Noise2Signal

Mehul Revankar
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Business

A cybersecurity podcast. Cyber conversations with more signal, less Noise. Noise2Signal is the antidote to the cybersecurity echo chamber: unfiltered conversations with the people who actually built the field — no buzzword bingo, no vendor pitches.

  1. 4d ago

    Ep 15. The Don of Security Ratings Mafia w/ Aleksandr Yampolskiy

    Alexander Yampolsky didn't set out to invent a category—he just didn't want to get fired for someone else's mistake. As CISO at Gilt Groupe, he watched a fraud-prevention vendor hand over a gorgeous SOC 2 report and then discovered unencrypted credit card data belonging to other customers sitting in their systems. That moment became SecurityScorecard, the company that now scans every IP address on the planet multiple times a day and quietly underwrites a huge chunk of the cyber insurance market. In this episode, Alex—known around the industry as the Don of the security ratings mafia—walks through the unglamorous version of the origin story: the investors who told him security couldn't be measured, the MongoDB decision that haunted his engineers for eight years, the five hours of a stranger's divorce story it took to buy the .com. He also gets refreshingly blunt about why compliance isn't security, why rating pushback is often legitimate, and what happens to the entire discipline when the time-to-exploit window collapses from two years to seconds.

  2. Aug 11

    EP 14. Inside the Verizon DBIR w/ Alex Pinto

    Alex Pinto leads the team behind the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report—the one publication the entire security industry stops and reads every single year. What almost nobody realizes is that the DBIR, now nineteen years old and built on data from over a hundred contributing partners, is written by exactly four people. In this episode, Alex pulls back the curtain on how the sausage actually gets made: the Verizon marketing team that fought tooth and nail to kill the very first edition, the Secret Service handshake that unlocked everyone else's data, and why the team flatly refuses to tell you which vendor supplied which number. He also walks us through the 2026 findings—vulnerability exploitation finally claiming the top spot after a four-year climb, a CISA KEV remediation rate that somehow went down, and shadow AI rocketing into the top three ways confidential data walks out of your building. Plus, the hunt for objective proof that attackers are using AI, why he thinks all of this will sound like business as usual by next year, and a genuinely excellent argument for why ransomware is the yoga pants of cybersecurity.

  3. Aug 11

    EP 11. Building Future of AI-Native Cyber Defense w/ Sasan Padidar

    Sasan is a veteran product builder with over 20 years of cybersecurity experience. In this episode, Sasan shares his journey from creating an early container security startup, navigating an acquisition by Tenable, and eventually building CrowdStrike's cloud security module into a $100M ARR business. We explore the early misconceptions surrounding Docker security, the architectural hurdles of moving legacy on-prem software to the cloud, and a harrowing tale of a $100K crypto-mining AWS bill. Sasan also details his recent pivot to the world of AI, explaining why human hype is often worse than AI hallucinations, how AI is fundamentally changing the speed of cyber attacks, and why defenders must rebuild their architectures to survive the next generation of threats.

  4. Aug 5

    EP 13. Vulnerability Research is Not Cooked w/ Thomas Dullien (Halvar Flake)

    Thomas Dullien—better known to the cybersecurity world as the legendary Halvar Flake—didn't just participate in the early cracking scene; he helped define it. As a computing mathematician and the mastermind behind BinDiff, Thomas revolutionized how we understand silent patches and reverse engineering. He eventually sold his pioneering company, Zynamics, to Google, but the journey was anything but smooth. In this episode, we get a no-holds-barred look at his origin story, why building a business around reverse engineering is a massive headache, and the excruciating reality of early tech M&As. Plus, Thomas delivers a sobering, provocative take on how agentic AI and infinite compute are about to rewrite the rules of vulnerability research—and why the human element isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

  5. Jul 1

    EP 12. Building Companies, Culture, & Cyber Offense and Defense in the Age of AI w/ Ron Gula'

