In this weekly random and unscripted update, Marco Ciappelli and Sean Martin catch up on their latest stories, from AI agents replacing SOC analysts to mixtape nostalgia and vintage guitars made from NYC history. They also tease big things coming at Black Hat USA and reflect on why collaboration is core to ITSPmagazine.
ITSPmagazine Weekly Update | From AI Agents to Tape Mixes, to Guitars and Black Hat Buzzwords and much more with Marco & Sean's Random & Unscripted Podcast
⸻ In this weekly unscripted update, Marco Ciappelli and Sean Martin catch up on their latest stories, from AI agents replacing SOC analysts to mixtape nostalgia and vintage guitars made from NYC history. They also tease big things coming at Black Hat USA and reflect on why collaboration is core to ITSPmagazine.
⸻ In this week’s Random and Unscripted episode, Marco Ciappelli and Sean Martin return with another lively behind-the-scenes update from the ITSPmagazine world. As always, the conversation flows unpredictably—from music and nostalgia to cybersecurity, AI, and everything in between. Marco kicks off the episode by confessing he saw ASIS live—twice—and is now on a mission for the perfect mod haircut.
Sean follows with an unexpected review of an avant-garde opera at Lincoln Center, which explores humanity’s attempt to extend life through technology. That sets the stage for deeper reflection on AI, with both co-founders digging into the role of AI agents in cybersecurity operations. Sean recaps his recent contributor-led newsletters on threat intelligence and AI-powered SOC roles.
Marco, meanwhile, teases the next chapter in his “Robbie the Robot” newsletter series, which will explore the merger of humans and machines. The episode also spotlights a series of published interviews: a brand story with Greg and John from White Knight Labs, Marco’s conversation with Ken Munro wrapping up Infosecurity Europe 2025, and an episode with Abadesi from the Women in Cybersecurity track—discussing how diverse teams build better tech.
Sean also drops new Music Evolves episodes, including a conversation with Summer McCoy of the Mixtape Museum and a new story on Carmine Guitars, where vintage NYC wood is repurposed into one-of-a-kind instruments. That sparks a philosophical reflection from Marco on the contrast between analog warmth and digital impermanence.
As the episode winds down, Marco and Sean turn their attention to Black Hat USA 2025. With sponsorships nearly sold out, they encourage companies to claim one of the last remaining spots. They also preview an upcoming live webinar where they’ll debate the event’s inevitable buzzwords with industry peers.
As always, the tone is informal, curious, and community-driven. If you want the inside scoop on what’s shaping the stories and strategies at ITSPmagazine—this is the episode to hear.
⸻ Keywords: cybersecurity, AI agents, threat intelligence, SOC analyst, mixtape museum, custom guitars, Black Hat USA 2025, ITSPmagazine, analog vs digital, diversity in tech, robotic automation, newsletter strategy, editorial collaboration, pen testing, brand storytelling, tech culture, cybersecurity events, operational technology, digital transformation, music and tech
Hosts links:
📌 Marco Ciappelli: https://www.marcociappelli.com
📌 Sean Martin: https://www.seanmartin.com
July 18, 2025
Marco Ciappelli:
[00:00:00] Well… do you know?
Sean Martin:
I don’t know. Are we recording?
Marco Ciappelli:
Do you know why? I mean…
Sean Martin:
It says we’re live.
Marco Ciappelli:
We are live.
Sean Martin:
Live. I’m live. Live and alive.
Marco Ciappelli:
Alive and kicking. Do you remember that song?
Sean Martin:
I do remember that song.
Marco Ciappelli:
Oh, that’s good. Shit, it was… yeah, talking about that kind of period, that was the eighties, I think. Right?
Well, here’s my update—I saw ASIS twice. Twice.
Sean Martin:
Because you didn’t get enough the first time?
Marco Ciappelli:
Well, I did. My wife… you really hope they noticed your haircut. My wife didn’t.
