Cybersecurity talk with the mechanics left in.
Decipher Security Podcast follows the mechanics behind security news, from supply-chain compromises to exploit development and vulnerability evidence. The tone is conversational, but the questions keep pulling guests toward practical distinctions that matter to defenders.
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Decipher Security Podcast is a cybersecurity conversation show with a strong bias toward explanation. It follows breaking incidents, research reports, industry conferences, and security culture, but it rarely stops at the obvious headline. The useful part is the middle layer. Recent episodes spend time on how an attacker gained access to maintainer accounts in the Axios NPM compromise, why later attribution mattered, and what the incident says about open source and supply-chain security. Other conversations look at cybercrime ecosystems through activity clusters rather than tidy villain names. That distinction matters. The show is often interested in how a defender should think, not just what a news story says happened. It asks what evidence counts, what logs can prove exploitation, how KEV decisions get made, and why old vulnerabilities can still matter to capable attackers. The conversations are brisk and informal. They can open with conference exhaustion, online security community awkwardness, or a joke about skipping ads, then pivot into attack surfaces, signals intelligence, compliance pressure, or exploit availability. That looseness helps the technical material breathe. Guests are allowed to think out loud, and the questions usually sharpen the frame rather than chase drama. The RSA episodes show the podcast's feel for industry theater: billboards, vendor takeovers, AI claims, and the difficulty of finding the sessions and people that matter. The movie discussion of The Martian fits the same pattern from another angle, using a story about engineering under pressure to talk about hacking, hardware, human limits, and institutional decision-making. Decipher Security Podcast is not sanitized vendor talk. It is also not shock-driven. Its value is the steady move from concrete case to broader pattern, with enough humor to keep the conversation human and enough technical care to make it useful.
Made for: For security practitioners, researchers, and cybersecurity-curious listeners who want current incidents explained without marketing gloss. It best suits people who like practical distinctions, real examples, and a little dry industry humor.
What sets it apart: The show keeps the conversation casual while preserving the technical shape of the problem. It is especially strong at connecting specific incidents, logs, exploit evidence, and attacker behavior to broader defensive thinking.
Every week, Dennis Fisher and Lindsey O'Donnell-Welch, the editors of Decipher, bring you exclusive, in-depth conversations with security researchers, CISOs, founders, and security experts to hellp you understand the threat landscape and better protect your organizations.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Dennis Fisher turns security terminology into clear conversations about evidence, prioritization, attribution, and the judgment behind defensive work.
Dennis Fisher gets technical detail by asking guests to explain how security work is actually done. Decipher Security Podcast moves from vulnerability prioritization and evidence of active exploitation to cybercrime attribution, while leaving room for conversations about raising…
CVE triage meets The Martian, so your security brain gets both evidence and oxygen.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Attribution feels like discipline here, not guesswork.
The piece follows Andrew Northern and Dennis Fisher through a familiar security origin story, from being a bad kid on the internet to learning scripts for chat rooms, editing config files for online games, and moving from a call center into a help desk.
A smart look at The Martian as hardware, politics, and human error.
Decipher treats The Martian as a story about hardware, leadership, and the improvisation that keeps a disaster from hardening into failure. Wendy Nather and the host stay close to the film's concrete choices, from the slingshot maneuver to Rich Parnell shifting people around the…
A clear look at exploit thinking, compliance pressure, and the practical ways attackers work around defenses.
Caitlin Condon frames the conversation around a simple but useful tension: attackers, defenders, and compliance teams do not look at the same security landscape the same way.
A practical look at KEV evidence, logs, and the process behind vulnerability decisions.
Todd Beardsley of Run Zero uses this Decipher Security Podcast discussion to explore the practical side of KEV, while Dennis Fisher presses for what counts as evidence of exploitation, how CISA wants to be contacted, and which logs can help make the case.
A grounded security conversation that ties school portals, Minecraft, and AI behavior together.
The episode follows Sean Zadig, Yahoo's Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Paranoid, from computer kid to security leader, while Dennis Fisher keeps the emphasis on how curiosity often starts in ordinary places.
Technology's mechanisms, power's consequences.
Dave, Joe, and Maria break down phishing kits, deepfakes, and social-engineering scams weekly.
Dennis Fisher talks with Sean Zadig, Yahoo's Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Paranoid, about how a computer kid from a beige tower and Slackware ended up in cybersecurity after an RIAA warning letter and a startup collapse.
Dennis Fisher interviews Caitlin Condon about Vulncheck's exploit intelligence report and the state of the security community.
A single Vercel employee's use of the third-party AI app Context.ai led to Google Workspace access and exposure of a subset of Vercel customers, per Vercel's updated advisory.
Decipher Security Podcast host Dennis Fisher talks with Andrew Northern, a principal security researcher at Census, about how he moved from call center and help desk work into red teaming, digital forensics, and e-crime tracking.
The hosts discuss the rapid rise of AI exploit development and the ongoing fallout from the Axios compromise, including attribution to North Korean actors.
A discussion about the Axios npm supply chain compromise where an attacker gained access to a maintainer's accounts and inserted a trojanized package.
Dennis Fisher and Lindsey O'Donnell Welch discuss the overwhelming size and vendor takeover of the RSA Conference, highlighting the difficulty of finding meaningful content and connections.
Dennis Fisher and Lindsay O'Donnell Welch preview the upcoming RSA Conference, discussing the overwhelming atmosphere and Lindsay's return from maternity leave.
Mark Watney turns hexadecimal, ASCII, and an old Pathfinder probe into a NASA communication channel.
Dennis Fisher and Caitlin Condon focus on Volncheck's exploit intelligence report, which tracks how 2025 CVEs moved from disclosure to real-world use.
Todd Beardsley says War in Pieces is "a sentence-by-sentence reading of War and Peace" expected to run about 60 years.
Sean Zadig, CISO of Yahoo, discusses his journey into hacking and technology, and shares insights on raising a hacker safely and the impact of AI.
Adam Meyers and Elia Zaitsev of CrowdStrike discuss their roles and a humorous anecdote about being mistaken for each other due to their similar beards.
Adam Bateman of Push Security discusses targeted phishing attacks detected through LinkedIn and the company's browser-based threat detection approach.
Brian Raftery discusses his new podcast 'The Hollywood Hack' about the Sony hack, exploring the internal reactions and lasting impact on Hollywood.