    Ron Gula is a cybersecurity pioneer, venture capitalist, and the visionary founder behind Tenable. Having bootstrapped his way to a $50 million Series A and scaled one of the industry's most recognizable brands, Ron has witnessed the highs and lows of company building. In this episode, we explore the authentic culture he established during Tenable's early days, the critical mistakes founders make when pitching venture capital, and the shifting landscape of building startups in the AI era. Ron details the strict rules of his famous "five-slide pitch deck," explains why AI wrappers are simply integrators rather than innovators, and warns that CISOs must take charge of AI operations before they are replaced by automated platforms. In our in-depth discussion, Ron shares: [00:04:21] Shaping Tenable's early culture with Cyndi Gula and Renaud Deraison. [00:08:10] Offering a junior employee a 4-day workweek during the 2008 crisis. [00:09:55] Talking a customer out of buying unneeded vulnerability scanners. [00:17:05] Creating "V-Ron," an unfiltered 3D avatar for controversial opinions. [00:22:44] Secondary sales that enrich employees versus traditional VC rounds. [00:24:51] Why sub-$1M ARR startups raising $30M rounds is a major red flag. [00:27:15] The strict "five-slide pitch deck" methodology to secure funding. [00:35:08] Pitching mistakes: leading with advisor names instead of solutions. [00:37:51] The danger of AI wrappers: becoming an integrator, not an innovator. [00:45:56] The impending platformization and consolidation of cybersecurity. [00:52:34] Predicting the replacement of CISOs by AI operations and MSSPs. [00:52:58] Why CISOs must aggressively lobby to run internal AI operations. [00:57:40] Why cyber hygiene fails against nation-states, requiring air gaps. [00:59:25] The economic realities of rising ransomware costs and falling payouts. [01:04:23] The future of AI-Native offense and Defense

  6. Jun 15

    EP 10. The Creation of Exposure Management Category w/ Jennifer Johnson

    JJ is an elite marketing visionary and category creator, shaping the narrative for cybersecurity giants like Tanium, Tenable, and CrowdStrike. In this episode, we pull back the curtain on the birth of the "Exposure Management" category at Tenable, exploring the strategic shift from legacy vulnerability management to holistic risk framing pre-IPO. JJ breaks down the "magic triangle" of category creation, the delicate dance of gaining executive and sales alignment, and the critical role industry analysts like Gartner play. We also dive into the future of marketing, the massive disruption of agentic AI, and how emerging technologies are spawning entirely new cybersecurity categories like AIDR. In our in-depth discussion, JJ shares: 00:02:57 - Earning a reputation as an elite CMO at Tanium, Tenable, and CrowdStrike.00:04:05 - Identifying as a CMO first and a category creator second.00:08:24 - Utilizing the "magic triangle" from Play Bigger for category design.00:10:09 - Expanding Tenable's vision beyond the traditional vulnerability management market.00:13:46 - Shifting the conversation from point-in-time compliance to continuous risk.00:15:00 - The internal naming debate between "Cyber Exposure" and "Exposure Management".00:16:29 - The tension between vendor innovation and analyst-defined categories.00:22:40 - Unveiling Tenable's new identity with a dramatic, sensory presentation.00:25:01 - Securing executive alignment by finding the correct problem narrative.00:30:55 - Overcoming sales team friction when introducing a multi-year category vision.00:34:10 - Validating the new exposure narrative with forward-leaning advisory customers.00:35:29 - Driving M&A product strategy to cover the entire IT and OT attack surface.00:40:43 - The milestone moment when Gartner officially adopted the Exposure Management category.00:41:42 - The future convergence of threat and exposure management in the era of Frontier AI.00:44:47 - Debating if Agentic AI represents a new category or just an existing feature.00:45:22 - How AI expands attack surfaces and spawns new categories like AIDR.00:48:33 - Why human judgment and the "human in the loop" remain strictly essential.00:50:23 - Orchestrating cross-functional marketing workflows with AI agents.00:55:01 - Embracing an AI-assisted interior design hobby outside of cybersecurity.

