster of zero-day vulnerabilities was exploited.Attackers linked to FIN11 used the flaws for large-scale data exfiltration. The stolen data was then handed off to the Clop, which launched a public leak-site extortion campaign.No ransomware encryption.Just stolen files and pressure.Victims included Shell, Kroger, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, multiple universities, and public-sector agencies worldwide.In this episode of The CISO Signal | True Cybercrime Podcast, we break down how legacy systems quietly become high-consequence risk, why patching alone could not fix the underlying problem, and what happens when attackers specialize across exploitation and extortion.This is not a story about ignoring upgrades.It is a story about systems that outlive their assumptions.🎙 Guest Co-HostsChristopher Russell:Chief Information Security Officer, tZERO Group👉 www.tzero.com 👉 / tzero Benjamin Lipczynski:Director, Cyber Security & Regulatory Services, 🤝 Episode Sponsor: Origina👉 www.origina.com👉 / origina This episode is sponsored by Origina, an independent provider of third-party software support and lifecycle governance for mission-critical enterprise systems.Origina works with security, IT, and risk leaders to safely operate, harden, and govern systems that may be aging, end-of-life, or under vendor upgrade pressure, without forcing rushed or unnecessary migrations. Their approach focuses on control, stability, and evidence-based decision making, especially in environments where downtime or disruption is not an option.🔍 Episode Topics• Why legacy file transfer tools stayed in production for decades• How multiple zero-days were exploited in rapid succession• The handoff between initial access groups and extortion operators• Why many victims learned of the breach through leak sites• Patching vs architectural limits in aging systems• How security leaders can manage legacy risk without panic-driven upgrades🧊 The aftershockBy early 2021, global CERT teams urged organizations to migrate off Accellion FTA immediately, citing its end-of-life status and ongoing risk. Multiple lawsuits followed, along with increased regulatory scrutiny of legacy tools embedded in sensitive workflows.The Accellion breach became a reference point for a broader industry reckoning around technical debt, governance, and the hidden risk of systems that are still working right up until the moment they fail.🧩 About The CISO SignalTrue cybercrime storytelling with real CISO lessons.Subscribe so you never miss an investigation.👉 @thecisosignal 👉 www.linkedin.com/company/the-ciso-signal 👉 www.theCISOsignal.com #CISOSignal #AccellionBreach #Clop #FIN11#LegacySystems #DataExtortion
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    25 min
  • Midnight Blizzard | How Russian Intelligence Breached Microsoft - w/ Alyssa Robinson, CISO @ HubSpot

    Midnight Blizzard | How Russian Intelligence Breached Microsoft - w/ Alyssa Robinson, CISO @ HubSpot
    Dec 30 2025

    Midnight Blizzard | How Russian Intelligence Breached Microsoft

    With guest CISO Co-Host Alyssa Robinson, CISO at HubSpot

    In late 2023, a Russian state-sponsored threat actor known as Midnight Blizzard (also called NOBELIUM and widely associated with APT29) began probing Microsoft the old-fashioned way: password spraying.

    No zero-day. No smash-and-grab.

    Just patience, repetition, and one legacy gap.

    Microsoft says the actor compromised a legacy, non-production test tenant account and used that foothold to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of senior leadership and employees in cybersecurity and legal, then exfiltrated some emails and attached documents. Microsoft detected the attack on January 12, 2024, and disclosed it publicly on January 19, 2024.
    Microsoft

    This was espionage, not extortion: Microsoft assessed the actor was initially seeking information related to Midnight Blizzard itself, essentially trying to learn what Microsoft knew about their operations.
    Microsoft
    +1

    In this episode of The CISO Signal | True Cybercrime Podcast, we break down how a nation-state operation targets the most valuable asset in modern security: identity. We explore why executive inboxes are intelligence gold, why slow intrusions are so hard to see in real time, and what incident response looks like when the adversary is collecting insight, not detonating ransomware.

