Hacker Valley Studio

Mythos just found 30,000 new vulnerabilities, and now every security team is asking the same question: what actually matters?

In this episode, Ron Eddings sits down with Dan Pagel, CEO at Brinqa, and Brad Hibbert COO & CSO at Brinqa, to break down the Anthropic Mythos moment that rattled the security industry. From the panic of millions of new findings dropping overnight to the strategy of narrowing them down to the 50 that actually matter in YOUR environment, this episode is a masterclass in exposure management at machine speed.

Dan and Brad share how Brinqa helps organizations make sense of massive volumes of findings, correlating data across 260+ connectors, enriching vulnerability context, and delivering clear, explainable actions to IT operations teams.

They also tackle the bigger question: how do you build enough trust in AI to let it take autonomous action on your behalf? The answer starts with better data, better explainability, and knowing when to keep humans in (or on) the loop.

00:00 - Introduction

02:00 - What just happened? Breaking down the Anthropic Mythos moment

04:10 - Why most new findings don’t apply to your environment

07:12 - What Mythos means to the broader market

09:09 - Why AI-driven discovery isn’t slowing down

11:00 - The gap between security and IT ops: how explainability closes it

13:38 - How fast you should go through findings 

15:53 - Why MTTR is the wrong metric and what businesses actually care about

18:03 - Why real-time visibility is replacing scheduled scanning

19:50 - Human IN the loop vs. human ON the loop

22:14 - What happens when AI hallucinates? 

27:20 - Why we’re over and under-estimating the impact of AI

29:54 - The immediate win Brinqa achieves for its customers

31:50 - What CISOs are really asking now: "What does good look like?"

Connect with our guest, Dan Pagel, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpagel/

Connect with our guest, Brad Hibbert, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradhibbert/

Learn more about Brinqa: https://www.brinqa.com/

Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams

Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com

SOAR promised to close the loop in the SOC and fell flat. Agentic AI is finally delivering what a decade of playbooks couldn’t.

Impactful Moments

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In 2025, Torq brought a monster truck to RSAC. And Don Jeter, Torq's CMO, will be the first to tell you: nobody's buying an AI SOC platform because of a grave digger in the booth.

In this episode, Ron sits down with Don to discuss what Torq is actually doing in a category packed with 60 near-identical vendors, and why "the epidemic of sameness" is the real threat to every cybersecurity brand right now. Don explains why Torq builds everything in-house, why he starts every strategy by listening instead of pitching the product, and why the only differentiator left in cyber marketing is how much you genuinely care. It's a conversation about brand, but it's really a conversation about trust, community, and what it takes to make a CISO text you back.

Impactful Moments

Most organizations are prepping for disaster recovery when they should be building for cyber recovery, and those are not the same thing. 

Recorded live at RSAC Conference 2026, Ron sat down with Chris Bevil, Principal Security AI Strategist at Commvault, to break down what actually happens after a breach hits and why most teams are caught flat-footed. 

Chris walks us through Commvault's Minutes to Meltdown tabletop exercise, why isolated recovery environments matter, and how clean data determines whether you get your company back in hours or in 200+ days. 

This episode will tell you what separates a team that recovers from a team that unravels. 

Impactful Moments

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AI adoption is outpacing governance at every level, and the cost of waiting is getting higher by the day. Guru Sethupathy, General Manager of AI Governance at Optro and former Founder of FairNow, breaks down what it really takes to build trust in AI systems before things go sideways. 

Guru lays out a simple but powerful 3 P’s Framework: policies, process, and people, connecting it to what teams are actually dealing with right now, from shadow AI to security threats that don’t look like anything we’ve seen before.

If 2026 is the year AI moves from experiments to real operations, this conversation is your blueprint for keeping it under control.

Impactful Moments

Learn more about Optro: https://optro.ai/

Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams

What happens when attackers collaborate better than defenders? 

Recorded live from RSAC 2026, this solo episode with Ron breaks down the biggest themes shaping cybersecurity right now, from organized threat groups and massive data breaches to the growing tension between productivity and control inside modern organizations.

This conversation highlights a hard truth. The threat landscape is evolving through collaboration. From phishing-as-a-service platforms like Tycoon 2FA to supply chain breaches impacting entire ecosystems, attackers are sharing tools and moving faster than ever.

But there’s another side to the story. As AI becomes embedded in how work gets done, security teams are being pushed to rethink their role. Blocking tools is no longer enough. The real challenge is enabling the business while managing risk, and that requires trust, alignment, and a stronger sense of community across the industry.

This episode is a call to rethink how we approach security. Not as isolated teams enforcing policy, but as a connected community working together to adapt, respond, and move forward.

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Become a sponsor of the show to amplify your brand: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/

What does it mean when your smart doorbell becomes an entry point for surveillance? What happens when a single hacker can jailbreak every major AI model within hours of its release? And why are the same tools being used by both nation-state attackers and the defenders trying to stop them?

Become a sponsor of the show to amplify your brand: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/

What does it look like when a cybersecurity founder who built a $2.5 billion company decides to level up, again? Dean Sysman, co-founder of Axonius, sits down with Ron Eddings to pull back the curtain on what it really took to go from zero to $100M ARR in four and a half years, and what came next.

Dean breaks down the founder mindset, the emotional weight of tying your identity to your company, and why he stepped into the Executive Chairman role while simultaneously pursuing a PhD in AI systems at Columbia University. He gets into how boxing taught him what solo performance reveals about leadership, why vulnerability is a non-negotiable skill at scale, and what it means to care about something bigger than yourself. This one hits differently if you're building, leading, or figuring out what your next chapter looks like.

Last episode, Ron and Marcus made predictions. This episode, they brought the receipts.

Impactful Moments

Read the articles we referenced in this episode:

Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams

The CISO role isn’t the finish line, it’s a launchpad. 69% of security executives are eyeing the exit, and Anthony Johnson is proof that what comes next can be even bigger.