Future of Threat Intelligence

Deepfakes have moved well past the uncanny valley and into active threat operations, and Tom Cross, Head of Threat Research at GetReal, has the client-side case studies to back it up. Tom explains how North Korean IT worker infiltration campaigns have transformed HR and video conferencing from administrative functions into active attack surface, albeit one that most security teams aren't monitoring, logging, or ingesting into their SIEM.Drawing on a long-running collaboration with a former West Point professor and intelligence officer, Tom also applies the military framework of tactical, operational, and strategic intelligence to cybersecurity, arguing that most CTI programs are really just lists of burned indicators. The actual value of IOCs, he contends, is retrospective: discovering you were communicating with a known-bad actor means you may still be compromised. He makes the case for connecting adversary intent models, red team findings, and vulnerability data into a unified predictive picture. YT Thumbnail title: Your Zoom Call Is an Attack SurfaceTopics discussed:How North Korean IT worker infiltration has converted HR processes and video conferencing into an active, unmonitored attack surfaceVoice-cloned peer impersonation via messaging apps, followed by deepfaked video calls and malware deliveryWhy deepfake audio attacks on IT help desk credential reset processes are among the most likely near-term vectorsBiometric indicators of compromise and the significant false-positive risks that distinguish them from traditional IP or domain IOCsHow the military intelligence framework of tactical, operational, and strategic analysis applies to CTI programsThe strategic importance of retrospective IOC analysis versus forward-looking ingestionWhy DPRK's financial motivation model expands their target set far beyond what traditional nation-state threat modeling would predictKey Takeaways: Ingest video conferencing logs into your SIEM.Audit your remote credential reset process for social engineering resistance.Map red team findings and vulnerability data to specific adversary profiles rather than treating them as a generic remediation backlog.Implement retrospective IOC analysis alongside forward-looking blocking.Treat DPRK's financial motivation as an equalizer when assessing APT exposure.Build threat intelligence at the strategic layer by modeling adversary intent and objectives, not just cataloging observed TTPs.Apply extra care to biometric IOC sharing.Monitor employee working-hour patterns against claimed time zones as a behavioral indicator of potential employment fraud.Extend IOC taxonomy to include multimedia and biometric formats.Listen to more episodes: Apple Spotify YouTubeWebsite

Vincent Passaro, Engineering Manager at Stripe Security, didn't get there through a slide deck or a company mandate. He got there through a shower thought that followed a conversation with a friend, and it broke how he'd been thinking about building, leading, and even measuring his own team.The reframe was simple and did not start with "we're all going to be software developers. Rather, "we're going to be product owners." That single pivot changed everything downstream, including how he approached prototyping, how he set success criteria for agents, and how he coached his team out of chasing bugs and into defining outcomes.In this episode, Will and Vince trace both of their "pin drop" moments: the specific conversations that shifted their mental models, then try to articulate what that shift actually means for CTI analysts and security engineers working real problems today.They talk about what it felt like to stop asking "how do I wire this" and start asking "what does success look like," and how fast things moved once that happened. They're honest about what breaks, like the siloed tools that don't talk to each other, the governance vacuum that opens when every analyst is shipping products, and the dopamine trap of adding features instead of finishing work. And they're equally direct about what becomes possible when outcome velocity: not headcount or tooling budget, and what becomes the competitive edge.This isn't a conversation about AI hype. It's about what happens when two practitioners who've spent years operating the plumbing realize the plumbing has been commoditized and what that means for where human judgment actually matters now.If you've been waiting for the right moment to pay attention, this is probably the episode where you stop waiting.Topics Discussed"Product owner" vs. "developer" mindset and why it changes how analysts build toolingDefining outcome criteria upfront as the core discipline for AI-assisted developmentHow AI collapses experimentation costs and eliminates dev team dependencyAnalyst-owned toolkits and outcome velocity as a competitive edge for small teamsThe governance risk: product silos, duplicated tooling, and inconsistent standardsFT3 as an open-source framework built to lower the community contribution barrierWhy CISO/board resistance to AI on security grounds will backfireThreat actors are scaling the same way — analyst adaptation is the necessary responseKey Takeaways: The unlock isn't learning to code: it's learning to think backwards from the outcome. Define what success looks like, set the criteria the agent has to meet before it moves on, and stop micromanaging the implementation. That's the product owner shift.Slow down before you build. Spend more time in planning than in execution using deep research across multiple models, comparing outputs, stress-testing the concept before a single line gets written.Drop the subscription and treat the model like a teacher, not a tool. Start with a problem you already understand. Ask it to walk you from zero to fluent. It will tell you to stop thinking like a developer and start thinking like a product owner. If you have a backlog of problems you gave up on because they weren't staffable, go find them. The feasibility question that used to take months to answer now takes an afternoon. Start there.Before your next team planning cycle, map what everyone is building. The duplicate tools are already being written in parallel by people who don't know about each other. Get ahead of it now, because it only compounds.If you're involved in open-source threat intel frameworks, the contribution problem was never motivation, it was friction. The tooling gap is closable. Build the on-ramp and the community will use it.Listen to more episodes: Apple Spotify YouTubeWebsite

