Threat Vector by Palo Alto Networks

North Korea has turned your hiring pipeline into a revenue machine. And most organizations have no idea.

Evan Gordenker, Director of AI Security and DPRK Operations at Unit 42, has led more than 160 investigations into sophisticated threat actors, including the North Korean IT worker networks quietly embedded inside global companies. He joins David Moulton to unpack how this operation actually works, why common assumptions about remote work leave organizations exposed, and what security and HR teams can do to detect and disrupt it.

You'll learn:

- How DPRK operatives use deepfakes, fabricated identities, and real accomplice networks to pass interviews and land jobs at global companies

- Why "we don't hire remote" is a dangerous assumption that no longer holds

- What signals HR and SOC teams should look for, before and after someone is hired

- How the threat has evolved from quiet wage theft to active extortion of former employers

- What government collaboration and cross-border intelligence sharing can realistically accomplish

Evan contributed to the UN Sanctions Monitoring Team report on North Korean operations and brings a rare combination of technical depth and geopolitical fluency to this problem. Having lived and worked across the US, EU, and Japan, he brings cultural context that matters when investigating a threat with global reach. His investigations have produced some of the most detailed profiles of DPRK operators in the security community.

This episode is essential listening if you're: a security leader building out your insider threat program, an HR or talent acquisition leader who hasn't yet connected with your security team, or a threat intelligence analyst tracking how nation-state programs fund themselves.

Related Episodes:

- From Code to Compromise — Covers North Korean threat actors using fake job interviews to target developers via malicious IDE extensions. A strong companion to this episode's look at the broader IT worker scheme.

-Inside the Mind of State-Sponsored Cyberattackers — A deeper look at how nation-state operations are structured and why they're so hard to disrupt.

#NationStateThreat #InsiderRisk

About Threat Vector

Threat Vector by Palo Alto Networks is your premier podcast for security thought leadership. Join us as we explore pressing cybersecurity threats, robust protection strategies, and the latest industry trends.

The podcast features in-depth discussions with industry leaders, Palo Alto Networks experts, and customers, providing crucial insights for security decision-makers.

Whether you're looking to stay ahead of the curve with innovative solutions or understand the evolving cybersecurity landscape, Threat Vector equips you with the knowledge needed to safeguard your organization.

Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks enables your team to prevent successful cyberattacks with an automated approach that delivers consistent security across the cloud, network, and mobile.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠http://paloaltonetworks.com.⁠

Your security budget is funding the wrong defenses.

Steve Elovitz leads Unit 42's North America consulting and incident response practice, where his team helps prevent, and ultimately answers the call when organizations face their worst day. After analyzing 750+ major breaches in a single year, he's seen exactly which security investments save companies and which ones fail when attackers strike. The data is uncomfortable: 90% of breaches succeed not because attackers are sophisticated, but because of misconfigurations or gaps in security coverage.

You'll discover:

- Why your detection window just shrunk to 1.2 hours (and what autonomous containment actually means when every minute counts)

- The single identity control that separated organizations recovering in days from those shut down for weeks—with the same attacker, same techniques, different outcome

- How to stop wasting money on tools that can't see the SaaS integrations and OAuth tokens attackers are already exploiting in your environment

- Which gaps in your security posture are preventable right now, before they become next quarter's incident response bill

- The defensive investment that delivers ROI in real breach scenarios, not just compliance checkboxes

With 15+ years leading incident response teams at Mandiant, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and Booz Allen Hamilton, Steve has helped security teams make critical decisions under pressure when ransomware is encrypting, data is walking out the door, and the board is demanding answers. He knows which controls actually stop sophisticated threat actors and which ones just look good in budget presentations.