    🎙 Guest CISO Co-Host

    Alyssa Robinson
    Chief Information Security Officer, HubSpot

    🔍 Episode Topics

    • How password spraying still works at massive scale
    • Why legacy test tenants and exceptions become the entry point
    • Executive identity risk and the “convenience gap”
    • What changes when the attacker is a nation state
    • The trust question: what downstream organizations must assume

    🧊 The aftershock

    Microsoft later reported evidence that the actor was using exfiltrated information to pursue additional unauthorized access, including some source code repositories and internal systems, while stating it found no evidence that Microsoft-hosted customer-facing systems were compromised.
    Microsoft

    CISA also issued guidance on SVR / APT29 tradecraft for initial cloud access (AA24-057A) and an Emergency Directive tied to this compromise (ED 24-02).
    CISA
    +1

    🧩 About The CISO Signal
    True cybercrime storytelling with real CISO lessons. Subscribe so you never miss an investigation.
    👉 / @thecisosignal
    www.linkedin.com/company/the-ciso-signal

    #CISOSignal #MicrosoftBreach #MidnightBlizzard #APT29 #NOBELIUM
    #CyberEspionage #IdentitySecurity #CloudSecurity #CISO #TrueCybercrime
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    33 min
  • The HubSpot Hack | The SaaS Backdoor to Bitcoin - ft. Scott Kisser (CISO, Swan Bitcoin)

    The HubSpot Hack | The SaaS Backdoor to Bitcoin - ft. Scott Kisser (CISO, Swan Bitcoin)
    Dec 7 2025

    The HubSpot Hack | The SaaS Backdoor to Bitcoin - ft. Scott Kisser (CISO, Swan Bitcoin)
    When attackers breached HubSpot in March 2022, they weren’t after HubSpot at all.

    They were after the customers of its customers.

    Crypto firms like Trezor, BlockFi, and Swan Bitcoin suddenly saw their users targeted by near-perfect phishing emails designed to steal recovery seeds and drain wallets. And just weeks later, another SaaS provider, Klaviyo, was hit the same way. The message was clear:

    You can defend your castle…
    but attackers will go after the people guarding your gates.

    This week on The CISO Signal | True Cybercrime Podcast, we dissect the SaaS-supply-chain breach that shook the crypto world and the coordinated response that stopped it from becoming a full-scale disaster.

    🎙 Guest CISO Co-Host: Scott Kisser
    Chief Information Security Officer – Swan Bitcoin
    Former security leader at Salesforce, DocuSign, Amazon, and F5.

    Scott takes us inside the incident response:
    • How a single phished employee put the SaaS ecosystem at risk
    • Why crypto companies were the downstream target
    • The race to warn customers before attackers drained wallets
    • How CISOs must rethink vendor access and trust assumptions
    • Why no major funds were stolen — and why that victory matters

    This wasn’t a tale of ransomware, it was a breach of trust.
    And a reminder that SaaS is now part of every organization’s attack surface.

    🔍 Episode Topics

    • Vendor compromise → internal tool access → crypto user phishing

    • The human element behind SaaS security

    • What leadership communication looks like when trust is shaken

    • The new rules of defending against third-party attack vectors


    🏴‍☠️ Key Players
    • HubSpot — initial breach vector
    • Klaviyo — second SaaS compromise
    • Trezor & Swan Bitcoin — downstream targets
    • Crypto customers — the true victims
    • CISOs — left to restore confidence & reshape strategy

    💡 Takeaway for CISOs
    “You’re only as strong as the SaaS identities you can’t see.”

    🧩 About The CISO Signal
    Hollywood-style storytelling meets real cybersecurity lessons.
    Every episode, CISOs break down the world’s most notorious cyberattacks — what happened, what broke, and what must change.

    Subscribe & ring the bell so you never miss an investigation. 🛎️
    👉 / @thecisosignal

    📣 Connect with Us
    🌐 Website: thecisosignal.transistor.fm
    🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-ciso-signal
    Subscribe & share to stay ahead of the world’s most sophisticated cyber threats.


