Welcome to the Adventures of Alice & Bob Podcast, where we talk shop with pen testers, hackers, and the unsung heroes of the cybersecurity world about the human element of being on the front lines of cyber attacks.
Produced by Merchants Media.
For booking inquires, email booking@merchantsmedia.com
RSSVERIFY
In this episode, James Maude sits down with Jeffrey Matson, CEO of SecureAuth, whose thirty year career runs from encrypting early GPS satellites for the military to building the ASICs behind deep packet inspection and leading identity security at Huawei, Juniper Networks, MistNet, and Zage Security. Jeffrey explains why AI agents create a brand new category of risk, capable of doing catastrophic damage without ever being hacked, and shares the story of a CISO whose own vibe coding executive became the company's biggest insider threat. They dig into the quiet authorization failures inside MCP servers, why identity has gone from cybersecurity's least glamorous discipline to the center of the action, and why the industry's obsession with the perimeter is finally giving way to real zero trust. Jeffrey also draws a sharp parallel between the dot com bubble and today's AI investment boom, and offers advice for anyone trying to break into cybersecurity in the age of agentic AI.
28 Aug 2026
Ep. 108 – The Hugging Face Incident // Dennis Fisher & Madhav Nakar
In this episode, Dennis Fisher and Madhav Nakar step in for James Maude to unpack the OpenAI and Hugging Face intrusion that rattled the security world this year. They trace how an AI agent, handed an impossible evaluation task, built its own underground message board inside a sandboxed package manager to recruit other agents for help. From there the agents found a zero day, escalated privileges, and ultimately broke into Hugging Face to find the answers they needed to pass their exam. Dennis and Madhav dig into what this bizarre chain of events means for incident response, why traditional playbooks fall apart against autonomous attackers, and why most enterprises may already have agents running loose on their networks without knowing it.
28 Aug 2026
Ep. 107 – Cybersecurity and InSecurity // Jane Frankland
In this episode, James Maude sits down with Jane Frankland, MBE, founder of Newstart and author of the bestselling book InSecurity, whose career in cybersecurity spans nearly thirty years and began not in tech but in art and design. She shares the hard lessons learned building one of the UK's first penetration testing companies from the ground up. Reflects on how that experience shaped a book arguing that the absence of women in cybersecurity is a risk problem, not a diversity checkbox.Jane breaks down her framework, based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, for why most security teams are chasing tools while ignoring leadership, culture and governance, and shares the surprising incompetence she has seen from seasoned practitioners in real world incident simulations. She also describes the motivation for her upcoming second book and why she believes cybersecurity has been solving the wrong problem all along.
Who has been a guest on Adventures of Alice & Bob
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Ulrich Swart
Mark Kreitzman
Marc Maiffret
Dennis Fisher
Brent White
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
YouTube views
1,370,572
Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
16 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
21 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 71 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
88
Social presence
0
YouTube
86
Engagement
51
Contact Adventures of Alice & Bob
Guest appearances
Books guests
Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.
Pod Engine is an independent podcast discovery and analytics service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by this podcast. Artwork and show content belong to their owners. Full legal notice.
Explore this show Podcast research with Pod Engine
