Research Saturday
Hosted by Dave Bittner
One fresh threat research report a week, explained by the researcher who wrote it, in about 25 minutes.
- Level
- Practitioner, assumes you work in or study security
- Status
- Active, last episode
- Who's behind it
- Media outlet, N2K Networks sourcePart of the CyberWire network; guests are mostly vendor research teams.
- Last verified
- Transcripts for some episodes
Listed underThreat intel and newsSOC and blue team
Editorial take
Research Saturday is the cheapest way to keep up with published threat research. Every Saturday Dave Bittner talks for about 25 minutes with the researcher behind one new report: a ransomware crew disabling EDR, a ClickFix campaign, an AWS CodeBuild supply chain flaw, an AI agent prompt injection. Bittner asks the questions a defender would, so you get the attack chain and the detection angle, not just the headline. The limitation is built into the format. Guests come from security vendors' research labs presenting their own work, so coverage follows what vendors chose to publish, and each episode is one report deep. Use it as a weekly sampler, then read the reports that matter to you.
Last hand-checked 2026-09-30.
Listen if you …
- work in a SOC or CTI role and want the week's notable malware and campaign research
- want to hear researchers like Marcus Hutchins or John Hammond explain their own findings
- have 25 minutes on a weekend and want something more technical than news
Skip if you …
- you want independent analysis, guests present their own employer's research
- you want breadth, each episode covers a single report
Start with these 3 episodes
- 01
· 18 min · Beginner
Scattered Spider explained for people outside CTI: help desk social engineering against a whole industry.
- 02
The driver's seat to ransomware.
· 24 min · Practitioner
Marcus Hutchins on a zero-day used to kill EDR: exactly the attack-chain depth the show does best.
- 03
A subtle flaw, a massive blast radius.
· 17 min · Expert
A cloud CI/CD supply chain flaw in AWS's own repositories, a standout lesson in how small misconfigurations scale.
About the show
Research Saturday is an N2K Networks show on the CyberWire network, hosted by Dave Bittner. It began in September 2017 and publishes every Saturday; the same episodes also appear in the CyberWire Daily feed.
Each episode is a single interview, usually 20 to 30 minutes, with the author of a recently published threat research report, most often from a security vendor's research team (Proofpoint, Infoblox, Huntress, Bitdefender, Unit 42 and others) and occasionally from academia or journalism.
Notable guests
- Marcus Hutchins
- John Hammond
- Selena Larson
- Renée Burton
- Bob Rudis
- Tom Hegel
- Geoff White
- Eric Woodruff
- Amanda Rousseau
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