Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version)

The job market is shitty right now, and threat actors are exploiting exactly that. Developers are a hot target, and it cuts both ways: they'll come at you as a fake recruiter sending a "coding test" straight off GitHub, or as a fake candidate using a stolen identity to get hired and work the inside. Cloning and running a malicious repo is now just part of the interview process. Doing a human CAPTCHA to prove the person on the other end isn't AI is no longer optional.

Tim Peck (Director of Research, Detections.ai) joins Dispatch to break down DEV#POPPER and the broader Contagious Interview campaign, still active, still evolving.

In this episode we get into:

• Why this attack starts with the human and why you can't train that instinct away
• Word Wrap Obfuscation: hiding payloads past the edge of the screen so scrolling through the code looked clean
• Why devs specifically get targeted: the power-full/shell languages baked into the job function itself, affiliation with crypto wallets
• Fake candidate red flags: brand new LinkedIn profiles, awkward response lag, 4am emails, resume inconsistencies
• What detection helps assuming breach

Follow Tim's work on:

• Detections.ai
• https://www.securonix.com/blog/analysis-of-devpopper-new-attack-campaign-targeting-software-developers-likely-associated-with-north-korean-threat-actors/

Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version) is an independent detection engineering & threat hunting podcast. Rebuilt. Community-first. Featuring a lineup of the real and active projects pushing the limits of detection engineering, threat hunting, and everything in between.

Dennis Chow (Detection Engineering Director, back for round two) and Michael LaSalvia (red team lead) join Dispatch to talk about their new book, Evasion Engineering: Building Custom Red Team Tools for the Modern Defenses, and what happens when a blue teamer and a red teamer decide to write the playbook together instead of against each other.

In this episode we get into:

• Why off-the-shelf adversary emulation repos are dying, and why building your own evasive tooling, not just running someone else's, makes you a fundamentally better detection engineer
• The trusted advisor model: bringing blue teamers inside red team ops so trust replaces the us vs. them dynamic
• The unmodified Kali header in a packet that blew a six month long campaign
  Shared fate as an operating model, borrowed from cloud providers, to stop punishing one side for the other's success
• Go (open-source programming language aka Golang supported by Google) and cross platform payloads: why Windows only red team frameworks have difficulty in keeping up with cloud and identity based attack paths 
• Their favorite chapters to write: low and slow exfiltration, and the hybrid packer that finally got past an EDR that wouldn't quit

Follow Dennis & Michael's work on:

• Evasion Engineering: Building Custom Red Team Tools for the Modern Defenses — available for pre-order on Packt and Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Evasion-Engineering-Building-Custom-Defenses-ebook/dp/B0GKDC57S8
• VM setup for adversary emulation & testing: https://github.com/Orange-Cyberdefense/GOAD

Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version) is an independent detection engineering & threat hunting podcast. Rebuilt. Community-first. Featuring a lineup of the real and active projects pushing the limits of detection engineering, threat hunting, and everything in between.

The definition of headless is taking shape. More software is shipping with an MCP. Teams are starting to require it in procurement. Your CLI and Claude Code can now talk directly to the tools you already run.

LimaCharlie was one of the first platforms in the SOC to build everything through the command line....long before the post-Claude boom. Maxime Lamothe-Brassard (their founder) joins Dispatch to explore what going headless actually means for security operations.

In this episode we get into:

• What headless actually means mechanically and why it's a very old computing idea security is only now fully inheriting
• Why the UI becoming optional levels the playing field and kills the faith-based vendor pitch
• The eager intern problem: permissions control what an agent is allowed to do, not whether its answer is right
• Why passing the MCP boundary and trusting the LLM on the other side is a front door left wide open
• GPT wrappers vs. real headless infrastructure: who owns the detection logic and who's just reselling tokens
• The customer who told their MSSP they'd rather their CEO get locked out for 30 minutes than wait on a human to respond
• The one thing Max won't let a headless agent do...ever

Follow Max's work on:

• limacharlie.io | limacharlie.io/blog
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/maximelb
• Free Build Your Own Headless SOC Workshop with BlackHills Infosec @ BlackHat, August 5, 2026 https://luma.com/black-hat-headless-soc-workshop?tk=crcMy4

Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version) is an independent detection engineering & threat hunting podcast. Rebuilt. Community-first. Featuring a lineup of the real and active projects pushing the limits of detection engineering, threat hunting, and everything in between.

What happens when a philosopher walks into a SOC? Apparently, he builds one from the ground up, spends a decade making sense of detection engineering across financial services, global IR teams, and now Canva. 

Diego Perez is a detection engineer who studied philosophy, taught himself security at 2am with a newborn in the other room, and has been quietly writing some of the sharpest unsloppy takes on the internet about what detection engineering actually is versus what we pretend it is. His blog Quasarops lives by one rule: words are cheap, sense making is not.