What happens when a DPRK IT worker operation lands inside one of your clients, and the three-letter agency you call says they can't show up? Duaine Labno, Director of Special Investigations & Threat Intelligence at TIG Risk Services, walks through exactly that case: his team built a ruse to recover the compromised laptop, staged a physical handoff at corporate HQ, filmed the courier, ran his plates, and traced him to multiple properties. This produced the kind of ground-level intelligence the FBI told him they'd never seen before in a US-based DPRK case. Duaine explains why digital and physical investigations have to run in parallel from day one, not handed off sequentially, and what that looks like operationally when federal resources don't materialize. He also breaks down how post-COVID remote hiring processes that are speed-optimized gave adversaries a repeatable entry point, and why an untrained recruiter doing a soft document check is now a meaningful attack surface for corporate networks.YT Thumbnail title: Remote Hiring Broke Your Security PerimeterTopics discussed:How post-COVID remote hiring processes relaxed identity verification standards and created repeatable enterprise network entry points Running parallel digital and physical investigations simultaneously when tracking identity fraud and insider threatsUsing open-source intelligence and proprietary threat monitoring software to scan millions of data points for suspect behavioral patternsExecuting a live DPRK IT worker case using physical surveillance, a document ruse, and plate runs to identify a U.S.-based operatorWhy untrained recruiters conducting soft document checks have become a meaningful attack surface in corporate hiring pipelinesHow adversaries are weaponizing AI for voice alteration, deepfakes, and document manipulation to bypass hiring and KYC verification processesThe case for vetted, secure cross-industry intelligence sharing platforms to close gaps that individual organizational silos leave openWhere cyber threat intelligence trails end and physical investigation must pick up to produce actionable, court-ready evidenceKey Takeaways: Treat remote hiring pipelines as an active attack surface by pulling security, legal, and HR into the process.Train recruiters to recognize fraudulent identity documents as a first line of defense against adversarial infiltration of corporate networks.Run digital and physical investigations in parallel from the start rather than waiting for cyber analysis to conclude.Build contingency plans for federal non-response into any investigation involving foreign threat actors.Deploy threat monitoring software capable of scanning open-source data at scale to surface behavioral patterns and connections.Establish vetted, secure intelligence sharing relationships with peer organizations and law enforcement to close the visibility gaps.Pressure-test AI-assisted hiring tools against deepfake and voice alteration scenarios before deploying them.Listen to more episodes: Apple Spotify YouTubeWebsite

