THREATCON1 PODCAST

THREATCON1 hosts Tom Bain and Patrick Garrity sit down with Nathan Rollings, Field CISO at Zafran, and Yonatan Keller, Analyst Team Lead at Zafran, for a deep, practitioner-focused conversation on the realities of modern vulnerability management.Together, they explore why patching alone can’t keep up with today’s threat landscape — and how security teams can dramatically reduce risk by prioritizing what actually matters.

Tom and Patrick sit down with Tyler Shields, Cybersecurity Strategy Analyst at Omdia, for a wide-ranging conversation on where cybersecurity is heading — and what actually matters to practitioners right now.

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The discussion dives deep into the realities behind AI hype, the importance of keeping humans in the loop, and why buyers are overwhelmed by security debt rather than lacking data. Tyler also offers a candid take on the CVE ecosystem, vulnerability scoring fragmentation, and why context — not raw severity scores — is the only thing that makes vulnerability data actionable.

Tom and Patrick sit down with Nabil Hannan, Field CISO at NetSPI, AI-focused startup advisor, and host of the Agent of Influence podcast. Nabil shares his unique perspective on today’s most pressing cybersecurity challenges.

Tom and Patrick sit down with Christine Fignar, Cybersecurity Analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, to unpack one of the most misunderstood areas of security: insider threats and human-driven risk. Christine’s background spanning aviation, HR, communications, and counterterrorism gives her a rare perspective on stress, behavior patterns, and the subtle signals that often precede incidents.

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We get into her “Cone of Uncertainty” framework for visualizing how threats form and evolve, discuss hiring fraud, offboarding gaps, nation-state recruitment, and why organizations routinely miss early warning signs. A conversation for anyone looking to better understand, track, and communicate human-centric risk.

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Tom and Patrick welcomed Simon Goldsmith, CISO, Ovo Energy to the show, to chat about the emerging threat landscape across different industries he’s served in - from the CISO’s perspective. We dig into some of his cyber experiences throughout his career, talk rugby, debate Oasis vs Blur and even drill down into how to counter coordinated nation-state attacks!

Tom and Patrick host Mike Privette, Founder, Return on Security, to get a sense of Mike's perspectives on how he's used his operational background in cyber as a former multi-time CISO to pivot into something entirely different in the cyber market today! Mike brings insights on how he tracks and slices data on all cyber funding and M&A activity with his broad-ranging dataset and his leading newsletter. They cover ground on emerging threats, AI investment in cyber and what pushed him to pursue a unique pivot in his cybersecurity journey!

Tom and Patrick sit down with VP of Security Research, Tod Beardsley. We talk to Tod about his current role leading cyber research at RunZero, his time at CISA, emerging cyber threats he's currently engaged in researching, his perspective on the CVE program and its future - and finally, horror movies, of which Tod is an aficionado and active podcast host himself of Podsothoth: A Lovecraft Book Club. This session isn't THAT scary really...

In this episode, Tom and Patrick chat with former Director of the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, Andrew Boyd, about the root of today’s emerging cyber threats to both business and to citizens. They dive into his experience in offensive cybersecurity across multiple former government roles, how he grew his skillset into cyber and experiences in serving the U.S. in many innovation-led cyber capacities, and his current cyber-inspired initiatives.

In this episode, Tom and Patrick chat with Jen Easterly, former Director of CISA, for the U.S. government. Topics covered range from public-private collaboration efforts to better protect our national security, to her perspectives on defending against threat actors targeting U.S. interests as well as the impact AI is having on cyber today, with a sneak peak into a few of her upcoming key initiatives. And we go to learn how Jen Easterly spent her summer!