From Cyber Warfare to AI-Powered Defense with Dave Kennedy
Dave Kennedy was a skeptic. After 28 years in the field, he had heard every claim about the next technology that was going to change cybersecurity, and he assumed AI was more of the same. Then it changed his mind, and now he is building some of the most advanced defensive AI in the industry.
Dave is the founder of TrustedSec and Binary Defense. He got his start on the military intelligence side as a U.S. Marine in cyber warfare. He is a well-known name in the cybersecurity community through his work on BackTrack Linux, the Social-Engineer Toolkit, and Metasploit. Dave is also, by his own description, obsessed with cybersecurity as both a career and a hobby – he can’t get enough of it.
In this episode, Dave breaks down how AI has re-energized his work and, in his words, made this feel like the early 2000s all over again. He walks through Night Beacon, the AI system his team built to transform the security operations center, and explains why they train their own models instead of relying on frontier models, how they keep a human in the loop for every final determination, and why his teams now ship more than a million lines of code a week.
Phillip and Dave get into what AI means for offensive work at TrustedSec and Binary Defense, concerns about autonomous hacking and cheaper zero days, and why Dave believes AI will create more work in cybersecurity rather than eliminate it.
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Connect with Dave Kennedy:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkennedy4
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Connect with your host, Phillip Wylie:
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/phillipwylie
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phillipwylie
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