Retired Colonel Justin Sapp was a Green Beret detailed to the CIA after the September 11th terrorist attacks. He was part of Team Alpha, the first eight Americans to drop behind enemy lines into the mountains of Afghanistan. At 29, Justin was its youngest member. There was no time to onboard him, and he was told he was leaving the next day, departing from the DC area to a base in Uzbekistan, then touching down in northern Afghanistan on a Black Hawk helicopter. Justin would go on to clear the way for follow-on forces to land, secure alliances with warlords to oust the Taliban, interrogate enemy fighters who had been captured. He would also tragically lose his colleague, Johnny “Mike” Spann. Justin takes us back into that historic mission 25 years later.

Rob Allen, Chief Product Officer at ThreatLocker, joins Dave Bittner on the CyberWire Daily podcast for a sponsored Industry Voices. Rob discusses how the conversation around agentic AI has quickly shifted from whether organizations should allow these tools to how they can use them safely. He explains why built-in guardrails aren't enough and how external controls, visibility, and a Zero Trust approach can help organizations embrace AI without giving agents unrestricted access to sensitive data and systems.

Heather Ceylan, CISO at Box, joins Dave Bittner on the CyberWire Daily podcast for a sponsored Industry Voices to discuss how autonomous AI agents are changing the enterprise risk landscape. She explains why organizations need to govern content, permissions, and agent actions from the start, and how CISOs can create secure pathways for AI adoption that enable innovation rather than stand in its way.

The Asia-Pacific theater saw its own scenes of brutality during World War II. But many of us don't know about them. Jenny Chan co-founded Pacific Atrocities Education to raise awareness of these lesser-known horrors. This conversation focuses on the Imperial Japanese Army, which occupied parts of China between 1937 and 1945 as part of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Jenny uncovered new details that showed how intelligence-gathering and covert research enabled war crimes.

Tim Springston from Semperis joins Dave Bittner on the CyberWire Daily podcast for a sponsored Industry Voices to discuss why hybrid identity isn't going away and what that means for cyber resilience. Tim explores the growing complexity of identity environments and how agentic AI is creating new opportunities for defenders while simultaneously giving attackers new ways to target identity systems.

Stephen Hilt, Senior Threat Researcher at TrendAI, joins Dave Bittner on the CyberWire Daily podcast for a sponsored Industry Voices recorded at Black Hat USA 2026. Drawing on research presented at DEF CON, he discusses thousands of internet-exposed industrial control systems associated with U.S. data centers, how attackers could target building and energy infrastructure to bypass traditional IT defenses, and why the growing importance of data centers makes these overlooked systems an increasingly important part of the security conversation.

Christy Wyatt, CEO of Absolute Security, joins Dave Bittner on the CyberWire Daily podcast for a sponsored Industry Voices recorded at Black Hat USA 2026. She discusses why prevention and detection alone are no longer enough to define security performance, how the business costs of downtime are putting greater focus on cyber resilience, and why organizations are increasingly thinking about their ability to remain operational and recover when disruption occurs.

In 2017, journalist Katie Sanders discovered an episode of a radio program called This Is Your Life. It was a scratchy recording from 1949, and she heard the voice of 2nd Lt. Murray Simon, her grandfather, for the first time. In the episode, Murray was reunited with a man named Peter Ortiz, who had rescued him after his plane crashed over Nazi-occupied France in 1944. Ortiz became one of the most decorated Marine officers of World War II, undertaking missions now handled by units like the Navy SEALs and Green Berets. Katie and Nicholas Reynolds, a former CIA historian, went on to write Ortiz's War.

Mark Beare, General Manager of Malwarebytes Consumer Business, joins Dave Bittner on the CyberWire Daily podcast for a sponsored Industry Voices recorded at Black Hat USA 2026. He discusses how AI is helping scammers create highly personalized attacks at scale, why everyday consumers are increasingly attractive targets, and how AI could also help defenders make cybersecurity easier and more accessible for the people they protect.