So we doubled up—it was good. We went to Manchester and Cardiff. They still sound great.
And yeah, now I’m trying to get the mod haircut.
So that’s my news for this episode of… of Random and Unscripted, which Sean [00:01:00] turned into something that we actually use to give updates about what’s going on in the ITSPmagazine world.
Sean Martin:
And our own worlds, I guess.
Marco Ciappelli:
ITSPmagazine is pretty much our world.
Sean Martin:
But I was telling you the other day, I went to—yeah, I guess—an opera, if you can call it that, at Lincoln Center…
Marco Ciappelli:
A Night at the Opera…
Sean Martin:
…in the Geffen Hall. And it was quite interesting. It kind of presented a world being born, life being born—we want to extend our lives, and we turn to technology to make that happen.
It was quite an experience, listening to this eclectic, music-driven five-person opera.
Marco Ciappelli:
Like I needed another idea for a newsletter.
Exactly—talking about the relationship between [00:02:00] technology and society.
But yeah, it did inspire. And you shared the link with me, so it’s in the queue.
It’s in the queue. Come on, Sean.
Let’s get to business—finally, after many years, this has become an update. A weekly update when possible, even when we are on location.
We’ll try to do it anyway. You know that.
Sean Martin:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco Ciappelli:
I’ll do it by myself.
Actually, it’ll be the best weekly update—just drop pictures of me when you’re not here.
That would be faster…
Sean Martin:
…and a lot more fun.
Marco Ciappelli:
Come on, man.
So what did you do?
Last time, we proposed the two newsletters that we wrote. Mine was about Robbie the Robot, when I was re-listening to iRobot from Asimov.
And my next newsletter is going to be the follow-up to that—still about robotics and how we merge with them. Or maybe robots merge with us.
[00:03:00] I don’t know which way it’s going to go, but it’s going to be a fun newsletter.
What’s up with you?
Sean Martin:
Well, that’s kind of what that show was about.
Let’s see. Yeah, for me—I think since then I…
Well, I did the—what? Put the candle back, right? So Crisis Management: Put the Candle Back and The Art of Not Making Things Worse, I think.
Yeah, there’s a potential that we automate and scale bad stuff, right?
Then I wrote a few more articles—some of them I had taped to read—but I looked at cybersecurity as not just about the code; it’s about the whole system.
This idea of systems of systems—that was a lot of fun.
Then I took a deep dive into threat intelligence as a way to drive business outcomes, not just security response.
And then I looked at AI agents as first responders—can they take the Level 1 SOC [00:04:00] analyst role?
A lot of people say replace it—I’m leaning more toward make them smarter.
Marco Ciappelli:
It’s a tool.
It’s not substituting—it’s implementing. Let’s put it that way.
I was on one of those conversations too, which we’ll publish soon.
So definitely one of the things we talk about the most nowadays—not only in cybersecurity.
I just got an email—it’s been implemented in ChatGPT and you can make your own agent.
And an helicopter is flying over me.
So that’s random.
Sean Martin:
That’s pretty random.
Marco Ciappelli:
No, it’s L.A.—so it’s pretty normal.
Anyway, yeah, it’s definitely happening.
And talking about that—let’s just open that can.
It’s probably going to be one of the buzz topics and buzzwords at Black Hat in two weeks from now, don’t you think?
Sean Martin:
I’m sure it will be.
[00:05:00] And on that note, we’re actually going to put a webinar together—a pre-event webinar where we talk about that.
That’s in line with one of the things I wanted to point out about my last two newsletters.
So, sometimes I write a newsletter based on an episode.
Sometimes I write one based on my own thoughts.
But the last two articles I did were contributor pieces—I asked folks to share their own thoughts.
I’m not going to say robots contributed—no.
Well, a robot did help craft it.
But yeah—contributions from the industry.
Folks provided their own insights on threat intelligence and AI agents.
Thanks to everybody who did—I’m not going to list them here. It’s too long.
