Think Like an Attacker - #223

Think your security tools are keeping you safe? Think again. Ryan Basden, Head of Offensive Security at Xora, has spent more than a decade thinking like an attacker. And what he finds inside organisations often has little to do with the tools they’ve bought — and everything to do with the gaps they’ve overlooked. In this episode of Reimagining Cyber, Ryan shares what red-team exercises reveal about real-world security, from supposedly segmented networks and default passwords to exposed developer credentials and cloud environments where everyone has admin access. He explains why understanding your network traffic and actually reading your logs can be more valuable than buying another security product, where AI can help defenders (and where it still needs human guidance), and why he’s concerned that cutting-edge cybersecurity capabilities could become accessible only to those who can afford them. Plus, hear the surprising story of how a guest Wi-Fi network gave Ryan access to an industrial mainframe — and why the organisation struggled to accept what he’d found.