CyberWire Daily - CyberWire Daily at 10: From an idea to the airwaves. [Special Edition]

Episode Date: March 22, 2026

In this special edition of CyberWire Daily’s 10th anniversary series, Maria Varmazis hosts a thoughtful and engaging conversation with N2K CyberWire CEO Peter Kilpe and CyberWire Daily host Dave Bittner, exploring the origin story of the podcast that started it all. From early ambitions to behind-the-scenes turning points, they trace how the show found its voice and evolved from a startup experiment into a trusted cornerstone of the cybersecurity community. Along the way, they share candid anecdotes, hard-earned lessons, and reflections on how both the industry and CyberWire Daily have transformed over the past decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Learn more at trendmicro.com slash RSA. Hello, Maria Vermazas here. Thanks for joining me today. The CyberWire Daily is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this year. And in honor of that big milestone, we're releasing monthly special edition episodes throughout 2026. Today's N2K CyberWire special edition kicks off our 10-year anniversary series with a big-picture look at the CyberWire Daily itself. And for more on the show and how it all began, I sat down with Dave Bittner, host of the CyberWire Daily, and Peter Kilby, CEO of N2K Networks.

I would say that basically my path, you know, working, doing the creative work, user experience, design, work in the intelligence community as a contractor, set me on that path. That was my first exposure to cybersecurity more broadly, and that was actually in a more in-depth kind of way. And I ended up working for a stream of companies doing these kinds of things. For one of the companies, a security company in Baltimore, we ended up building, creating a newsletter for ourselves, all about cybersecurity, helping educate our own employees. on what's going on inside the security world. A number of people kept telling us how great our little internal intelligence newsletter was,

and we should share it with the world, so we did. And we ultimately built a cybersecurity newsletter product that was read in almost every country. Probably only two readers in Madagascar, but we hit that island with the penguins. Yeah, they were a very big. the pandemic, every board game. Place me in time. When about was this?

What year, roughly? This would have been 2012, 2013. I'm Fran. It was probably just before Dave joined us. Our newsletter became very popular. It was still, again, not an internal product,

but it wasn't a profit-making venture. Dave came to join us, you know, Little bit of 2015, bringing his immense talents to our creative team, especially in the video world. He got to notice the products, particularly the newsletter that we were doing. He had met our first editor, John Patrick, and came by my office and said, hey, Peter, you know, this newsletter you have might make a great podcast. and David had a lot of experience working on podcasts in the past,

doing broadcasts kind of work. And I said, that's interesting. Why don't you like show me what that would look like? So he worked with the editor, came back, showed a little prototype of what the first podcast could look like, which, by the way, was just like five minutes long, you know, the first iteration. Dave, how did you have that idea? I mean, obviously you had the expertise there,

But was there a lightning strike moment for you? Or was it a slow realization or what? How did you get to that point? Well, in my previous career, I had produced podcasts for a number of other people. So I was familiar with the medium, but I'd been more behind the scenes. And so when I joined the team at the cybersecurity company, they had this, Peter said, they had this pre-existing newsletter called the Cyberwire. And I thought, why don't I just read?

read it every day. I had also, as Peter mentioned, I had a background in theater. I'd been doing voiceover professionally since I was like eight. So it was something I was very comfortable with. And the idea was just that every day, I would just read the newsletter as it existed, just read it verbatim.

And we'd put that out in audio form. We originally, I think we held ourselves to something like a 10-minute limit for show length. Ha ha ha ha ha. Check the wrong time. And then we were like, should we extend this to six? Yeah. You know.

Yeah. And then it became like, you know. Yeah. And you know, Peter's management style is very much, you know, pushing you to stretch your boundaries and find what other things you can do and constant improvement. So we, you know, at first it was like, well, what if we did an interview every now and then? Oh, we could do that. What if we did an interview? every day. So it just kind of snowballed and eventually took the form that it is today. It really was just as simple as thinking that we were going to read the daily news briefing every day and just

send it out into the world and didn't take us too long to figure out we were on to something. I was going to say there must have been some very good audience signals that you not only had anticipated at the start, but that you were getting as you started going. Because not every podcast has legs. I mean, certainly 10 years is incredible. But earlier on, you all must have been seeing things like, oh, this is getting traction. What were you hearing at that time? It was actually really surprising to me. I wasn't sure what to expect.

