Beyond CVSS With EPSS, SSVC, And Real Attack Signals (Brandon Parsons & Pedro Kertzman)

Beyond CVSS With EPSS, SSVC, And Real Attack Signals (Brandon Parsons & Pedro Kertzman)

CVSS can scream “critical” while the real risk in your environment is quietly sitting somewhere else and threat actors know it. We sit down with Brandon, a former United States Marine Corps intelligence specialist and longtime cyber threat intelligence practitioner, to get brutally practical about what actually drives smart vulnerability prioritization in 2025.  We talk through why vulnerability management is so hard at scale, where EPSS and SSVC help (and where they can mislead), and why the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog is a solid baseline but not the standard by itself. Brandon shares the products he screens for because attackers keep coming back to them: Citrix NetScaler, VMware ESXi and vCenter, Veeam Backup and Replication, Fortinet, Ivanti, file transfer tools, RMM software, and high-impact on-prem deployments. The throughline is adversary incentive: if taking out backups or gaining initial access raises the odds of a payout, expect fast “dogpiling” once research and proof of concept exploits hit the public.  Then we pivot into the phishing and social engineering wave: device code phishing kits that steal refresh tokens and access tokens, Microsoft Teams phishing that abuses trust, callback phishing that hides the danger in a phone number, and the growing use of burnable infrastructure like workers.dev and pages.dev. We also dig into the dark web economy behind phishing as a service and why some groups are literally hiring English-speaking social engineers.  Subscribe, share this with a teammate who owns patching or identity, and leave a review so more defenders can find the show. What’s the one vulnerability or phishing tactic you’re most worried about right now? Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432798/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://buymeacoffee.com/ctipodcast] Thanks for tuning in! If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. Got thoughts or questions? Connect with us on our LinkedIn Group: Cyber Threat Intelligence Podcast—we’d love to hear from you. If you know anyone with CTI expertise that would like to be interviewed in the show, just let us know. Until next time, stay sharp and stay secure!

From Law Enforcement To Adversary Intelligence In Modern Banking (Eric Huber & Pedro Kertzman)

Telegram isn’t just where fraud gets discussed, it’s where entire criminal markets operate in the open. I sit down with Eric Huber, who leads adversary intelligence and disruption work at TD Bank Group, to map how cyber-enabled financial crime really works today: the blend of fraud, payments, cybersecurity, cryptocurrency, and now AI. If you’ve ever wondered why CTI in banking feels different than “classic” threat intel, this conversation makes the overlap tangible and practical. We get into what Eric is seeing in Southeast Asia focused fraud ecosystems, including why the scale on Telegram can be overwhelming and how to find signal without drowning in noise. We talk about the reality of doing OSINT in a regulated financial services environment, where legal, privacy, vendor reviews, and governance controls are not red tape but part of doing investigations safely. Along the way, Eric shares a simple approach that works: start with a few sources, iterate, validate with peers, and keep your assumptions testable. From there, we connect the dots between telecom and banking with SIM swap attacks, insider risk, and why phone number takeover is still a fast path to account takeover and crypto theft. We also explore cryptocurrency fraud and blockchain analysis, including how public ledger data can help you evaluate criminal tooling and payment flows. Finally, we dig into AI in cybersecurity: where it accelerates analysis, where hallucinations can mislead teams, and why human QA and strong data handling matter more than ever. Subscribe, share this with a teammate, and leave a review if it helps. What part of the fraud and cyber threat landscape do you want us to unpack next? Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432798/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://buymeacoffee.com/ctipodcast] Thanks for tuning in! If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. Got thoughts or questions? Connect with us on our LinkedIn Group: Cyber Threat Intelligence Podcast—we’d love to hear from you. If you know anyone with CTI expertise that would like to be interviewed in the show, just let us know. Until next time, stay sharp and stay secure!

From Ransomware Matrices To Actionable Threat Actor Profiles (Will Thomas & Pedro Kertzman)

The fastest way to fall behind in cybersecurity is to stay reactive while attackers iterate in real time. We sit down with Will Thomas, known across the CTI community as “BushidoToken” to get practical about what actually helps defenders: threat actor profiling that is repeatable, actionable, and built for change. We start with how Will builds community-ready resources like the ransomware tool matrix and his threat actor profiling guide, then zoom into the Conti leaks and what hundreds of thousands of internal ransomware messages can teach us. From “salary day” breakdowns to operator behavior during major incidents, we talk about why these datasets are a gold mine and how to avoid getting lost in the volume. Will shares a concrete workflow for large-scale analysis using JSON exports, regex searches, CyberChef, and Elasticsearch so you can extract IOCs, wallets, infrastructure clues, and the higher-level “so what” that drives detections and threat hunting. From there, we shift into emerging threats and modern intrusion tradecraft: hacktivism that ranges from empty noise to destructive campaigns, EDR bypass techniques like bring-your-own vulnerable drivers and “EDR-on-EDR” tactics, and the steady rise of legitimate tools abused for access. We also dig into identity-led attacks where stolen credentials, social engineering, and SSO platforms like Okta can make endpoint controls less decisive. Finally, we unpack threat intelligence exchange beyond IOC feeds, including why STIX/TAXII still matters, how data quality and freshness drive results, and why a bidirectional TIP and SIEM relationship enables better correlation and “sightings.” Subscribe, share the episode with your team, and leave a review, then tell us: what part of your threat intelligence program needs the biggest upgrade right now? Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432798/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://buymeacoffee.com/ctipodcast] Thanks for tuning in! If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. Got thoughts or questions? Connect with us on our LinkedIn Group: Cyber Threat Intelligence Podcast—we’d love to hear from you. If you know anyone with CTI expertise that would like to be interviewed in the show, just let us know. Until next time, stay sharp and stay secure!

