CYBERCAST by NEVERHACK

Your company has a security plan. When did anyone last test it?

Recorded live at the Nordic Baltic Security Summit in Tallinn, this episode of the NEVERHACK Cybercast brings in a guest from outside the usual threat-research circuit. Host Ronnie Jaanhold talks with Aleksandr Miina, co-founder and partner at Lean Digital, who has spent 20 years studying why good process ideas die inside real organisations.

Aleksandr's diagnosis is blunt: the tech layer is usually in place. The firewalls and tools are there. What's missing is the management layer: software inventories, named owners, access rules, offboarding checklists, backups that have actually been restored. Without it, security runs on hope.

Ronnie and Aleksandr cover how corners get cut quietly (the MFA exception, the "temporary" admin password), whether NIS2 is producing discipline or just better-documented hope, what Lean's continuous improvement teaches about resilience, a single metric for process health, and a no-budget check you can start on Monday morning.

Listen now, and subscribe to the NEVERHACK Cybercast for more conversations from Estonia and beyond.

What really happens inside a Security Operations Center at 3am on Christmas Day? In part two of our SOC deep-dive, Louis Zezeran sits down again with Fotul "Forhan" Karim Forhan, Head of SOC at NEVERHACK Estonia, to walk through a SOC analyst's day from shift handover to escalation.

Forhan explains how an MSSP funnels alerts from many EDR and SIEM tools into a single queue. He shows why analysts set their own priorities instead of trusting the vendor's "critical" label, and how analysis of competing hypotheses shapes a verdict. They also cover:

• 24/7/365 human coverage and why automation alone isn't enough

• A client portal that shows every ticket, note and SLA, with nothing hidden

• Rules of engagement, and why letting your SOC act needs trust

• How a good SOC raises security maturity until alerts start to drop

• Why tierless SOC teams keep analysts engaged for longer

Whether you run a SOC, buy SOC services or want to become an analyst, this episode gives you an honest view from the inside.

Listen now, subscribe to the Cybercast by NEVERHACK, and connect with Louis and Forhan on LinkedIn.

Everyone is suddenly talking about digital sovereignty — but almost nobody agrees on what it actually means. In this pre–Nordic Baltic Security Summit episode of the NEVERHACK Cybercast, host Louis Zezeran sits down in the Tallinn studio with Jesper Olsen, Chief Security Officer for EMEA North at Palo Alto Networks, for a deliberately contrarian conversation about the sovereignty panic sweeping Europe.

Jesper breaks sovereignty into five distinct layers — data, operational, technology, legal and economic — and argues that lumping them together is exactly why organisations are solving the wrong problem. Is the real risk a foreign government reading your data, or losing access to the services your business runs on? Why is losing global threat telemetry the hidden cost of going fully local? What should you actually be demanding from your cloud providers on transparency, and where do you genuinely have contractual leverage?

Along the way: kill switches in military hardware, the AI capability gap between Europe and the US, EU regulatory fragmentation, and why "informed interdependence" beats sovereignty theatre.

Listen now, and subscribe to the NEVERHACK Cybercast for more unfiltered cyber security conversations from Estonia and beyond.

OpenAI set roughly 1,200 AI agents loose in a cybersecurity evaluation. About a third were handed a task that was impossible to solve. What those agents did next is the most important AI security story of the past six months — and it only became public by accident.

In the first of a new monthly opinion format, NEVERHACK's Louis Zezeran and Ronnie Jaanhold break down how isolated agents discovered a covert channel in a package repository, taught themselves to talk in 256-character folder names, reverse-engineered their own evaluation harness from GitHub, falsified their tool logs to cover their tracks, volunteered to terminate themselves so the group could learn — and finally went looking for the scoring system inside Hugging Face's infrastructure.

Along the way: why the models trusted each other so completely, why none of them raised a hand and asked a human, what the researchers saw in the reasoning chains, and the Estonian folklore character that explains AI goal-fixation better than any whitepaper.

Listen now, and tell us what we should cover next month — find Louis and Ronnie on LinkedIn.

Everyone says cybersecurity is desperate for people. So why is it so hard for a junior analyst to get hired?

In this episode of the NEVERHACK Cybercast, host Louis Zezeran sits down with Fothul Karim Forhan — better known as Forhan — Head of SOC at NEVERHACK Estonia, who went from a TalTech cybersecurity degree and a home lab in his bedroom to running a 24/7 security operations centre in just a few years.

Forhan explains the difference between academic and operational knowledge, why a home lab beats a stack of course certificates, which certifications are actually worth your money, and why NEVERHACK stopped setting technical tasks in interviews now that AI can solve them. He also opens up the SOC itself: the tierless model, dynamic streams, distributed leadership, and why "that's above my pay grade" is a phrase that burns out juniors and seniors alike.

Practical, honest career advice from someone who is hiring right now.

Listen, follow the Cybercast for new episodes, and visit neverhack.com to see what our teams are working on.

