Farzan Karimi: We Cut Security Reviews From 3 Days to 10 Minutes With AI | S3 | E2
Security Mondays with Eva BennShow Notes
If you have a hundred findings rated 9.2, which one do you fix first? The score can't tell you. Proof that an attacker can actually exploit it can.
Meanwhile AI is flooding security with new tools. Some are real. Some are snake oil. How do you tell the difference, and what should you measure to understand your real exposure?
Hi, I'm Eva Benn. Every Monday morning I bring you the best global security leaders with practical AI security guidance you can turn into action this week. If you have ever found value in this show, please do me a huge favor, drop me a comment, hit the thumbs up on this video and make sure you are subscribed. This tiny action costs you nothing, but it has a huge impact the entire security community, because it helps bring the voices of some of the most incredible leaders in our industry to more people. Every episode is designed to give you practical things you can go and implement in your organization this week.
I was super stoked to chat with Farzan Karimi, Deputy CISO at Moderna. Farzan has 20+ years in offensive security: he ran the Android red team at Google, was a founding member of the red team at Electronic Arts, and red teamed at Microsoft. At DEF CON 33 he introduced Recursive Request Exploits, nominated for PortSwigger's Top 10 Web Hacking Techniques of 2025, and this summer he scanned 1 million domains and found 2,216 Firebase databases open to the internet. Let's just say he knows what defenders miss.
Share this one with your security, AppSec, engineering, and vulnerability management teams.
I'm doing my part by bringing you some of the best global leaders in the security industry every Monday, with practical tools and resources you can go use this week.
This week, I sat down with Farzan Karimi, Deputy CISO at Moderna.
We talked about separating real AI value from snake oil, prioritizing what is actually exploitable, and measuring real exposure instead of counting findings.
If AI can now find more vulnerabilities than your team will ever fix, is your program still counting findings, or is it tracking attack paths? Tell me in the comments.
If you find this helpful, I'd appreciate a thumbs up, subscribe, and share. It helps more people find the show.
Resources we mention in the video:
Connect with Farzan:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karimi/ - Medium: https://jumpycastle.dev/ - GitHub: https://github.com/jumpycastle
Farzan's research and talks:
- How I Accessed 1,800 Company Livestreams and Uncovered a New Web Exploit Class: RRE: https://jumpycastle.dev/how-i-accessed-1-800-company-livestreams-and-uncovered-a-new-web-exploit-class-rre-f74b7ef996e7
- RRE Burp Suite extension: https://github.com/jumpycastle/rre-burp
- I scanned 1 million domains for Firebase misconfigurations: https://jumpycastle.dev/i-scanned-1-million-domains-for-firebase-misconfigurations-f18c2e0c3f1e
- The 20-second Firebase demo (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7472317351636385792/
- Collaboration for battling security incidents, LWN.net report on his SunSecCon 2026 keynote: https://lwn.net/Articles/1063459/
Other resources:
- PortSwigger Top 10 Web Hacking Techniques of 2025, nominations list: https://portswigger.net/research/top-10-web-hacking-techniques-of-2025-nominations-open - Inside the race to adapt to an AI-powered security world, CyberScoop: https://cyberscoop.com/ai-powered-cybersecurity-mythos-xbow-agentic-pen-testing/ - XBOW's published Moderna customer story (vendor case study): https://xbow.com/customer-stories/moderna
Follow along for more free cybersecurity education.
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More from Security Mondays with Eva Benn
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If you watch one video from Season 2 of Security Mondays, make it this one.10 episodes. Some of the most respected names in cybersecurity. Five themes that kept coming up again and again. I boiled it all down to under 15 minutes, so you can walk away with guidance you can use THIS week.Season 2 is officially a wrap. I got to sit down with leaders from completely different backgrounds, with completely different experiences. And they kept landing on the same five lessons. That's not a coincidence.A huge thank you to the incredible guests who made Season 2 possible:Rob Lee: AI security, cybersecurity fundamentals, and how AI is changing the speed of security.Thomas Rocha: AI threat intelligence and how the threats are changing.Helen Oakley & Dimitri Raidman: AI supply chain security and the risks hiding across the AI stack.Neil Provost: Security invariance, and building security that holds up as environments change.Joshua Copeland: Security theater, and why having a control is NOT the same as proving it works.Heath Adams: The attacker mindset, and thinking like the people trying to break your systems.Josh Bressers: The future of open source and the security challenges it faces.Tim Raines: AI aerospace strategy and the security implications of AI in critical environments.Rob Joyce: Offensive operations, national security, and lessons from decades in the field.Every conversation pointed to the same thing:AI is exposing every weak spot in the security playbook we already had, at a speed and scale we can no longer ignore.The five themes:1. AI changed the speed, not the fundamentals.2. Know what you have and what it can access.3. Assume agents will fail and contain the blast radius.4. Stop believing your security works. Test it.5. Finding vulnerabilities is getting cheap. Fixing them is the hard part.But HOW do you actually use any of this on Monday morning?Don't try to do everything at once. Pick ONE lesson. Put it into practice this week.That's how we roll here.Thank you for watching, commenting, and sharing these episodes with your teams. You made Season 2 what it was, and it has meant the world to me. ❤️Season 3 is coming soon, and we're kicking it off with Dave DeWalt on October 5th. Until then, I'll be here every Monday with practical AI security guidance you can turn into action.Which of the five themes hits closest to home for your team? Tell me in the comments 👇If you enjoyed this episode, I'd really appreciate a subscribe and a thumbs up.Follow along for more free cybersecurity education. 🤗---Want to hear from more voices in AI security? Security Mondays is a proud partner and supporter of the AI Cyber Magazine. Find it in any Lufthansa or Delta lounges. Not traveling soon? Get your copy here: https://aicybermagazine.comFollow along for more free cybersecurity education. 🤗LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evabenn/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evabennofficial/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@evabennofficialWebsite: https://www.evabenn.com/