Marco Ciappelli:
No, too long.
Sean Martin:
I want to do more of that—bring together a thought or idea and get people to comment on it.
Marco Ciappelli:
With Sean, it’s kind of going back to the origin for you.
[00:06:00] I remember when we started ITSPmagazine, you were doing a lot of this collaboration.
I’m glad you went back to it—it’s a great way to bring the community together, especially the thought leaders in the industry.
If people want to know more, they can just go to your LinkedIn.
Maybe just DM you and see how they can work with you.
My thoughts are just mine—I don’t want anybody else involved.
Except for all my friends in my head—I have many invisible, imaginary friends to help me craft stories and all of that.
Sean Martin:
Well, my early days in writing were kind of analyst-driven views.
I see a lot of things, I have opinions on where things are going, and sometimes I like feedback to help shape and refine those ideas.
It’s fun.
Marco Ciappelli:
I think it’s a great idea, and I think a lot of our friends in the industry are going to like it.
They can be part of your stories anytime.
Marco Ciappelli:
Talking about stories—we did a brand story after our last Random and Unscripted episode.
It was with our friends at White Knight Labs—Greg and John—who hopefully we’ll get to see in Las Vegas, right?
We’ll be very happy to share a coffee or a drink, depending on the time of day we actually get to see them.
And yeah, catch up on that app that presents what they’re doing with their company, especially on the basic level training for pen testers.
They have some strong opinions on that.
Sean Martin:
I think they have strong opinions in general—
and certainly for this thing they’re putting together, which sounds pretty cool.
Marco Ciappelli:
That’s the one thing I like about them—they don’t hold their horses.
They just tell it as it is.
So that’s really good.
So we’ve got your newsletter… I’m going through the things we’ve done…
Oh yeah—
I had kind of my final 2025 conversation, the closing of our Infosecurity Europe coverage.
I caught up—
Sean Martin:
2025… your last one of the year?
Marco Ciappelli:
For Infosecurity Europe, yeah.
Well, you know—we just said Black Hat is coming up, and we’re not going to list all the other events we’re doing, but this one—
It was with Ken Munro.
And the people who’ve been listening know this goes back to when we met at DEF CON at the aerospace [village],
which wasn’t called the Aerospace Village at the time.
It was more like… just talking about airplanes, right?
And of course, you know who came up in the conversation.
You probably don’t—because you didn’t listen to the podcast yet.
But I think you can imagine. There’s some kind of a prop character—
Sean Martin:
I know exactly what you’re talking about.
Marco Ciappelli:
It might be inflatable?
Sean Martin:
Exactly.
Marco Ciappelli:
It is—
It’s Otto, the autopilot that we’ve seen in many different occasions.
A few pictures, a few videos floating around that we’ve captured—
[00:09:00]
and a funny way to blow that guy up…
I’ll just leave it there.
But it was great to catch up with Ken.
They put together pretty much a little village in a pub near the ExCel.
You could hack cars, ICS systems, they talked about aerospace…
Have a drink… put together the community.
It was really, really fun.
I invite people to listen to that episode, especially if they’re in the UK.
We made a lot of references—
For example, the car they hacked isn’t even available in the U.S.,
so that alone tells you there’s a bit of difference between here and there.
Sean Martin:
Absolutely.
Marco Ciappelli:
And just to round that off—
I also spoke with someone we were supposed to interview during Infosecurity Europe.
She keynoted the Women in Cybersecurity track of the event,
but we didn’t get to record on location.
So I invited her—
But it wasn’t about Infosecurity Europe,
it was actually part of my Redefining Society and Technology podcast.
Her name is Abadesi.
She’s very much involved in investing, training, education—
everything about tech when it comes to diversity and inclusion.
[00:11:00]
We talked about how tech is so much better when the team developing it is actually a diverse team—
instead of just a bunch of white dudes.
Because then the product doesn’t work so well for everybody else.