We hit on:

• Why "garbage in, garbage out" is a heuristic that stops short of actually helping anyone
• The Cynefin framework and why knowing which detections you need lives in the complex domain, not the complicated one
• Detection as code: is it overrated now that coding agents exist, or are we asking the wrong question entirely
• The Red Queen effect, Jevons' paradox, and why you do actually need AI in your SOC whether you like it or not
• Agentic threat hunting: whose tokens do you trust, yours or a vendor's black box
• Why the human element is more important than ever, and who exactly gets blamed when the model gets it wrong
  
  Follow Diego's substack: https://quasarops.com 

Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version) is an independent detection engineering & threat hunting podcast. Rebuilt. Community-first. Featuring a lineup of the real and active projects pushing the limits of detection engineering, threat hunting, and everything in between.

macOS detection engineering has had a documentation problem for years. Everyone told Olivia Gallucci she was locking herself into a platform nobody cared about. Then infostealers showed up, enterprise Mac fleets exploded, and suddenly her work was the most in-demand research nobody knew existed.

Olivia is a security engineer at Datadog living inside macOS internals...from Apple Silicon boot chain to ESF event families to IOKit abuse....and she is single-handedly dragging macOS DE into the light.

In this episode we get into:

• Why you can't just flag osascript anymore and what to look at instead
• The process tree trap that trips up every Windows-native DE who crosses over
• Background Task Management: the persistence metadata everyone's sleeping on
• Living off the Orchard binaries
• Why your EDR is abstracting macOS telemetry from you and what to do about it
• Jonathan Levin's books, Jaron Bradley's Sprite Tree, and the resources that actually matter

Follow Olivia's work on: 

• oliviagallucci.com | [ret]2read — An OS Internals Newsletter (Substack)
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/olivia-gallucci
• 2026 main stage at BlackHat 

Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version) is an independent detection engineering & threat hunting podcast. Rebuilt. Community-first. Featuring a lineup of the real and active projects pushing the limits of detection engineering, threat hunting, and everything in between.

GRC has been called the passenger princess of security for too long. In this episode, Alex sits down with Ayoub Fandi, GRC engineer and author of the GRC Engineer newsletter, to make the case that GRC and detection engineering are solving solving the same problems and somehow still not working together.

This episode covers:

• Why GRC plays PvE while everyone else in security plays PvP and why that actually makes them your best ally
• How auditors certify 100% coverage from less than 1% of your environment 
• Detection debt meets GRC debt: what inheriting someone else's program looks like on both sides
• Vibe coding, AI agents deleting production databases, and what that means for both of our jobs

Ayoub's newsletter and podcast: GRCengineer.com

Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version) is an independent detection engineering & threat hunting podcast. Rebuilt. Community-first. Featuring a lineup of the real and active projects pushing the limits of detection engineering, threat hunting, and everything in between.

Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version) episode two brings on the person who treats detection engineering like an actual craft....not a vendor feature list, not a MITRE bingo card, not a vibe coded rule you ship and forget. Hayden teaches detection engineering at Antisyphony Training and runs the SOC at Black Hills Information Security, which means he's not theorizing. He's got the reps, the scars, and even a home SIEM with documentation. This is the episode for practitioners who are watching Claude write their detections and quietly wondering if they're slowly getting worse at their job.

In this episode we cover:

• The detection lifecycle nobody actually closes: research, write, validate and the canary step that tells you whether your thousand rules are quietly dead in the water six months from now.
• The CTI firehose problem. When every vendor blog is just an ad wearing a threat report costume, how do you find the gold? (Hint: DFIR Report and Google TI don't need your clicks)
• AI writing detections: yes, with caveats. No for junior engineers who've never written a query. And absolutely not without a review agent, an experimental pipeline, and final approval from a human who still knows how to dribble the ball.
• Why you cannot send AI out like a Pokémon and what happens to your detection program when you try.

Find Hayden at @kilobytethedust and at antisyphontraining.com.

Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version) is an independent detection engineering & threat hunting podcast. Rebuilt. Community-first. Featuring a lineup of the real and active projects pushing the limits of detection engineering, threat hunting, and everything in between.

Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version) premieres with John Hammond...Huntress senior researcher, former DoD red team, the guy 2M+ people watch break attacks down in real time for the red-meets-blue conversation the week forced into existence. Alex came up blue. John came up red. They meet in the middle on the three stories eating the industry alive.

In this episode we cover: 

• Axios: one patient social engineer, a fake founder Slack workspace, and an NPM maintainer who never stood a chance. 
• The lethal trifecta: private data, untrusted content, network egress. When all three show up in one agent, there be dragons. Why prompt injection isn't getting solved, and what that means for your MCP sprawl.
• Mythos + Project Glasswing
• The red teamer's detection wishlist

Find John at @_JohnHammond, jh.live, and on Huntress's Declassified.

Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version) is an independent detection engineering & threat hunting podcast. Rebuilt. Community-first. Featuring a lineup of the real and active projects pushing the limits of detection engineering, threat hunting, and everything in between.