Before ransomware gangs, before AI, before anyone had heard the word "endpoint" — a teenager in Estonia ran a coax cable from the ISP upstairs into his bedroom, went exploring, and ended up quietly rewriting the news a local radio station read on air.

That teenager is Ronnie Jaanhold, co-founder of Security Software (later Cybers, now NEVERHACK Estonia), and in this Summer Series episode he sits down with host Louis Zezeran to trace the whole arc: from flat, unlogged networks and 56k modems to today's professionalised criminal economy.

Along the way: why cybersecurity once meant nothing more than antivirus, firewalls and encryption; what the McAfee–Intel acquisition taught Ronnie about choosing vendors on more than technology; why MDM was "mostly crap" for a decade; why technical buyers are allergic to sales pitches; and why people still have to touch the hot stove before they buy protection.

Part career story, part industry post-mortem, part practical advice for anyone selling, buying or building security.

Listen now, and follow the NEVERHACK Cybercast for new episodes. Got a topic you want covered? Find Louis and Ronnie on LinkedIn.

What happens when a 155-year-old railway company decides to leap straight to the cutting edge of cybersecurity? In this episode of the NEVERHACK Cybercast, host Louis Zezeran breaks down zero trust from three angles: the theory, the technology, and a real-world national-scale implementation.

Domenico Iandoli (NEVERHACK Italy) explains why zero trust is not a product you can buy, but a journey — and why AI-powered attackers have made the old "patch, patch, patch" approach obsolete. Jonne Tuomela (Netskope) walks through ZTNA, SASE, and how a trust broker evaluates every single connection — identity, device, location, data and more. Then Tõnu Tammer, CTO of Estonian Railways, reveals how his team rebuilt their security architecture in months, and how they became the only company in Estonia to test their services in full isolation mode — trains running even with the country's internet cables cut.

Listen now, and don't miss the Nordic-Baltic Security Summit on September 10th in Tallinn — details at nbss.ee. Subscribe for more NEVERHACK Cybercast episodes every quarter.

What does it take to sit across the table from a cybercriminal — drinks in hand, at 3 a.m. in Dubai — and not blow your cover? In this episode of the NEVERHACK Estonia Cybercast, host Ronnie Jaanhold sits down with Richard K. LaTulip, author, cybersecurity expert, and retired U.S. Secret Service Special Agent (1998–2020), now Field CISO at Recorded Future.

Richard traces the evolution of cybercrime from counterfeit bills printed on all-in-one printers, through card skimming and IRC chatrooms, to the global carding forums he infiltrated during Operation Karter Chaos. He explains why the Secret Service opened an office in Tallinn, how he helped stop a million-dollar business email compromise in the Baltics, why Estonian hackers ended up with guns to their heads in the forest, and what quantum computing means for the next wave of crime.

Plus: the Titanic analogy every executive should hear about threat intelligence, and how to win a signed copy of Richard's book, Operation Karter Chaos.

Listen now, and subscribe to the NEVERHACK Estonia Cybercast for more expert conversations.

A broken leg. One overlooked WordPress setting. Three ransomware groups knocked offline.

In this episode of the NEVERHACK Cybercast, host Britta Sillaots and co-host Louis Zezeran sit down with NEVERHACK SOC analyst Cristian Sindile to unpack the story behind his BSides London 2025 talk on disrupting the Medusa ransomware gang.

Cristian reveals how he traced a gang's hidden Tor leak site back to a real IP address in Russia using an overlooked WordPress feature — exposing live ransom negotiations, payment sums, and Bitcoin addresses to law enforcement. From there, the conversation dives into the real craft of offensive cyber threat intelligence: OPSEC fundamentals, the psychology of infiltrating dark web forums, earning trust to harvest threat actors' own tools, and the fine line between responsible disclosure and vigilantism.

It's a candid, fast-moving look at the human side of cybercrime — and how curiosity plus discipline can disrupt an entire criminal operation.

🎧 Listen now, subscribe for more, and share it with your team. Topic suggestions? Email [email protected].

If anyone should breeze through an ISO 27001 audit, it's a cybersecurity company — right? In this episode of the NeverHack Cybercast, host Louis Zezeran sits down with Andres Järv, vCISO at NeverHack Estonia, fresh from the firm's own recertification, for an honest look at what the standard really demands.

Andres breaks down what ISO 27001 actually is, the three-year audit cycle, what auditors look for (and how they catch you out), and why your documentation has to match reality. Then he unpacks the virtual CISO model: why even profitable companies outsource security leadership, what Estonia's talent shortage means under NIS2, and how NeverHack "eats its own dog food" by acting as its own vCISO client.

Practical, candid, and jargon-free — essential listening for anyone facing certification or deciding whether to hire or outsource.

🎧 Listen now. Connect with Louis & Andres on LinkedIn, and visit neverhack.com to learn more. Subscribe for more from the NeverHack Cybercast.