The Segment

By IllumioTechnology

The Segment episodes

September 21The Monday Microsegment for the week of 9/21/2026
The Monday Microsegment for the week of September 21. All the cybersecurity news you need to stay ahead, from Illumio's The Segment podcast.
The FBI and Coast Guard board two hacked oil tankers headed for the U.S. coast.
Google’s Gemini joins the unintended AI attack club.
And CISA is making big changes to how it flags dangerous software bugs.
Plus, Michael Adjei joins us to discuss why more cybersecurity tools don’t always mean better security.
Head to The Zero Trust Hub: hub.illumio.com
Get the Industry’s First Vendor-Neutral Zero Trust Certification: https://www.illumio.com/zero-trust-certification
8 min
September 14The Monday Microsegment for the week of 9/14/2026
The Monday Microsegment for the week of September 14. All the cybersecurity news you need to stay ahead, from Illumio's The Segment podcast.
AI's biggest rivals just agreed on one thing: it's time to slow down.
A series of rogue AI attacks may prove their point.
And Microsoft’s latest Patch Tuesday shows why those warnings are getting harder to ignore.
Plus, Trevor Dearing joins to unpack the attacks on a recent UK power plant.
Head to The Zero Trust Hub: hub.illumio.com
Get the Industry’s First Vendor-Neutral Zero Trust Certification: https://www.illumio.com/zero-trust-certification
8 min
September 09The Human Attack Surface: What Cybersecurity Can Learn from the Secret Service | Hazel Cerra
What can 25 years of protecting the President teach the cybersecurity world?
In this episode, Raghu Nandakumara sits down with Hazel Cerra, Director of Digital Security Convergence at BlackCloak and a 25-year veteran special agent of the U.S. Secret Service, to explore what protective intelligence can teach cybersecurity about defending the human attack surface.
Hazel draws on her path from investigating counterfeit and credit card fraud, to protecting President Clinton, to pioneering critical systems protection for presidential visits, sharing how she came to see the Secret Service's layered "zero fail" security model as a direct parallel to Zero Trust, and why understanding an adversary's motive, means, and opportunity is as critical in cyber as it is in physical protection.
Raghu and Hazel discuss:
How the Secret Service evaluates and prioritizes threats using motive, means, and opportunity
Why "zero fail" protection is the same discipline as Zero Trust security
How cyber convergence changed physical protection, from hackable elevators to compromised cameras
Why executives' home networks have become the new "path of least resistance" for attackers
Balancing security with usability, without creating unnecessary friction
How deepfakes and AI impersonation are changing verification and executive risk
Hazel closes with a practical tip for spotting a deepfake on a video call, and a reminder that as executives become as visible as presidents once were, protecting them has to extend far beyond the corporate perimeter.
Stay connected with our host Raghu on LinkedIn
For more information about Illumio, check out our website at illumio.com
47 min
September 08The Monday Microsegment for the week of 9/8/2026
The Monday Microsegment for the week of September 8. All the cybersecurity news you need to stay ahead, from Illumio's The Segment podcast.
Dark web sellers claim to have scans of nearly half of all driver’s licenses in the U.S. and Canada.
Move over, Mythos. OpenAI takes its Astra model public, with some caveats.
And the cyber cavalry is coming to save Texas water utilities.
Plus, John Kindervag joins for a special Book Club segment promoting his new book. Read it here: www.illumio.com/resource-center/cyber-resilience-at-machine-speed-the-zero-trust-model-for-the-ai-era
Head to The Zero Trust Hub: hub.illumio.com
Get the Industry’s First Vendor-Neutral Zero Trust Certification: https://www.illumio.com/zero-trust-certification
8 min
August 31The Monday Microsegment for the week of 8/31/2026
The Monday Microsegment for the week of August 31. All the cybersecurity news you need to stay ahead, from Illumio's The Segment podcast.
OpenAI publishes its Hugging Face postmortem. It’s even scarier than we thought.

Washington declares a national emergency over foreign gear in the power grid.

And a hundred-plus organizations warn that our AI head start is shrinking fast.
Plus, Christer Swartz joins for this month's Boos and Bravos.
Head to The Zero Trust Hub: hub.illumio.com
Get the Industry’s First Vendor-Neutral Zero Trust Certification: https://www.illumio.com/zero-trust-certification
8 min
August 24The Monday Microsegment for the week of 8/24/2026
The Monday Microsegment for the week of August 24. All the cybersecurity news you need to stay ahead, from Illumio's The Segment podcast.
OpenAI reins in upcoming AI models it says are getting too good at breaking software.

Seventeen Iranians charged over a decade of stolen research.

