Cyber Voices

Australian Information Security Association (AISA)

Welcome to CYBER VOICES, where we highlight and celebrate the diverse voices of the Australian cyber community. From top-ranking CISOs and government officials to threat hunters and vulnerability analysts, if there’s a voice to be heard, you’ll hear it on CYBER VOICES. Join us as we delve into the stories, insights, and expertise that shape the world of cybersecurity in Australia.

  1. 1d ago

    You’re Not Broken: Michalina Lisik on Discovering Autism as an Adult in Tech

    Mish Lisik spent years doing everything right and still watching her peers get promoted ahead of her. In this episode of Cyber Voices, host David Savva-Willett sits down with his former colleague to talk about the moment that question turned from "what is wrong?" to "what is wrong with me?", and how discovering she is autistic as an adult changed her career in tech. Mish is a technology strategy manager, sessional academic and advocate for disability and neurodiversity confidence in organisations. She shares what her research with 20 late diagnosed adults found about work before and after, why all 14 who changed careers moved into advocacy, and why autistic people are less susceptible to the bystander effect, along with practical advice for leaders who want to support neurodivergent colleagues without overcomplicating it. This episode is less about cyber security and more about the people who do it. It includes discussion of depression and mental health. If anything brings something up for you, Lifeline is available on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636. Cyber Voices is the official podcast of the Australian Information Security Association. Share your feedback at cybervoices@aisa.org.au.

  2. 6d ago

    Confessions of a Friendly Hacker: Keren Elazari on Why We Still Need Human Hackers

    Recorded on the CyberCon 2026 expo floor in Melbourne, this episode sees host David Savva-Willett sit down with Keren Elazari, the friendly hacker, the day after her keynote closed out day one of the conference. Keren is the founder of BSidesTLV and Leading Cyber Ladies, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University, and the speaker behind one of TED's most watched talks on why the world needs hackers. Twelve years on from that talk, Keren explains how AI has shrunk the time it takes to find and exploit a vulnerability from months to hours, and why defenders will never win a speed race with the machines. Her answer is to invest in people: more human creativity, more technical literacy and more defenders who think like hackers. She unpacks how state backed groups linked to China and Russia are combining patience with AI, shares two hacker habits every defender can steal, and gives her take on the OpenAI agents that cheated a cyber security benchmark and broke into Hugging Face, including why it took humans to work out what had happened. There is plenty of fun along the way, from The Matrix and Asimov to a Star Trek SQL injection, before Keren talks about the role models who brought her into hacking and leaves the Australian community with some simple parting advice. Cyber Voices is the official podcast of the Australian Information Security Association. Share your feedback at cybervoices@aisa.org.au.

    Confessions of a Friendly Hacker: Keren Elazari on Why We Still Need Human Hackers

  3. Oct 19

    Empowered Together: AISA Chair Michael Burchell on the Road to 2030

    Recorded on day three of CyberCon 2026 in Melbourne, the first episode of the Cyber Voices CyberCon series brings AISA Chair Michael Burchell back into the booth with host David Savva-Willett. Close to 5,800 delegates came through the doors this year, a record for the conference, and the pair reflect on what made it work: a program with a record number of speakers presenting for the first time, a deliberate focus on cyber while a global trend pulls conferences towards AI, and a community that turns up to share what it has learned. Michael also unpacks the AISA 2030 Vision and Strategy, unveiled at CyberCon. He explains how it was shaped through consultation with members, the vision of a digital world that is a safe place, and the five pillars that support it: leadership, impact, learning, engagement and resilience. He then walks through the horizons that take the association from today's baseline to 2030, and how members can have their say over the coming months. Cyber Voices is the official podcast of the Australian Information Security Association. Share your feedback at cybervoices@aisa.org.au.

    Empowered Together: AISA Chair Michael Burchell on the Road to 2030

  4. Oct 18

    Swag as a Hidden Attack Vector, with David Hill

    There was a pen on the table at a workshop. Placed next to an unlocked phone, it opened the browser and loaded the facilitator’s website, with nobody tapping anything and nobody agreeing to anything. David Hill was in the room, at the back, and what he noticed first was the noise. When the facilitator stopped to explain why people had started talking, the reaction arrived in two parts: delight at a clever piece of marketing kit, then unease at what it had just done without being asked. Recorded at AdelaideSEC, David joins David Savva-Willett to describe what happened next. He is an export adviser with the South Australian Department of State Development rather than a security practitioner, speaking here in a personal capacity, and he is open about how long he spent working out whether he was even entitled to take the pen apart, and what the right thing to do about it was. Taking it apart revealed an NFC tag under the sleeve at the top. It also revealed that the tag had been left writable, so anyone who pocketed one could change where it pointed. He worked out how to do that from a search engine and a free app, with no prior experience of either. The conversation covers why a workshop is precisely the room where your guard is lowest; why NFC has no equivalent of a Wi-Fi password, a Bluetooth PIN or the deliberate act of pointing a camera at a QR code; how cheaply programmable tags can be bought in bulk; and the finding he considers most important, which is that the phone most likely to react is the personal one nobody manages or trains anyone about. He also describes how he raised it with the facilitator, in the first break, as an attendee asking about informed consent rather than an expert catching someone out.

