Inside the Verizon DBIR Report w/ Alex Pinto
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About this episode
Alex Pinto leads the team behind the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report—the one publication the entire security industry stops and reads every single year. What almost nobody realizes is that the DBIR, now nineteen years old and built on data from over a hundred contributing partners, is written by exactly four people. In this episode, Alex pulls back the curtain on how the sausage actually gets made: the Verizon marketing team that fought tooth and nail to kill the very first edition, the Secret Service handshake that unlocked everyone else's data, and why the team flatly refuses to tell you which vendor supplied which number. He also walks us through the 2026 findings—vulnerability exploitation finally claiming the top spot after a four-year climb, a CISA KEV remediation rate that somehow went down, and shadow AI rocketing into the top three ways confidential data walks out of your building. Plus, the hunt for objective proof that attackers are using AI, why he thinks all of this will sound like business as usual by next year, and a genuinely excellent argument for why ransomware is the yoga pants of cybersecurity.