And AI is helping attackers break into factory and water controllers.
Plus, John Kindervag joins us for a Book Club segment!
Head to The Zero Trust Hub: hub.illumio.com
Get the Industry’s First Vendor-Neutral Zero Trust Certification: https://www.illumio.com/zero-trust-certification
8 min
August 10The Monday Microsegment for the week of 8/10/2026
The Monday Microsegment for the week of August 10. All the cybersecurity news you need to stay ahead, from Illumio's The Segment podcast.
A third frontier AI model leaves its test setup — and at least two of the cases are connected.

A major flaw in a popular analytics tool is already leaking customer data.

And Congress wants to make the CVE program law — but some experts have concerns.
Plus, Raghu Nandakumara recaps last week’s Black Hat event in Vegas.
Head to The Zero Trust Hub: hub.illumio.com
Get the Industry’s First Vendor-Neutral Zero Trust Certification: https://www.illumio.com/zero-trust-certification
8 min
August 05Hackers Don't Break In. They Log In. | Keren Elazari
Hackers don't break in — they log in. That's the refrain cybersecurity researcher, TED speaker, and self-described friendly hacker Keren Elazari keeps coming back to, and it sets the tone for a conversation that cuts through a lot of the current AI hype.
Host Raghu Nandakumara sits down with Keren to talk about why, despite the constant headlines about AI-discovered zero-days and autonomous attack tools, the overwhelming majority of real-world breaches still come down to the same fundamentals: stolen credentials, unpatched known vulnerabilities, and social engineering. Keren points to Verizon's DBIR data showing that over 80% of web-facing attacks are credential-based, and to the CISA KEV catalog, where under 30% of known exploited vulnerabilities are even patched — numbers that make the "AI supercharges vulnerability discovery" conversation feel a little beside the point.
The two dig into what Keren calls the widening asymmetry between attackers and defenders: AI is getting good at finding vulnerabilities and writing exploits, but not nearly as good at patching them or getting fixes into messy, real-world production environments. She describes AI as "a time machine for attackers" — compressing weeks of reconnaissance and tooling into hours — and argues defenders need that same acceleration applied to mitigation and containment, not just detection.
The conversation also covers:
Shiny Hunters' evolving social engineering playbook — from impersonating employees to get help desks to reset access, to now impersonating the help desk itself to harvest credentials via fake SSO resets, SIM swapping, and deepfake voice tools

The GTG-1002 incident referenced in Anthropic's late-2025 report, where a nation-state actor used an AI model as an active accomplice in an orchestrated attack, and why Keren thinks the sophistication was in AI-driven orchestration, not novel exploit creation

Shadow AI as a new attack surface, using the rapid, often misconfigured spread of local "Open Claw" installations (many left listening on all ports) as a cautionary example

Jade Puffer, an early example of agentic, largely human-out-of-the-loop ransomware, and why Keren wasn't surprised given how much ransomware groups already reinvest in R&D

A malicious-package incident on Hugging Face, and the broader pattern of attackers targeting trusted open-source "watering holes" like GitHub and model/skill hubs
Keren closes out by introducing her reframed security fundamentals — Identity, Visibility, and Containment (IVC) in place of the classic CIA triad — and makes the case for "proactive paranoia": preparing for breaches before they happen rather than scrambling once they do. She and Raghu wrap with a shared hard truth: for all the AI conversation, security is ultimately about serving the humans on both sides of the equation, including the fact that attackers are humans too, and often know an organization's environment better than its own defenders do.
Stay connected with our host Raghu on LinkedIn
For more information about Illumio, check out our website at illumio.com
58 min
August 03The Monday Microsegment for the week of 8/3/2026
The Monday Microsegment for the week of August 3. All the cybersecurity news you need to stay ahead, from Illumio's The Segment podcast.
OpenAI's rogue agent didn't stop at Hugging Face.

And Anthropic joins the party with new disclosures about its own AI agents

An extortion crew threatens to leak stolen Ernst and Young data.
Plus, Aishwarya Ramani to explain why a new warning from the European Central Bank could reshape how organizations prepare for AI-driven cyber threats.
Head to The Zero Trust Hub: hub.illumio.com
Get the Industry’s First Vendor-Neutral Zero Trust Certification: https://www.illumio.com/zero-trust-certification
8 min
July 28The Monday Microsegment for the week of 7/27/2026
The Monday Microsegment for the week of July 27. All the cybersecurity news you need to stay ahead, from Illumio's The Segment podcast.
Rogue AI agents break out from their test environment and hack another company.

Iran is targeting a wider set of industrial control systems, U.S. authorities warn.

And did a Chinese company steal from a U.S. AI model?
Plus, Christer Swartz joins us to unpack July's boos and bravos.
Head to The Zero Trust Hub: hub.illumio.com
Get the Industry’s First Vendor-Neutral Zero Trust Certification: https://www.illumio.com/zero-trust-certification
8 min

About The Segment

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Attackers are smarter, more sophisticated and move more quickly than ever. If your organization hasn’t been breached yet, odds are you will be. On The Segment, you will hear from industry experts…

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