We thought this might be kind of a side project. It was very good. And we definitely believed in what we were making. But within six months, we had Fortune 10 companies reaching out and saying, how do I get on this show? You know, and the audience became really enamored with what we were doing. We'd mentioned it in our newsletter, of course. Also, some of our customers who are still our customers, 10 years later, reached out to us and said, we're in.

We're happy to sponsor what you guys are doing. They weren't even particularly interested in the ROI. They just wanted to be connected with the trust that we were building in the community. And not long after that, we realized that this had real legs and could be a business. So five of us split off to go make it a company. And that was Dave Bittner, Jen Ibin, John Patrick, Chris Russell, and myself. And we went off. We all had our function.

I needed to help turn what we were doing into a business so that it could survive. John Patrick would write the stories of the day. You know, Dave Bittner would tell the stories, you know, help people engage with our audience, talk to people. Jen Ibin would help create the infrastructure and process we needed to be able to, you know, talk to the world and, you know, shape the stories that we were doing. And Chris helped build the technical infrastructure that helped us deliver what we did day and day. We bet we were a small and mighty team and we still are.

A little bigger though. Those early days were, as anyone who's been in that sort of a startup knows, everybody's just kind of taking care of everybody or everything and everybody and just doing what needs to be done just to see you to the next week. And we were definitely in that mode. I think just getting back to the startup, you know, one of the things I think that set us apart at the outset, and you have to remember 10 years ago, podcasting was,

different than it is today. We just sounded like a real radio program. We were able to sound like a news show, and part of that was just the technical experience we had, the experience we had writing, just we had this group of people who could together make that happen. And I think at the outset, it set us apart. These days, it's not hard to sound great with all of the tools and the filters and all the things that the audio teams can do. But back then, it wasn't a given that you were going to sound good. And we did. And I think that caught people's ear and helped get us off to a good start. Yeah, I'm also very curious, in addition to that high standard of production excellence, which speaks for itself truly, also the guiding star, like the North Star for the show in terms of

standards, editorial responsibility, that sort of thing. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that's one of the things that the show is also really well known for, like that level of integrity. Well, I mean, the vision of the cyber wire when it first came out, and we didn't really fully articulate this into words as we were going forward. But really what we were doing is making the world a safer place by help keeping people educated and informed about what was going on in security. And we did it diligently. We did it without fluff.

We did it without creating fudge. you know, in the community. We just told it like it was. And we were there every day. We were reliable, even in major snowstorms, you know, that I don't, I'm not even sure there is one day that is off air, one one business day that is off air for this, for the cyber wire. I mean, through the pandemic and other things, we were there.

Other places shut down. Of course, we have our breaks that we build into what we do because people work hard day in and day out on this show. But we were there, and we started building trust with leaders in the public sector, the private sector, intelligence community, law enforcement, not just in the U.S., but abroad, started using the content that we create. Again, not just as fluff, but people used what we made to help bring context to their own intelligence operations, their own disaster recovery kinds of things. And even major companies,

you know, basically, I don't want to name names at the moment, but a number of public companies actually assigned listening to the cyberwire to their employees. They wanted them to be informed when they went into meetings. They wanted to make sure that they were growing and that they were always in the know when it comes to cybersecurity. I remember a couple of moments that struck me as being noteworthy, maybe milestones. First was not long after we started publishing, of course, we were tracking our numbers every day, which was very exciting because they were going up and up slowly but surely. And I remember I was at a women in cybersecurity conference, I believe in Texas,

And I was doing the publishing and the things that needed to be done in my hotel room. And I think it was the first time that we had crossed 3,000 downloads for a day. And it was a big boost. Like the day before had been probably half that. And so somebody caught notice or we got published. Somebody mentioned us somewhere and we got a big boost. And I remember how exciting that was. and I think I said to Peter, hey, we crossed 3,000, and Peter said, that's great.