So… that’s my side.
Sean Martin:
That’s your side.
Well, I was very monogamous with all the events—
but very busy the last few months covering them,
and therefore wasn’t able to record many new episodes or publish a couple I had already recorded
for my Music Evolves podcast.
I finally put out the one around the Mixtape Museum with Summer McCoy.
Talk about looking back in time—nostalgia—
and how the culture of creating mixtapes has shifted and transformed into what we now know as playlists.
Funny enough, the playlists are very above-ground
because it’s all publicly available music.
Mixtapes had a lot of underground stuff—
there’s a lot of history with record labels, promotions, radio stations…
It was a pretty cool chat.
And what Summer’s doing with the museum is really cool.
Marco Ciappelli:
The museum—
Is it a physical museum in New York?
Sean Martin:
Nope.
It’s a virtual museum.
Marco Ciappelli:
Oh, it’s a virtual museum?
Sean Martin:
Yeah—so you can’t go there physically.
She documents mixtapes—
people send in collections, she catalogs them and I believe sends them back.
She’s also a data scientist,
so she’s got a lot of ideas about analyzing that space.
Great conversation.
And I’m working on another one that should go out today—
about custom guitar making.
There’s a guitar shop here in NYC called Carmine Guitars.
Cindy creates custom wood guitars—using vintage wood from old New York buildings.
[00:13:00]
Marco Ciappelli:
That is really cool.
That one’s super cool.
Makes me think of those great guitar players in the ‘60s and ‘70s who built their own instruments—
some of them still play the same old ones.
It’d be nice to put our hands on one of those,
but… I don’t think it’s in our price range. Let’s put it that way.
Sean Martin:
I don’t see a custom guitar from Cindy in my horizon either.
Marco Ciappelli:
Yeah, same.
Sean Martin:
But it’s fun—she makes beautiful stuff.
The shop is full of amazing materials—amazing stories too.
I encourage everybody to check it out.
Marco Ciappelli:
You know what I love about that?
How we can make things come around.
Using a piece of wood from a historical NYC building—
instead of burning it or throwing it away, it takes on a new life in something new.
That’s absolutely amazing.
That’s one of the things I love about the analog world versus the digital.
Which is a theme I’m bringing back in Redefining Society and Technology.
The difference—and interaction—between analog and digital.
But you can’t really do that with digital.
I mean sure, you can reuse a hard drive, but…
you’re just deleting and adding new data.
In this case…
you’re making Pinocchio.
Sean Martin:
And she showed me a piece of equipment that was originally used—
I don’t know how many decades ago—
to make duck decoys.
They’ve repurposed it to create the indentation where your arm goes on the guitar.
She says it does good work for many things,
but she still finds it more fun—and sometimes even faster—to do it by hand.
But just the way we use technology—
I’m going to use that to connect to my other podcast that I just published,
which is not about music,
but about security and technology in the operational technology world—
the whole world of manufacturing.
And to your point about digital—
a lot of those old manual machines are now controlled by robots.
And the systems that control those robots are now connected to networks.
And those networks are connected to back-office IT systems.
It’s a whole world where the manufacturing infrastructure
and the OT infrastructure
is exposed to the internet—
and all the fun (and not so fun) things that can happen from an adversarial perspective.
That’s what I talked about with Tobias Hellmann.
He’s based out of Germany.
It was a great conversation.
The newsletter for that episode kind of recaps my thoughts on the whole thing.
And obviously, the episode is out too.
Marco Ciappelli:
Well, Sean—definitely a lot going on.
It’s a very eclectic basket of things we’ve put together.
Even though now it’s mostly the two of us doing this,
there are a few things coming up that I think I’ll announce next week.
Something we’re going to work on with a really good friend of ours in the UK.
I feel like there’s a magnet pulling me more and more toward Europe and the UK.
You feel that?
Sean Martin:
I don’t know why, but yeah, it’s happening.
