Tye Valdis

Episode 36: Alert Fatigue & How Private Equity is Ruining Cybersecurity Tools

February 27th, 2026  |  Season 3  |  1 hr 1 min

This week, Richard, Joseph, Hunter, and Mario tackle the double-edged sword of "Alert Fatigue," discussing how bombarding IT directors with alerts can lead to them tuning out actual threats (the "Target hack" scenario). They pull back the curtain on how the Scinary SOC operates differently, focusing on transparency and building customized network profiles to reduce noise. The conversation later pivots to the "enshittification" of cybersecurity tools by private equity firms. The guys call out Tenable (Nessus) for quietly locking basic features behind massive paywalls and discuss how Ivanti's private equity takeover crippled their engineering team, leading to critical, unpatched VPN vulnerabilities.

Episode 35: The Biggest IT Mistake We Found This Week

February 13th, 2026  |  Season 3  |  1 hr 13 mins

This episode is a tale of two halves. In the first segment, Richard, Mario, Brazos, and Joseph discuss Scinary's new partnership to bring cybersecurity education to rural Texas schools before pivoting to a "finance corner" analysis of the slowly deflating AI and tech stock bubble.

Suddenly, [THE CUT] happens.

We pick up the next day where Mario has mysteriously vanished, only to be replaced by Pierre Vivoni. Pierre drops the quote of the year regarding a Domain Controller "raw dogging the internet," launching a discussion on the unglamorous reality of SOC work vs. Hollywood hackers. The team closes with a heated debate on Flock cameras, mass surveillance, and the hypocrisy of banning foreign tech while domestic privacy erodes.

Episode 28: Nightmare on AWS Street: Halloween Special

October 31st, 2025  |  Season 2  |  53 mins 59 secs

In this Halloween special, the team discusses the massive AWS outage that recently brought large swaths of the internet to a halt. They break down the technical "race condition" that caused the DNS failure, explore the comical real-world consequences like smart beds getting stuck, and analyze why even competitors like Microsoft were affected. The conversation broadens into a critical look at the tech industry's single points of failure (AWS, AT&T), the dangerous trade-off between efficiency and resiliency, and whether our critical infrastructure is too reliant on a few monopolies. Additionally, they provide an update on the Salesforce breach, revealing that data belonging to personnel in major US government departments (DOD, DHS, ICE) was compromised by the threat group "Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters"

Episode 23: Debunking VPN Myths: Are You Really Anonymous Online?

September 26th, 2025  |  Season 2  |  58 mins 35 secs

The team pulls back the curtain on the consumer VPN and data privacy industry. They conduct a deep-dive into the privacy policies of major players like NordVPN and Surfshark, revealing how "no-log" claims can be misleading due to DNS logging and financial transaction records. They also present compelling research on PII (Personally Identifiable Information) removal services like Incogni and DeleteMe, exposing their surprisingly low success and accuracy rates, and questioning if these expensive subscriptions are truly worth the cost.

Episode 22: The MSP Playbook: Building a Business with Brian Kane

September 19th, 2025  |  Season 2  |  1 hr 7 mins

This week, we have a very special guest in the studio: Brian Kane, the Vice President of Global MSP Channels at Threatdown/Malwarebytes. Brian pulls back the curtain on his 20-year journey, from the scrappy beginnings of building an MSP to advising a global cybersecurity leader.

Episode 20: From Our First Intern to Rival CEO: Hacking with Jason Phillips

September 2nd, 2025  |  Season 2  |  1 hr 3 mins

This week, we go back to our roots and sit down with a very special guest: Jason Phillips, the founder of Mustang Cyber and, once upon a time, the very first intern at Scinary Cybersecurity.

Episode 17: Revenge Hacking: Justice or Just Illegal?

August 11th, 2025  |  Season 2  |  59 mins 36 secs

This week, the team tackles a controversial and ethically murky corner of the cyber world: Offensive Security and the temptation to "hack back". When an attacker breaches your network, is fighting back a righteous act of justice or a dangerous form of vigilantism?