From Law Degree to AI Cyber Defense with Zack Korman

09/21/2026 | Phillip Wylie | Episodes

Zack Korman came into cybersecurity from about as far outside the field as you can get, a UK law degree and a master’s in law and finance, and he now spends his days on the AI defense problems most of the industry is still catching up to. His outsider path is exactly what makes his take on the current AI moment worth hearing.
Based in Norway, Zack got into code to win an argument with a professor, worked his way up to running a media company’s tech department, then spent four and a half years as CTO of an Oslo cybersecurity startup building AI phishing simulations and AI insider threat detection. That work pulled him deep into the defensive side of security and into a conviction that detection is one of the most underserved areas of the field.
Phillip and Zack get into why the “thousand crap alerts” model of detection is broken, the blind spots that let obvious insider threats slip past a SOC that was never even receiving the data, and Zack’s work on AI agent security, including the malicious MCP server he built to prove how completely an agent can exfiltrate a company. From there the conversation turns to the thing Zack has become known for online, pushing back on inflated AI risk claims, the fallout from the Hugging Face incident, and why so many of the loudest warnings about AI in cybersecurity are coming from people who have never worked in security. They also cover frontier versus local models, why smaller models could reshape defensive work, model guardrails and offensive testing, and Zack’s straightforward advice for anyone trying to fold AI into their day to day.
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Connect with Zack Korman:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zacharyakorman/
X: https://x.com/ZackKorman
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Connect with your host, Phillip Wylie:
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/phillipwylie
X: https://x.com/PhillipWylie
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/phillipwylie

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