Marco Ciappelli:
Yeah, it’s happening.
And it’ll bounce back between L.A. and there.
But I’ll announce that later.
What I do want to say, in these last couple of minutes,
is that we’re very excited about Black Hat.
It’s our birthday—
not yours or mine—
but ITSPmagazine’s birthday as a publication.
It’s always fun to go there.
We’re going to be talking with Steve Wylie soon—
I think this coming week.
We already recorded a pre-event conversation,
which we’ll publish soon.
Sean Martin:
A lot of briefings from sponsors coming.
Marco Ciappelli:
Exactly.
That’s what I want to say—RSA Conference was sold out in terms of sponsors and briefings.
Looks like Black Hat is about to do the same.
We still have two weeks to go
and only a few spots left.
So if you’re listening to this and you want to join us in Las Vegas—
to share your brand story, or to actually start even before—
We’ve got one little new thing going on.
Sean, what’s that webinar panel thing you’re putting together?
Sean Martin:
It’s similar to the newsletter contribution thing I’m doing.
I have some thoughts on what the hot topics will be—what the conversations will rally around.
But I want people rooted in the industry to participate in a conversation with us about it.
So, you and I and three or four others will get together
and talk about what we expect to see and hear—
what it means for the industry, for business.
And we’ll do that as a live webinar so people can join us,
shake their finger and say,
“No, you got it wrong,”
or give us a thumbs up,
or chime in and share their own thoughts.
Marco Ciappelli:
Place your bet.
Place your bet on what the buzzword’s going to be.
I have a few ideas myself… but we’ll see.
The point is, we’ll record this—go live—
and then everyone can watch it on demand.
I think we’re going to do it in about 10 days from now?
Sean Martin:
Yeah, the 30th.
Marco Ciappelli:
The 30th.
So—right before we leave for Black Hat.
And right here:
itspmagazine.com/blackhat-usa-2025
is where you can subscribe to our coverage,
sign up for a briefing,
grab one of the last full sponsorship spots,
or join us for the webinar.
And maybe we’ll do another one after—
to say who was right, who was wrong, and who won the bet.
I don’t know what the prize will be—
maybe just bragging rights.
Coolest kid in town or something like that.
Sean Martin:
That’s right.
If you want to be part of any of this—
just DM Marco or me on LinkedIn.
That’s the easiest way.
Of course, you can follow both of us on our own websites:
All of our episodes, newsletters, and contact info is there—
including LinkedIn.
Marco Ciappelli:
Good stuff.
I really enjoy these.
It helps me wrap my head around what’s going on.
Sometimes it’s hard to follow—
but when you stop for a second and look back at what we’ve done,
and the few things coming up—
it makes more sense.
I think we’re doing something really cool.
Something I love doing.
I love doing it with you.
And I love doing it with our amazing audience—
and all the amazing sponsors that work with us
and allow us to do this thing we love:
sharing our thoughts, and sharing the community with the community.
All about the community.
Sean Martin:
This is what we do—day in, day out.
I love it.
Marco Ciappelli:
That… and pretend to be musicians.
Well, you are.
I just pretend.
Sean Martin:
I am a musician—
but I’m pretending to be a guitarist.
So there’s definitely a lot of pretending going on.
But it’s super fun.
And I like the balance—music, tech, cyber, community.
And working with you?
It’s good.
Excited for the next couple weeks.
Stay tuned for more updates from us
as we continue to be Random and Unscripted.
Marco Ciappelli:
Definitely random.
Sean Martin:
One of them will be random…
We’ll plan it for Black Hat,
but it’ll still be random and unscripted.
So stay tuned for that one in a couple weeks—
and we’ll see what we share next week.
Marco Ciappelli:
I’m curious.
Sean Martin:
I’m curious.
Alright—see you!
Thanks everybody for listening, watching,
laughing at us or with us—
whichever you prefer.
And we’ll see you all soon.
Marco Ciappelli:
See ya.