Dark Reading Confidential
Hosted by Becky Bracken
Monthly-ish first-person stories from people who were in the room: pen testers, CISOs, threat hunters.
- Level
- Practitioner, assumes you work in or study security
- Status
- Active, last episode
- Who's behind it
- Media outlet, Informa TechTarget sourceProduced by Dark Reading's editorial staff.
- Last verified
- No transcripts
Listed underThreat intel and newsCISO and leadership
Editorial take
Dark Reading's podcast is at its best when someone tells a story only they can tell. Examples: the pen testers jailed in Iowa for doing their job, Christofer Hoff on leading LastPass through its breach, Chris Inglis on the NSA during Snowden. Host Becky Bracken, a Dark Reading senior editor and former Threatpost reporter, keeps episodes to 25 to 50 minutes with one or two guests. The publishing gap is the honest weakness: roughly 20 episodes since May 2024, sometimes months apart. The policy and career episodes are less distinctive than the incident stories. Subscribe and let it surprise you, rather than planning around it.
Last hand-checked 2026-09-30.
Listen if you …
- learn best from first-person accounts of incidents and investigations
- are a security leader interested in ethics, regulation, and the CISO role
- want a well-produced show that does not need weekly attention
Skip if you …
- you want a reliable schedule, gaps between episodes run one to three months
- you want news, episodes are features on one theme
Start with these 3 episodes
- 01
Pen Test Arrest: 5 Years Later
· 42 min · Beginner
A gripping story with a practical lesson about scope and authorization letters, no background needed.
- 02
· 33 min · Practitioner
A CISO on leading people through a major breach, the human side incident-response courses skip.
- 03
Meet the Ransomware Negotiators
· 54 min · Practitioner
The people who talk to extortionists for a living explain how payment decisions actually get made.
About the show
Dark Reading Confidential is the podcast of Dark Reading, the security news site owned by Informa TechTarget. It launched in May 2024 with an episode on the SEC and the CISO, and is hosted and produced by senior editor Becky Bracken, with other Dark Reading editors sitting in.
Each episode is a 25 to 55 minute conversation on one theme, often a first-person account of an incident or investigation, with occasional policy and career episodes. It publishes roughly monthly, with longer gaps.
Notable guests
- Chris Inglis
- Christofer Hoff
- Rich Mogull
- Robert Hansen
- Adam Shostack
- Ronald Deibert
- Jake Williams
- Hal Pomeranz
- Fredrick Lee
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