    🔥 Hashtags
    #CISOSignal #HubSpotBreach #Klaviyo #SaaSSecurity #CryptoSecurity #SupplyChainAttack #SocialEngineering #Phishing #SecurityPodcast #TrueCybercrime #ScottKisser #SwanBitcoin #Trezor
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    30 min
  • The Okta HAR Hijacking

    The Okta HAR Hijacking
    Dec 7 2025

    In late 2023, the world’s most trusted identity provider experienced the kind of breach it was designed to prevent. Attackers quietly infiltrated Okta’s customer support system, stole session tokens hidden inside HAR files and used them to impersonate users across some of the most secure organizations on earth.

    For two full weeks, the intruders operated in silence. No alerts. No red flags. No detection.

    When the truth came out, it wasn't just a security incident, it was a crisis of trust in the infrastructure that underpins modern authentication.
    How did a company synonymous with identity become a cautionary tale? What does this breach reveal about session tokens as the new crown jewels, third-party risk, and the blind spots that even top-tier security teams can miss? And what lessons does every CISO need to take from the Okta compromise before history repeats itself?

    In this episode of The CISO Signal: True Cybercrime Podcast, host Jeremy Ladner is joined by Oren Zenescu, CISO at Plarium, to break down every layer of the Okta breach, from the silent entry and token theft to the fallout across the cybersecurity community and what it means for the future of identity security.

    💡 In this episode, we discuss:
    🔹 How attackers harvested HAR files and hijacked live session tokens
    🔹 Why session tokens are becoming the primary target for modern attackers
    🔹 The two-week detection delay and what it says about support system security
    🔹 What the Okta breach means for zero trust, vendor reliance, and third-party risk
    🔹 Lessons CISOs must take from Okta’s incident history Lapsus$, source code theft, and beyond

    🎙 Featured Guest
    Oren Zenescu | Global CISO at Plarium
    Member of Team8 CISO Village, with 15+ years of enterprise security leadership across finance, gaming, and global tech.

    Follow The CISO Signal
    🌐 Website: thecisosignal.transistor.fm
    🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-ciso-signal
    Subscribe & share to stay ahead of the world’s most sophisticated cyber threats.

    #CyberSecurity #OktaBreach #IdentitySecurity #TokenHijacking #ZeroTrust #CISO #IncidentResponse #SupplyChainSecurity #CyberCrime #TheCisoSignal
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    30 min
  • The $610 Million Poly Network Hack: The Greatest Heist That Never Was

    The $610 Million Poly Network Hack: The Greatest Heist That Never Was
    Oct 27 2025

    The $610 Million Poly Network Hack: The Greatest Heist That Never Was

    In one of the most shocking moments in crypto history, a lone hacker exploited a vulnerability in Poly Network’s cross-chain protocol—draining over $610 million in digital assets across Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, and Polygon.

    Then, in a twist no one saw coming… they gave it all back.

    Was it a white-hat test gone wrong? A hacker with a conscience? Or a sophisticated cover-up by an insider? To this day, the attacker’s true identity remains a mystery—and the world is still searching for answers.

    In this episode of The CISO Signal: True Cybercrime Podcast, host Jeremy Ladner is joined by Christopher Russell, CISO at tZERO Group, to dissect the technical brilliance, psychological intrigue, and geopolitical implications of what might be the largest digital heist in history—and the most bizarre ending cybersecurity has ever seen.

    💡 In this episode, we discuss:
    🔹 How a flaw in Poly Network’s cross-chain manager enabled the $610M exploit
    🔹 Why the hacker chose to return every stolen token
    🔹 The role of decentralized finance (DeFi) in enabling modern cybercrime
    🔹 What CISOs can learn from the blockchain’s weakest link
    🔹 Why attribution in crypto attacks remains nearly impossible

    Follow The CISO Signal:
    🌐 Website: www.thecisosignal.transistor.fm

    🔗 LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/the-ciso-signal

    Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share — to stay ahead of the world’s most sophisticated cyberattacks.

    #CyberSecurity #CryptoHack #PolyNetwork #DeFi #BlockchainSecurity #CISO #TheCisoSignal #CyberCrime #CryptoHeist
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    33 min