Show Notes
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 [email protected].
More from Cyber Voices
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.