I think we'll really have something when we cross 10,000. And I thought to myself, I thought to myself, oh, come on, that's impossible. Of course, it wasn't impossible. You know, probably six months later, we crossed the 10,000 a day threshold, and it's just grown ever since. Another moment that was special for me was one day in the mail, I got a little pad, envelope with no return address. And it was full of challenge coins from NSA. Oh, wow.

Fort Mead. And just a handwritten, unsigned note that said, thanks for all you do. Dang. That was it. Wow. That was a pretty special moment. Dave also gets all the goodies, you know, from very...

It's true, yeah. So you get all the swag. You want to send us cookies and other delights. You're not jealous at all, Peter. But to this day, I'll go to events, and as I've said, I'm just the most public-facing person in this team that makes this happen. So people come up to me and thank me on behalf of the team. And it just never gets old. People in very important positions, both in government and the private sector, whose job is to help keep all of us safe, are sincerely thankful that we help them.

them do their job. And that feels great. It does. It reminds me, too, that, like, you know, we oftentimes are talking about the impact that we have with, you know, the intelligence community or some, you know, big leader who listens to us. But our team is really excited to hear from individuals who reach out to us fairly regularly. And they say, oh, you helped me get a job. You know, I learned about you and you helped me transition into this career or security was assigned to me as part of my portfolio. You helped me get there or get where I needed to go. I remember sitting at an airport once and the lady saw my cyberwire shirt and she's like,

oh my gosh, you know, I listened to you on my way to a job interview the other day and I got the job and I just wanted to say thank you. That means a lot to us. We touch a lot of lives. We're in people's ears. We have their trust and the idea that we can actually help people move forward in their careers, help them grow in their knowledge, help their organizations stay safe. It means a lot to us.

I think also the foundational principles that we established, and that was really the partnership with Peter and our founding editor, John Petrick, who's since retired, we don't report on rumors or gossip or any of that stuff. We just don't go there. Because we understand people's time is valuable, and so we try to help people make the most of their time.

And so I think that's been an important North Star part of our value proposition. And I know it's part of, we have a daily production meeting every day. We get together, the whole team runs down the stories that we're covering. And sometimes we have lively debates over what to include and what not, who to name and who not to name, whether something is really in our lane or not, or where in the rundown something should be if it's controversial or not. And so to have those discussions and come up with a group,

or to come up with an answer that the team is happy with and everybody feels like they can sleep at night, you know, that's really important to me and Peter and all of us. So it's nice to be able to hang your head on that and know that you can feel good about that part of things. Yeah, absolutely. I want to ask you about two very macro-level questions as we reflect on the last 10 years. I'm going to tell you what they both are

so you can noodle on them while the other one is speaking. Just give you a minute. I want to get your thoughts on the large trend lines in cybersecurity in last 10 years, is we could take hours talking about that one, and I know we will. But I'm just curious if anything bubbles up quickly on that one. I'm just just curious. And the second thing I want to ask you is a question I know you both get a lot,

which is advice for people on making a longstanding podcast. Again, 10 years is a huge milestone. And I know you both get asked a lot about how'd you do it? What should I do? How do I be successful like you? So that would be the wrap-up question is the advice on that front. So let's go back first to the cybersecurity question because I can't not ask. And I know we'll be diving into it in further detail later on other shows or with other people,

but I just have to ask. Ten years of covering cybersecurity, thoughts, trends, what have you noticed? What is your gut feeling on how things have changed, how things have evolved in interesting ways? Who wants to address that one first? Dave, Peter. It's a really huge question. It truly is. It's right to address.

I would say when we first started doing what we were doing, cybersecurity was still kind of niche, at least in the commercial space. Definitely a lot of larger companies emerging to tackle the challenge. But it wasn't seen as this sort of important function that cuts across every vertical in every industry. And I think what we were able to see is, again, cyber attacks have been going on for quite a long time. But as we started this podcast and the newsletter and things that we've been doing,

we've seen the nature of threats evolve over time. You see the kind of capability that's given to small actors that previously was just in the domain of nation states, how nation states started to use criminal networks to help them, advance their own missions. Really, when we first started, there's some of the early news around like OT

kinds of attacks and threats to critical infrastructure. We're just starting to get into the consciousness. Definitely security people have been thinking about this for a long time. But I really started to come about through the time that we were creating

the cyber wire. The nature of ransomware itself has made a particularly important evolution as it started as this thing that a few people did and it became fully operationalized, industrialized, you know, to the point where you can buy it as a service, you know, like you were buying something from Salesforce or something. I mean, really, you know, full-on kits to do what it is that you need to do. And the kind of disruption that actors large and small can do has really evolved. in the last decade.