From Shiny PDFs To Decisions In CTI - Season 2 - Episode 5 (Joshua Copeland & Pedro Kertzman)

Most organizations say they “do CTI,” but what they really have is a pile of threat feeds, glossy reports, and alerts nobody trusts. We sit down with Joshua Copeland, cybersecurity executive, board advisor, and creator of the Unpopular Opinion series, to get brutally practical about what cyber threat intelligence should be: decision support that changes behavior inside a real security program. We talk through what it looks like to operationalize threat intelligence in security operations and threat hunting, including a trap that catches even mature teams: tuning everything around a baseline that might include attacker behavior. If a threat actor moves low and slow, “normal” network traffic can quietly become the attack. Joshua shares how strong CTI teams use frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to turn a single piece of intel into targeted hunts, better detections, and smarter prioritization instead of endless IOC matching that breaks the moment infrastructure changes. The conversation also goes upstream into hiring and leadership. We dig into why certifications and degrees can’t substitute for critical thinking, how to interview with open ended scenarios that reveal real judgment, and how state level fusion centers can help public sector teams share actionable guidance. We also unpack why ransomware hits schools and why student data can be the real prize, then shift to the business case: translating CTI into risk reduction, downtime avoidance, insurance impact, and clear ROI. We close with a grounded take on AI in cybersecurity: it can add speed, but only with tight guardrails, source checking, and humans staying accountable. If you found this valuable, subscribe, share the episode with your team, and leave a review so more practitioners can find it. Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432798/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://buymeacoffee.com/ctipodcast] Thanks for tuning in! If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. Got thoughts or questions? Connect with us on our LinkedIn Group: Cyber Threat Intelligence Podcast—we’d love to hear from you. If you know anyone with CTI expertise that would like to be interviewed in the show, just let us know. Until next time, stay sharp and stay secure!

Precision Over Volume: Rethinking Threat Feeds For Real-World Impact (Sergio Albea & Pedro Kertzman)

Ever wonder why your TI platform ingests thousands of new indicators a day and still finds almost nothing useful? We dig into the gap between volume and relevance with Sergio Albea of SWITCH, who built a simple, powerful framework to make IOCs matter for real users in real environments. The idea is direct: score every indicator by system, language, location, and sector so your detections match the way attackers actually operate. We walk through practical examples that flip the match rate from near-zero to meaningful hits. A URL mentioning Zurich or SBB scores higher for Swiss campuses. German or French lures outrank Spanish in that context. Mac fleets discount Windows-themed bait. Subject lines about research grants and student loans rise to the top. With that context, Sergio operationalizes Match4 using Azure Logic Apps to run KQL collectors, aggregates indicators in MISP, and pushes high-confidence URLs into Microsoft Defender TI Indicators to stop access at the endpoint—vital for students traveling worldwide. The impact grows as signals are shared. When one university sees a malicious domain, neighbors with similar language and services often see it next, revealing how threat actors campaign by sector. By centralizing across European NRENs, the team builds a living, education-focused threat feed you can’t buy off the shelf. Bonus: the data now surfaces cross-org targeting patterns, extends IOC lifetimes for “golden tickets,” and preserves history for threat hunting long after default telemetry ages out. If you’re tired of bloated, generic feeds and want precise detections that block real attacks, this conversation lays out the roadmap: prioritize relevance, automate collection, enforce at endpoints, and collaborate across your sector. Grab Sergio’s open-source templates on GitHub, start with a few collectors, and score for your environment—education, healthcare, finance, or beyond. Subscribe for more CTI strategies, share this with your team, and leave a review to help others find the show. Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2432798/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://buymeacoffee.com/ctipodcast] Thanks for tuning in! If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, share, and leave a review. Got thoughts or questions? Connect with us on our LinkedIn Group: Cyber Threat Intelligence Podcast—we’d love to hear from you. If you know anyone with CTI expertise that would like to be interviewed in the show, just let us know. Until next time, stay sharp and stay secure!