This episode is essential listening if you:

- Need to defend your security roadmap with evidence from actual breach investigations, not vendor promises

- Want to understand why identity keeps appearing in every postmortem and what to do about it before you're the case study

- Are tired of "best practices" that don't map to how attackers actually succeed against real organizations

Related Episodes:

- Muddled Libra: From Spraying to Preying in 2025 - Learn which conditional access policies actually stopped the threat actor Unit 42 calls their toughest fight

- Transform Your SOC and Get Ahead of the Threats - Discover how organizations build SOCs that partner effectively with IR teams instead of slowing down containment

- Inside Jingle Thief: Cloud Fraud Unwrapped - Understand why your MFA deployment isn't protecting you from identity compromise the way you think it is #IncidentResponse

If you think you may have been compromised or have an urgent matter, please contact Unit 42 Incident Response team or call North America Toll-Free: 866.486.4842 (866.4.UNIT42), EMEA: +31.20.299.3130, UK: +44.20.3743.3660, APAC: +65.6983.8730, or Japan: +81.50.1790.0200.

About Threat Vector

Threat Vector by Palo Alto Networks is your premier podcast for security thought leadership. Join us as we explore pressing cybersecurity threats, robust protection strategies, and the latest industry trends.

The podcast features in-depth discussions with industry leaders, Palo Alto Networks experts, and customers, providing crucial insights for security decision-makers.

Whether you're looking to stay ahead of the curve with innovative solutions or understand the evolving cybersecurity landscape, Threat Vector equips you with the knowledge needed to safeguard your organization.

Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks enables your team to prevent successful cyberattacks with an automated approach that delivers consistent security across the cloud, network, and mobile.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠http://paloaltonetworks.com.

Security that slows people down is security that gets bypassed.

Birat Niraula leads security for Google Enterprise Network, where he oversees protection across on-premise, network infrastructure, enterprise, and cloud environments. In this episode of Threat Vector, host David Moulton explores a critical truth that most security leaders miss: the difference between friction that protects and friction that creates risk.

You'll learn:

- Why bad security UX isn't just annoying—it's a vulnerability that creates backdoors

- How to identify friction that protects (like MFA and jump hosts) versus friction that makes teams bypass controls

- Why DevOps teams inject backdoors into production when security slows them down too much

- How AI is becoming the new cloud rush—teams deploying models without understanding security risks

- The Chrome browser principle: best security is seamless security that users don't have to think about

- Why embedding security teams in design processes beats the "sledgehammer approach" of blanket policies

- How to use AI agents as security sidekicks to scale beyond what your team can manually review

Birat shares hard-won lessons from securing enterprises at massive scale—from building 24/7 SOCs to leading multi-cloud architecture at Goldman Sachs to now protecting Google's infrastructure. But this conversation isn't about his resume. It's about the fundamental tradeoffs security leaders face: velocity versus protection, automation versus human judgment, and when to embrace friction versus when friction becomes the enemy.

This episode is essential listening if you're: leading enterprise security programs, struggling with teams that route around your controls, managing DevOps or cloud security, implementing security that doesn't block business velocity, or trying to understand where AI security is heading.

Related Episodes:

- Securing the Modern Workforce

- Why Security Platformization Is the Future of Cyber Resilience

- Shifting Security Left

#Cloud #SecurityUX #DevSecOps

What separates organizations that truly excel at cybersecurity from those that just spend money on it?

In this episode of Threat Vector, host David Moulton sits down with Isaias Telhado, Senior Cybersecurity Customer Success Engineer at Palo Alto Networks, to explore what cybersecurity success actually looks like. With over 25 years in IT and security leadership across Nestlé, Zscaler, and now Palo Alto Networks, Isaiah has seen firsthand what transforms organizations from vulnerable and reactive to confident and resilient.

You'll learn:

- Why the "castle and moat" security model creates massive blind spots that leave you vulnerable from the inside

- The museum analogy that finally makes Zero Trust architecture click

- How AI is shifting security teams from reactive firefighting to strategic threat forecasting

- What "crypto agility" means and why quantum readiness matters today, not tomorrow

- The cultural shifts that separate mature security programs from expensive tool collections

Isaias shares a powerful case study of a major financial institution that transformed from a devastating data breach caused by misconfiguration to a proactive, cloud-native security posture. The outcome? Incidents dropped dramatically, and the security team's confidence soared—proving security can be a business driver, not a blocker.

