7 SECURITY.COM The Podcast Moments That Still Haunt Us
For those of us who like a tinge of thrill with their threat intel
- In 2026, SECURITY.COM The Podcast shed light on some truly unsettling global threats cybersecurity experts are tracking.
- From nation-state cyberwarfare and agentic AI to the surveillance state, these sharp conversations remain very relevant to our current threat landscape.
- Whether you’re queuing up episodes for a business flight or a long commute, these moments are worth revisiting, if only for a quick chill down your spine.
This year’s horrors have felt less like things that go bump in the night and more like something arguably worse: humans gone bad. While monster features still have their place, 2026’s biggest horror flicks lean on psychological dread, physical trauma, and far too-real social anxieties. The line between monster and human has blurred, with breakout films like Obsession finding their terror in what regular people are capable of when greed and desire go too far. As art imitates life, it’s no surprise this shift mirrors a lot of existing fears in cybersecurity.
Some moms listen to true crime stories on the way to work after dropping off the kids. You could say I do too. SECURITY.COM The Podcast covered some truly hair-raising cyber crimes this year: nation-states lurking inside critical infrastructure, questionably rogue AI wreaking havoc, privacy infringements left and right, and security teams drowning in the very data meant to protect them.
These seven quotes across the podcast’s 2026 season were the ones that kept me up at night.
We're seeing nation states using cyber as the first strike in actual kinetic warfare.
From Hoodies to Headlines: The Evolution of Cybersecurity PR with W2 Communications
Tony Wells, co-founder of W2 Communications, has been in cybersecurity long enough to remember a time without SEC disclosure rules and scary cyber headlines. But that’s no longer the case. Nation-states aren’t waiting around for missiles to fly before making their move anymore. Front and center, cyber operations are now starting wars, well before anyone called it one. How’s that for unsettling?
We discovered a campaign where they were trying to get into utility companies in the US…just to have that capability in reserve if they ever needed it.
From 2026 Threat Predictions
Imagine knowing someone has access to your home—uninvited and completely unnoticed, living in the hidden spaces right beneath your feet. Much like the eerie, secret survival hidden inside the house in Parasite, according to Threat Hunter O’Brien more attackers are targeting access just to have it. From there, this episode’s predictions only get more uncomfortable, with some of it already having come to pass. They may not have a crystal ball, but O’Brien saw enough coming to make these predictions worth a second listen.
The real risk, when a war breaks out, is what they’ll do with that access next.
From Iran's Cyberwarfare Playbook: What Defenders Need to Know Right Now
Dick O’Brien blows past headlines to shed light on what’s actually happening inside networks during the Iran conflict, reminding us the teams that gain access aren’t necessarily the ones who’ll use it to cause damage. If access can be reserved and handed over until the most opportune moment, who knows what’s waiting on the other side of that foothold?
My long-term prediction and concern is that someone gets to the point of using agent AI to build a zero-day canon, at which point we're gonna have a bad day.
From AI-Hacking: Red vs. Blue
In this episode, Dan Mellinger, Paul Miller and Dick O’Brien open the can of worms on AI shifting from just helping attackers’ productivity to making decisions for them. As the possibility of fully autonomous AI attacks looms on everyone’s minds (the robopocalypse, if you will), O’Brien shares his own predictions of what could actually happen. Full disclosure: it’s not exactly the reassurance you might hope for.
We're completely in the dark as to who's behind it.
From The Parasite in the Machine: Unmasking the Speagle Infostealer
Those are not words anyone wants to hear, but it’s O’Brien’s job to keep it real. He shares how he came upon Speagle Infostealer, a malware with an uncanny knack for finding exactly what it’s looking for. I’ll leave the grittier details for the true crime genre fans to discover in this threat intel download.
We can get people's locations and patterns of life and everything else without ever having to get a warrant, for just a couple of bucks.
From Personal Privacy with Electronic Frontier Foundations (EFF)
Dan Mellinger and Paul Miller bring on Cooper Quinton of the EFF to explain how the surveillance ecosystem evolved from tracking what we click to collecting where we go, what apps we use, and the patterns of our daily lives. The part that really brings a chill: That personal information can be cheaply bought by law enforcement and advertisers, putting an incredibly detailed picture of anyone’s life within reach without so much as a warrant. But the creep factor doesn’t end there. Quinton delves into what happens as the devices we carry every day become part of a much larger surveillance network.
You end up with stale alerts, stale correlations, data that's building up that you're paying for but not using.
From The Death of SIEM
This one might hit a little closer to home for practitioners in the field. After all, SIEM was supposed to be the nerve center of the SOC. Instead, many teams ended up with an expensive log warehouse that generates more noise than signal. Dan and Justin Falck unpack how we got there, from SIEM’s original promise to the hordes of stale alerts and correlations now piling up behind it. Because with every mountain of yesterday’s alerts, teams lose precious time looking for today’s attack. As if attackers needed yet another advantage.
It's also a compelling case for a different approach to threat detection—one Symantec CBX takes by connecting endpoint, network, and data security signals in a single platform.
Keep the lights on
These moments shake us because of how particularly dystopian or nightmareish they sound. The problem is, none of them are fiction.
That’s what makes the ghost stories on SECURITY.COM The Podcast worth revisiting around the campfire. Our expert guests aren’t whispering tales of lurking monsters that could haunt the dark—they’re revealing the digital phantoms they’re actively hunting, tracking, and exorcising before the next nightmare strikes your network.
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