Adventures of Alice & Bob

• Ep.89 - The Hollywood Hacker: Album Leaks and NSA Whistleblowers // Ralph Echemendia

  In this episode, James Maude talks with Ralph Echemendia “the ethical hacker” whose journey from Miami phone phreak to Hollywood’s top cybersecurity consultant is stranger than fiction. Ralph shares how hacking printers and hospital records jump-started his career, why tracking down an Eminem album leak turned into an international manhunt, and what Oliver Stone learned about the NSA at DEF CON. From securing the Snowden film against nation-state attacks to uncovering that studios store entire movies in Dropbox, Ralph exposes Hollywood’s biggest security blind spots and the rise of AI-powered deepfake heists worth hundreds of millions.

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• Ep. 88 - Microsoft Tried to Get Me Fired Weekly // HD Moore

  James sits down with cybersecurity pioneer HD Moore, the legendary founder of the Metasploit framework, whose journey from dumpster-diving teenager to cybersecurity pioneer was anything but easy.   HD recounts how Microsoft called his employer weekly trying to get him fired for releasing exploits — harassment that ultimately motivated him to "drop zero days continuously, forever, until it got normal." He shares tales of accidentally controlling satellite systems after following network hops too far, backdooring 7,000 systems through tainted warez, and spending $80,000 on his personal credit card to build the Rapid7 team when traditional corporate processes moved too slowly. From crawling through school windows at 5 AM to access Apple computers as a poor kid, to discovering that Palo Alto devices were leaking 5,000 customers' domain admin passwords to internet scanners, HD's stories illuminate the wild early days when vulnerability research was considered criminal activity rather than corporate necessity. Discover how he accidently destroyed his first self-built computer, why his ex-wife held a pile of cash as bail money ready during years of FBI visits, and how the Phrack IRC channel became an unlikely recruitment ground for his first cybersecurity job.

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• Ep. 87 - Code Crashes and Vinyl Scratches // Kevin Greene

  In this episode, James Maude sits down with Kevin E. Green, Chief Security Strategist at BeyondTrust, whose 25+ year career stretches from configuring Nokia firewalls in basements to shaping federal research initiatives. Kevin recalls how crashing systems during penetration tests at Ernst & Young was once considered a win - a “capture the flag” moment - and how he crossed paths with future industry leaders like Stuart McClure and George Kurtz, who went on to found Cylance. He shares his pivotal work in mapping NIST 800-53 controls to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, transforming static security catalogs into threat-informed heat maps that show which defenses light up against real-world attacks. Blending technical depth with cultural insight, Kevin also draws unexpected parallels between cybersecurity and hip-hop — from how attacker techniques echo rapper “signatures” to why his alter ego "Kevtorious" and his "Secure Coding by Nature" brand reflect the creativity and pattern recognition needed in both fields.

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• Ep. 86 - When Your VPC Partner Gets Pwned // Brian Wagner

  In this episode, James Maude sits down with Brian Wagner, CTO at Revenir, whose cybersecurity story started at just 15, building Microsoft Access databases for a medical hospice. From teenage entrepreneur to AWS security specialist, Brian’s path has been anything but ordinary. He pulls back the curtain on his time with the elite Zipline incident response team where he confronted a catastrophic VPC peering breach that spiraled into data theft and blackmail. Together, James and Brian dissect how vendor network compromises can silently open doors into your cloud and why Brian insists that true security isn’t something you bolt on later - it’s a culture you build from day one.

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• Ep.85 - Subterfuge and Social Engineering // Matthew Toussain

  Join host James Maude for a candid conversation with Matthew Toussaint - founder of Open Security and mastermind behind the legendary Subterfuge framework that once forced Starbucks to overhaul its Wi-Fi security. From his unexpected path as an aspiring Air Force lawyer to becoming a renowned cybersecurity educator, Matthew shares a lifetime of stories: a physical pen test that went spectacularly wrong at a franchise location, a medical clinic investigation that exposed an insider threat with international stakes, and how old-school phone-based social engineering works in the age of identity threats. They dive into why AI is about to make help desk social engineering terrifyingly scalable, how a nervous 21-year-old’s DefCon talk reshaped network security, and why, despite decades of warnings, the industry is still failing at the basics while attackers rapidly scale with artificial intelligence.

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