When Matt McKnew, Senior Manager of Incident Response at Thermo Fisher,  tracked down the Nimda worm in 2001 by analyzing packet captures to identify NetBIOS saturation patterns, threat actors weren't trying to get paid; they were causing disruption. Today, he's defending against ransomware groups that operate like businesses, complete with service models and affiliate networks. Matt explains why Clop's acquisition of six zero-days puts them in APT territory regardless of financial motivation, how attackers now hide in the noise of criminal operations making nation-state activity harder to detect, and why the North Korean IT worker scam succeeds by exploiting weak hiring processes rather than technical vulnerabilities. Topics discussed:Responding to the Nimda worm using packet capture analysis to identify NetBIOS saturation patterns across satellite ISP infrastructureBuilding trusted peer networks for crowdsourcing threat intelligence during active incidents rather than relying solely on formal feedsAnalyzing Clop ransomware's acquisition of six zero-days as evidence of APT-level sophistication despite purely financial motivationImplementing structured incident response documentation and processes to enable faster recovery and more nimble responseEvaluating nation-state threat actors by understanding their 5-year strategic plans and objectives rather than mapping everything to MITRE ATT&CKDeploying agentic AI to standardize analyst work products and maintain consistent intelligence delivery across global security teamsExamining North Korean IT worker infiltration campaigns that exploit weak HR and recruitment processesDifferentiating financially-motivated ransomware operations from nation-state APT campaigns while recognizing blurred lines in TTPsKey Takeaways: Document incident response procedures upfront with standardized policies to reduce response time during active security incidents.Build trusted peer networks across industry for crowdsourcing threat intelligence when formal feeds lack critical real-time information.Evaluate ransomware groups for APT-level capabilities when they acquire multiple zero-days regardless of their financial motivations.Research adversary 5-year strategic plans and national objectives to understand nation state threat actor targeting.Deploy agentic AI systems to standardize analyst work products and maintain consistent intelligence delivery formatting.Strengthen HR and recruitment processes with technical screening questions to defend against North Korean IT worker infiltration.Maintain curiosity and interrogate suspicious indicators until they make complete sense rather than accepting surface-level explanations.Recognize that attackers leverage the same automation and AI capabilities defenders use, requiring equivalent adoption to maintain defensive parity.Listen to more episodes: Apple Spotify YouTubeWebsite

Running CTI at a cyber insurance carrier and across more than tens of thousands of companies forces a triage discipline most programs never need to build. Alex Bovicelli, Senior Director of Threat Intelligence at Tokio Marine HCC, describes how his team scaled by narrowing focus to one thing: the initial access vectors threat actors are actually using right now: not CVSS scores, not spray-and-pray alerts, but underground forum activity, access broker behavior, and credential exposure from info stealer logs that most SMBs have zero visibility into. When a detection fires, his team doesn't just notify, they walk the customer through remediation and confirm the issue is closed, because for a company relying on an MSP with no internal security staff, an alert without support is just noise.The more pointed conversation is about what's not making headlines: thousands of SMBs are getting hit by ransomware every year, and groups like Akira have built a business model specifically around it; high volume, low ransom, staying below the threshold that triggers serious law enforcement attention. Alex explains how those attacks succeed not through sophisticated tradecraft but through SSL VPN brute forcing tools left running unattended, returning thousands of valid credentials against organizations that have no account lockout policies, no MFA on remote access, and no way to know their credentials are already in a log collector somewhere. Topics discussed:Building intelligence-led CTI programs at scale by anchoring detection on initial access vectors, access broker activity, and credential exposureUsing underground forum proximity and info stealer log correlation to identify compromised credentials across thousands of organizationsOperationalizing pre-claim threat intelligence within cyber insurance to eradicate initial access before events generate claimsClosing the alert-to-remediation loop for SMBs by delivering detection, support, and mitigation confirmation as a single workflowHow Akira and similar ransomware groups deliberately target SMBs with high-volume, sub-threshold attacks Rethinking CVSS-based patching prioritization by incorporating criminal exploitability and at-scale attack frequency into triageSeparating AI as an intelligence producer from AI as a report summarizer, where automation could realistically drive patching priorityWhy most external threat feeds leave CTI teams in a retroactive posture, and how incident response data from insurance claims changes thatKey Takeaways: Anchor your CTI program on initial access vectors rather than trying to cover every vulnerability class across your environment.Monitor access broker activity and underground forums to understand which threat actors are actively buying and selling against your industry or infrastructure.Integrate info stealer log analysis into your detection pipeline to identify compromised credentials before threat actors use them for lateral movement or ransomware deployment.Shift your patching prioritization model away from CVSS scores and toward criminal exploitability.Design alerts for smaller IT teams to be remediation-ready on receipt because an alert without a clear next step will not get acted on.Close the loop on every detection by confirming mitigation was completed, not just that the alert was acknowledged.Enforce account lockout policies and MFA on all SSL VPN and remote access entry points as a baseline control.Assess AI tooling for your CTI program on whether it can produce intelligence rather than just consume it through report summarization.Use incident response data from post-claim analysis to validate your pre-claim detection signals.Listen to more episodes: Apple Spotify YouTubeWebsite