  7. Jun 7

    EP 9. Do AI or Be Replaced by AI w/ Craig Adams. AI-Native Future of Cyber Offense, Defense & PM

    Craig Adams is a seasoned cybersecurity product leader with over 20 years of experience building and scaling industry-defining tools. Having served as the Chief Product Officer at Rapid7 and Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Recorded Future, Craig has steered some of the most prominent teams in enterprise tech through massive evolutionary shifts. In this episode, we unpack how the age of AI has fundamentally rewritten the roles of product management, user experience, and software engineering. Craig challenges the "SaaS apocalypse" narrative, explains why AI-generated code will cause an exponential explosion of vulnerabilities, and argues why human information security teams will actually grow in size to handle the complex, agentic future of tech. In our in-depth discussion, Craig shares: 00:04:01 - Why the traditional waterfall requirements document is dead in the age of AI. 00:05:40 - How the role of the software engineer is transitioning to architectural oversight. 00:06:19 - The core strategy differences between running B2B and B2C product management. 00:07:28 - The merging lines between PM and UX design systems. 00:08:58 - Why the role of the prompt engineer has already gone out of fashion. 00:10:06 - Walking the floor at RSA and the problem with copycat cybersecurity marketing. 00:12:03 - The shift from SEO to AEO (AI Engine Optimization) for scraping agents. 00:13:12 - The rise of sandbox-driven trial loops and the death of human-led software demos. 00:14:46 - Buying enterprise AI subscriptions purely on self-serve product value. 00:16:13 - Facing the "Mythos" vulnerability hype and how AI disrupts raw discovery. 00:19:23 - Why putting 5x more findings into a discovery bucket is an unsustainable model. 00:21:52 - Reframing the cybersecurity dilemma as an implementation problem. 00:22:59 - How AI is binarily decreasing the time to exploitation for attackers. 00:25:00 - A religious-level conviction that the number of human defenders will grow, not shrink. 00:27:35 - Why entry-level information security roles are in the center of the AI bullseye. 00:29:48 - The new reality of writing functional exploits using simple natural language prompts. 00:32:31 - Debunking the idea that AI-generated code will plateau software exposures. 00:33:32 - Shifting defender terminology to focus on "toxic combinations" rather than simple patching. 00:35:13 - Redefining SaaS software: Either you embed AI or you get replaced by it. 00:36:06 - Navigating the inequality between well-funded banks and under-budgeted municipalities. 00:39:49 - Why security teams who block AI usage will ultimately hinder their enterprise. 00:40:14 - Moving past the chatbot era of 2023 into true automated agency. 00:41:57 - The dramatic leapfrog analogy: Treating the adoption of AI like switching from mail to email. 00:44:23 - Dismantling the platformization myth of "one security platform to rule them all." 00:45:47 - The thesis behind why the next trillion-dollar tech giant will be a services organization. 00:48:00 - Predicting a renaissance of software-like margins inside the IT services industry. 00:49:56 - Automating lower-value tier-one analyst tasks to focus on higher maturity journeys.

  8. Jun 1

    EP 8. The Buyer's Seat w/ Aysha Khan. Inside the Mind of CISOs Buying in AI Era

    Aysha is a technology executive with over 25 years in cybersecurity, most recently serving as CISO and CIO at Treasure Data. Known for her "spiritual CISO" persona, she blends deep operational experience with a monk-like clarity — cutting through vendor noise with equal parts wisdom and candor. In this episode, we explore the frustrations behind her Buyer's Seat series, the chronic delivery problem plaguing the cybersecurity industry, and a no-holds-barred look at how buyers actually evaluate, adopt, and renew software. Aysha shares her structured vendor evaluation process, what "fantasy math" ROI really signals, and how AI is fundamentally reshaping how she leads her team.

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
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About

A cybersecurity podcast. Cyber conversations with more signal, less Noise. Noise2Signal is the antidote to the cybersecurity echo chamber: unfiltered conversations with the people who actually built the field — no buzzword bingo, no vendor pitches.

Information

  • Creator
    Mehul Revankar
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    15
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Mehul Revankar
  • Show Website
    Noise2Signal

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