Behind the Binary by Google Cloud Security
Hosted by Josh Stroschein
Hour-long conversations with the reverse engineers who build the tools and crack the malware everyone else studies.
- Level
- Expert, assumes deep technical background
- Status
- Active, last episode
- Who's behind it
- Vendor-run, Google Cloud sourcePublished as a Google Cloud Security show; the feed lists host Josh Stroschein as owner.
- Last verified
- Transcripts for some episodes
Listed underThreat intel and newsOffensive security
Editorial take
Behind the Binary is the best podcast for anyone learning or doing reverse engineering. Josh Stroschein, a reverse engineer on Google's FLARE team, interviews the people behind the field's tools and techniques: the creators of x64dbg, YARA-X, and Binary Ninja, Windows internals author Pavel Yosifovich, Project Zero's Seth Jenkins on a Pixel 9 zero-click chain. Episodes run about an hour and mix career story with real technical depth on obfuscation, debugging, binary similarity, and EDR internals. Annual FLARE-On episodes give a useful window into the challenge. Google owns the show but the guest list ranges well beyond Google. The cost is time and background: this assumes you know what a debugger and a disassembler do, and it releases roughly monthly.
Last hand-checked 2026-09-30.
Listen if you …
- are learning malware analysis or reverse engineering and want role models and tool context
- play FLARE-On or other reversing CTFs
- want deep Windows, macOS, or mobile internals from practitioners
Skip if you …
- you are new to security, the technical floor is high
- you want short episodes or current threat news, most run close to an hour
Start with these 3 episodes
- 01
EP01 Nick Harbour - Early Days of Incident Response, Mandiant History and FLARE-ON
· 65 min · Practitioner
The founding story of FLARE-On and Mandiant's reversing culture, the most accessible way in.
- 02
· 62 min · Expert
Shows how code reuse becomes attribution evidence, linking reversing work to nation-state threat intel.
- 03
EP26 When AI Features Create Zero-Click Exploits: The Pixel 9 Chain with Seth Jenkins
· 59 min · Expert
A Project Zero exploit chain walked through by its author, the show's technical high point.
About the show
Behind the Binary is published under the Google Cloud Security name and hosted by Josh Stroschein, a reverse engineer with Google's FLARE team. It launched in October 2024 and released its 29th episode in September 2026, organized in seasons.
Each episode is a long-form interview with a reverse engineer, tool author, or malware researcher, covering how they entered the field, the problems they work on, and the tooling they use. Guests have included the creators of x64dbg and YARA-X, the Binary Ninja co-founder Jordan Wiens, and members of the FLARE team.
Notable guests
- Nick Harbour
- Victor Manuel Alvarez
- Duncan Ogilvie
- Jordan Wiens
- Saumil Shah
- Thomas Roccia
- Pavel Yosifovich
- Seth Jenkins
- Tim Blazytko
- Olivia Gallucci
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