    Swag as a Hidden Attack Vector, with David Hill

  5. Sep 30

    Your Company Through the Eyes of an Info Stealer, with Jesse Hoppo

    Information stealing malware is not new and not sophisticated. That is precisely what worries Jesse Hoppo, who leads the open source intelligence and cyber crime team within Telstra's Threat Research and Intelligence Group, and who spends a good deal of his time reading what these things send home. Recorded at AdelaideSEC, Jesse joins David Savva-Willett after his talk on what an organisation looks like through an info stealer's eyes. He explains how the malware arrives, usually by persuading someone to run a command themselves rather than through any exploit, and what a single log actually holds: browser credentials, session cookies, clipboard contents, search history, a screenshot of the desktop, whatever documents looked interesting. His central reframe is that the useful question is not what an attacker can do with a stolen password, but what they can do as that person. He also describes the browser password sync problem that quietly carries corporate credentials onto home machines, the exposure a single employee device can create, and the hardest question he has tried to answer for a large organisation: where are all the places your people can log in and access data? The conversation closes on what actually helps, for organisations and for individuals, including why he would rather you used any dedicated password manager than the one built into your browser.

    Your Company Through the Eyes of an Info Stealer, with Jesse Hoppo

  6. Sep 24

    Agentic GRC and the Limits of AI, with Ian Yip and Jack Hedges

    Governance, risk and compliance generates a great deal of manual work, and not all of it is work anyone would miss. Ian Yip's argument is that this is exactly where AI earns its place in a security team, provided nobody mistakes it for judgment. Ian is the founder and CEO of Avertro, the company behind the cyber and AI governance platform CyberHQ, and he recently delivered a standing room only session on agentic GRC at Infosecurity Europe in London. He joins David Savva-Willett along with Jack Hedges, a strategic account executive at Avertro who works with security leaders across Australia. Ian sets out a way of thinking rather than a technology: build an agentic team the way you would build a human one, as an org chart of narrow specialists that collaborate, because models do their best work when given one task rather than many. Chained together and scheduled, that team absorbs the evidence collection, the framework crosswalks and the board reporting, leaving the humans the work they would rather be doing. What cannot be delegated is taste, which Ian describes as the ability to look at what a model hands back and know what to strip away. The conversation covers how much of GRC is theatre and which of that is still necessary for auditability, why he believes everyone is now a builder, what European regulators do differently and why their real effect is on budgets rather than behaviour, and Jack's view from the field, where a lack of visibility over what staff are already using has overtaken cyber GRC as the pressing concern.

    Agentic GRC and the Limits of AI, with Ian Yip and Jack Hedges

  7. Sep 16

    Are ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini Useful in a Breach Investigation? with Josh Lemon

    Threat actors are already using large language models to accelerate the early stages of a compromise. Josh Lemon wanted to know what the same tools could do for the responders on the other side. Recorded at AdelaideSEC 2026, David Savva-Willett speaks with Josh Lemon, Chief of Digital Forensics and Incident Response at SoteriaSec and a SANS principal instructor, immediately after his talk on that question. Josh has been putting the major models in front of forensic evidence for years, and reports real movement: where they once sent an inexperienced analyst off in entirely the wrong direction, they now answer factual questions reliably. What they still lack is the creativity to ask why something is wrong, or what a threat actor is likely to do next. The discussion ranges across where LLMs are genuinely saving hours in a SOC, from one off Python tooling to threat intelligence summaries to executive status updates; a response Josh received that read unmistakably like vendor advertising; why he warns his students that an AI written report may one day be read by an expert witness in court; how MCP servers are being folded into SANS forensics classes; and whether any of this helps with the on call burden and burnout that have dogged the profession for years. It closes on the exchange every responder knows by heart, where no evidence of exfiltration gets heard as no exfiltration, and Josh's observation about what a model eager to please would say if a lawyer asked it the same question.

    Are ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini Useful in a Breach Investigation? with Josh Lemon

  8. Sep 9

    AI Agents as Workers, with Sharon Hunneybell

    Most organisations still treat AI agents as software. Their staff do not. Agents are being used as colleagues, confidants and co-developers; they are being handed access to multiple systems, and a good number of them belong to proof-of-concept projects that quietly ended without anyone shutting off the credentials. Recorded at AdelaideSEC, David Savva-Willett speaks with Sharon Hunneybell, VP of Products at FirstWave, ahead of her talk on a governance framework for AI agents as workers. Sharon describes realising midway through writing that framework that she had missed a step, and that discovery has to come before onboarding, because these things arrive in the workplace unannounced and increasingly as features inside software that is already approved. The conversation covers where accountability sits when an agent acts, why access should be task-based and time-limited rather than granted to one broad agent, how far traditional HR frameworks actually translate, and what Sharon expects from regulation over the coming months. It closes on her practical checklist: give every agent its own identity, log what it does, scope its access to a single task, review it on a schedule, and know how to offboard it before you build it.

    AI Agents as Workers, with Sharon Hunneybell
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About

Welcome to CYBER VOICES, where we highlight and celebrate the diverse voices of the Australian cyber community. From top-ranking CISOs and government officials to threat hunters and vulnerability analysts, if there’s a voice to be heard, you’ll hear it on CYBER VOICES. Join us as we delve into the stories, insights, and expertise that shape the world of cybersecurity in Australia.

Information

  • Creator
    Australian Information Security Association (AISA)
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    92
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright AISA
  • Show Website
    Cyber Voices

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