Chris Wallis, Founder and CEO of Intruder, joins Dave Bittner on the CyberWire Daily podcast for a sponsored Industry Voices recorded at Black Hat USA 2026. He discusses why point-in-time pentesting is struggling to keep pace as teams ship software and attackers exploit vulnerabilities faster, how AI agents could make continuous investigation more practical, and why compliance standards need to evolve alongside the changing threat landscape.

Brian Vecci, Field CTO at Varonis, joins Dave Bittner on the CyberWire Daily podcast for a sponsored Industry Voices recorded at Black Hat USA 2026. He discusses how AI assistants and agents are magnifying existing data security risks, what recent research reveals about emerging AI-enabled threats, and why organizations need to rethink how they protect enterprise data as both employees and attackers gain access to more powerful AI tools.

Ev Kontsevoy, CEO of Teleport, joins Dave Bittner on the CyberWire Daily podcast for a sponsored Industry Voices recorded at Black Hat USA 2026. He discusses why traditional Zero Trust principles need to evolve for autonomous AI agents, how agents can operate within their permissions while still behaving in unintended ways, and why organizations need security controls that protect the business without creating friction that drives users toward workarounds.

You might find Meredith Cavan playing music in an Irish pub. But long before her first album dropped, she clocked more than 20 years at the CIA. One of her jobs there was Southeast Asia Department chief, where she oversaw covert action, intelligence operations, and analysis across 30 countries. We're talking about the years 2021 to 2023, when terrorism was taking a back seat to strategic competition, and her priority was trying to thwart China's influence and infrastructure in its most consequential playground.

Nick Warner, CEO of Neo, joins Dave Bittner on the CyberWire Daily podcast for a sponsored Industry Voices recorded at Black Hat USA 2026. He discusses how the rapid adoption of AI tools and agentic software is reshaping enterprise security, why CISOs need greater visibility and control over the software operating across their environments, and how organizations can put guardrails around AI without creating unnecessary friction.

Clint Gibler, Cyber Lead at OpenAI, and Robby Winchester, Chief Services Officer at SpecterOps, join Dave Bittner for a discussion recorded live at Black Hat USA 2026. Together, they explore how frontier AI models are changing cyber defense, where AI creates the greatest value for defenders, and why responsible deployment and human expertise remain essential as organizations adopt these technologies.

Michael Leland, Field CTO at Island joins Dave Bittner on the CyberWire Daily podcast for a sponsored Industry Voices at Black Hat USA 2026. He discusses the emerging risks in the AI supply chain, why AI agents introduce new challenges around trust and governance, and what organizations can do to securely adopt agentic AI without slowing innovation.

Stephen Harrison, VP of Product at Abnormal AI joins Dave Bittner on the CyberWire Daily podcast for a sponsored Industry Voices interview at Black Hat USA 2026. He explains why AI agents and service accounts are creating a new identity challenge for security teams, how shadow AI is expanding the attack surface through unmanaged OAuth permissions, and why organizations need to understand what "normal" looks like for every identity in their environment.

For decades, Cuban intelligence has been seen as a force that punches above its weight. Shaped during the Cold War through cooperation with the Soviet Union, its intelligence officers received extensive training by the KGB. But where does Cuba’s spy service stand today, especially as it faces pressure from Washington? Retired FBI special agent Peter J. Lapp, who wrote Queen of Cuba, came in to discuss Havana’s capabilities, the Americans who spied for Cuba, and the Cubans who spied for us.

Mujtaba Hamid, EVP of Product and Strategy at Booz Allen Hamilton joins Dave Bittner on the CyberWire Daily podcast for a sponsored Industry Voices at Black Hat USA 2026. He explains how AI is compressing the timeline from vulnerability discovery to exploitation, why traditional human-paced security operations can no longer keep up, and how AI-native defensive systems can help organizations detect, adapt, and respond at machine speed.

After Noel Pichardo called out his city's embrace of Flock surveillance cameras, he was subjected to five internal affairs investigations in less than two years.