Beyond technology, Isaiah reveals why collaboration across IT, legal, operations, and business leadership is essential—and why the best security awareness programs are bidirectional, not just pushing policies onto users. With insights on breaking down silos, measuring what matters, and avoiding common pitfalls that slow security maturity even in well-funded organizations, this conversation delivers practical wisdom for security leaders at any stage of their journey.

This episode is essential listening if you're: implementing Zero Trust architecture, managing cloud migration while maintaining security, breaking down organizational silos between security and business units, struggling to prove ROI on security investments, or preparing your organization for AI-powered threats and quantum computing risks.

Related Episodes:

- Why Security Platformization Is the Future of Cyber Resilience

- Securing the Modern Workforce

- Unlocking Cybersecurity ROI with Platformization

#ZeroTrust #CloudSecurity

About Threat Vector

Threat Vector by Palo Alto Networks is your premier podcast for security thought leadership. Join us as we explore pressing cybersecurity threats, robust protection strategies, and the latest industry trends.

The podcast features in-depth discussions with industry leaders, Palo Alto Networks experts, and customers, providing crucial insights for security decision-makers.

Whether you're looking to stay ahead of the curve with innovative solutions or understand the evolving cybersecurity landscape, Threat Vector equips you with the knowledge needed to safeguard your organization.

Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks enables your team to prevent successful cyberattacks with an automated approach that delivers consistent security across the cloud, network, and mobile.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠http://paloaltonetworks.com.

Can you trust your AI systems with your business, or are they just another attack surface waiting to be exploited?

Aaron Isaksen leads AI Research and Engineering at Palo Alto Networks, where he advances state-of-the-art AI in cybersecurity. In this episode of Threat Vector, host ⁠David Moulton⁠ sits down with ⁠Dr. Aaron Isaksen⁠ to explore why engineering excellence must precede ethical AI debates, how adversarial AI is reshaping cybersecurity, and what it actually takes to build AI systems resilient enough to operate in hostile environments.

You'll learn:

Why well-engineered AI must be the prerequisite before discussing AI ethics

How prompt injection attacks are becoming the "SQL injection of the AI era," and why they may never be fully solved

What defending the Black Hat USA NOC with AI-powered security taught about real-world AI resilience

How machine learning transforms attack surface management from manual inventory chaos to automated risk reduction

Why game development experience creates better cybersecurity AI researchers (and what curiosity has to do with it)

Before Palo Alto Networks, Aaron spent 15+ years building products across wildly different domains. From co-founding mobile gaming companies and funding independent game developers through Indie Fund, to leading ML engineering at ASAPP where his teams prototyped state-of-the-art neural networks for NLP. With a PhD from NYU (automated software design), a Master's from MIT (light field rendering), and a BS from UC Berkeley, Aaron brings a unique perspective: AI security isn't about philosophical debates. It's about rigorous engineering, continuous red teaming, and building systems that can withstand determined adversaries.

This episode is essential listening if you're: deploying AI in production systems, building security programs around generative AI tools, leading attack surface management initiatives, trying to separate AI security theater from actual resilience, or wondering whether your AI agents can operate safely on the open web. #AI

Related Episodes:

Identity: The Kill Switch for AI Agents

Securing AI in the Enterprise

Inside AI Runtime Defense

About Threat Vector

Threat Vector by Palo Alto Networks is your premier podcast for security thought leadership. Join us as we explore pressing cybersecurity threats, robust protection strategies, and the latest industry trends.

The podcast features in-depth discussions with industry leaders, Palo Alto Networks experts, and customers, providing crucial insights for security decision-makers.

Whether you're looking to stay ahead of the curve with innovative solutions or understand the evolving cybersecurity landscape, Threat Vector equips you with the knowledge needed to safeguard your organization.

Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks enables your team to prevent successful cyberattacks with an automated approach that delivers consistent security across the cloud, network, and mobile.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠http://paloaltonetworks.com.