Hi, I'm Eva Benn. Every Monday morning I bring you some of the best global security leaders to talk through what's actually top of mind, the threats they're seeing, the tools they're using, and the decisions they're making right now. Every episode is designed to give you practical things you can go and implement in your organization this week.This week, I sat down with Rob Joyce, former Director of Cybersecurity at the National Security Agency and founder of Joyce Cyber. We talked about what changed once AI agents could run most of an attack on their own, and the concrete moves a security leader can make this week to keep pace. What you'll walk away with: - What still stops a top-tier attacker, and the one defense to add now. - What changed in AI-enabled offense, and the assumption to drop from your threat model. - How to check if you qualify for the NSA's free cyber services and sign up this week. - The identity audit to run today: phishing-resistant MFA and killing stale accounts. - The one thing to start Monday, and how to know by Friday that you moved. If you find this helpful, I'd appreciate a thumbs up, subscribe, and share. It helps more people find the show. Connect with Rob: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-joyce-b43445116/ ResourcesUSENIX Enigma 2016 — "Disrupting Nation State Hackers" (talk): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDJb8WOJYdA USENIX Enigma 2016 talk page + transcript: https://www.usenix.org/conference/enigma2016/conference-program/presentation/joyce NSA Cybersecurity Collaboration Center (free services, eligibility): https://www.nsa.gov/ccc Anthropic — "Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign" (Nov 2025): https://www.anthropic.com/news/disrupting-AI-espionage Rob Joyce at the Secureframe National Cybersecurity Summit (six moves; AI offense): https://secureframe.com/blog/rob-joyce-dib-cybersecurity Rob Joyce testimony, House Select Committee on the CCP (Mar 5, 2025): https://docs.house.gov/meetings/ZS/ZS00/20250305/117983/HHRG-119-ZS00-Wstate-JoyceR-20250305.pdf XBOW tops HackerOne (2025): https://xbow.com/blog/xbow-on-hackerone-whats-next Chapters:00:00 — Why Hackers Don't Care Who You Are Anymore05:18 — AI Just Changed the Economics of Hacking07:55 — Why Every Organization Is Now a Potential Target10:15 — The Three Defenses You Can't Afford to Ignore17:04 — When AI Agents Become the New Insider Threat20:07 — Why Attackers Can Now Outpace Your Patch Cycle30:01 — The Cryptography Deadline Security Leaders Can't IgnoreWant to hear from more voices in AI security? Security Mondays is a proud partner and supporter of the AI Cyber Magazine. Find it in any Lufthansa or Delta lounges. Not traveling soon? Get your copy here: https://aicybermagazine.comAnd follow along for more free cybersecurity education. 🤗LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evabenn/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evabennofficial/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@evabennofficialWebsite: https://www.evabenn.com/
Hi, I'm Eva Benn. Every Monday morning I bring you some of the best global security leaders to talk through what's actually top of mind, the threats they're seeing, the tools they're using, and the decisions they're making right now. Every episode is designed to give you practical things you can go and implement in your organization this week.Every week there's a new AI security product and a new reason to panic. This episode is the opposite of that. Tim Rains has spent his career figuring out how organizations actually get compromised and which strategies actually hold up, and his take on AI is refreshingly calm: most of what works still works, and the real skill is knowing which few parts of your program AI genuinely breaks.I'm doing my part by bringing you some of the best global leaders in the security industry every Monday, with practical tools and resources you can go use this week.What you'll walk away with:- A clear sense of which parts of your strategy to revisit for AI, and which to leave alone- Where to double down on fundamentals versus where to fund something new- A 90-day change for vulnerability management when discovery and exploitation move at machine speed- The security requirements to set before an AI system reaches production- A way to tier AI use cases by consequence and decide how much autonomy each getsConnect with Tim:- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timrains/Tim's book:- Cybersecurity Strategy for the AI-Driven Era, 3rd ed. (Packt): https://www.packtpub.com/en-us/product/cybersecurity-strategy-for-the-ai-driven-era-9781806028573- Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Cybersecurity-Strategy-AI-Driven-Era-data-driven/dp/1806028573Resources we talked about- Tim on securing AI agents (Okta Executive Exchange): https://www.okta.com/newsroom/articles/adt-ciso-tim-rains-on-why-ai-agent-access-is-crucial-and-risky/- OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, Black Hat 2026 (SC Media): https://www.scworld.com/news/black-hat-2026-openai-reveals-agents-planned-collective-attacks-via-secret-message-board- MITRE ATT&CK: https://attack.mitre.org/- CWE-20, Improper Input Validation (MITRE): https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/20.html- OWASP API Security Top 10: https://owasp.org/API-Security/Chapters00:00 — The AI Shift Every Security Leader Needs to Prepare For03:03 — The Three Security Priorities AI Changes First07:35 — Why AI Can't Be a Separate Security Strategy09:40 — Where Security Budgets Should Go Now13:15 — Why Vulnerability Scanning Is No Longer Enough20:21 — How to Secure AI When Input Can't Be Trusted23:32 — Why AI Autonomy Could Multiply Your RiskFollow along for more free cybersecurity education. 🤗LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evabenn/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evabennofficial/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@evabennofficialWebsite: https://www.evabenn.com/