And it's changing things geopolitically. It's changing things inside various countries. I don't think we've begun to see what's possible. I mean, I agree with all that. I think, as you said, the rise of ransomware along with cryptocurrency, which I think has been an accelerant for ransomware. Great way of putting it. Yeah.

Right. And then obviously these past couple years, AI, but I think also the global fraud market that's just exploded with fishing and social engineering and how many bad things start with that. And most of them come from the other side of the world. And it's hard to toss a wall up around the Internet. So just huge growth of the house become normalized. I think that's remarkable. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so I'm going to transition to the other question now.

Advice for people who are trying to start their own podcast or people who are trying to continue a podcast and are looking at the CyberWire's longevity and wondering, what are some takeaways that I should know? So, Dave, I know you get this question a lot. And you give really great advice on this one, but I am curious to get both of your takes on this. But, Dave, let's start with you on that.

Well, lately I've been using a phrase that I borrowed from, you know, the great comedian and actor Steve Martin in his memoir, people, he said, people ask him, how did you get noticed at first? And he says, be so good they can't ignore you. And I think, you know, there's a certain arrogance in that statement. But I think there's a certain arrogance in thinking that what you're doing is something that vast numbers, of people want to consume. So yeah, it takes a certain amount of confidence and ego or whatever you want to call it to put yourself out there in that way. So I think that's a big part of it. You have to set high quality standards for yourself and the people around you and what you do and then consistency. We haven't missed a day in 10 years and I probably just jinxed it. But being there and being reliable, that's been a huge part of our success as well. Doing a daily is not easy. We make a It look easy. It's not.

Trust me, especially in those early days when it was just a small little team. And we were spinning plates and juggling balls, you know, like just all that. So there's that. And then for folks who are just starting out or have their sights set on something like this, a big piece of advice I give to folks is try to plot out your first 20 shows. Because everybody has half a dozen. and shows in them about something, a topic that they're passionate about. But usually between

episode six and episode 10, you start running out of the easy ideas. And so if you really think you have something that can last, write out 20 episodes, an outline for 20 episodes. If you can do that and it's easy, then you're probably on to something. That's great advice. Peter, what about you? I would agree with everything that Dave just said. But I would, I would, add that you know there's something to be said for authenticity you know just you know being yourselves you know speaking from your heart you know sharing with people in in an earnest way you know while there is some arrogance and thinking that we can you know actually make a build a company reach you know literally millions what i think we're like on our getting close to our hundred million down

load threshold for what we're doing. But really just being ourselves, trying to be truthful, learning along the way, we've made mistakes. And I think we're good at correcting this when they happen. Being ourselves, talking with people, being open and friendly. I think one of the greatest compliments that we ever got was somebody who had been a listener of our show. And she ended up somehow becoming a guest on this show.

And before her interview aired, she made a little social media post. And she said, it was really great. I was exciting to have an interview with the CyberWire the other day. And it was so nice to see that they're as nice on the inside as they are on the outside. Oh. And it just meant a lot to all of us. We try to be friendly. When you come interview with us, we're not trying to do gotcha questions or back you into a corner.

We want to hear what you have to say, and we're going to give you the space and ability to do that and support to be able to do that. So I think that's part of it. And like they've said, consistency. I'd also just call it perseverance. You know, you have to keep going. I mean, you can keep going and not listen to what your audience is telling you. Or you can keep going, but also be listening. Like, how can I improve?

What can I change? How can I iterate? How do I set some goals? for my podcast so that I can keep going. I mean, today, you know, CyberWire is not just like the daily show. You know, we have a number of different shows of our own. We have a larger network where, you know, larger companies like Palo Alto Networks, rubric and others are part of what we're doing.

And it's just, it takes perseverance. So, Peter, we've talked about. bit about the start of the show, the genesis of the CyberWire Daily, but it is not just a podcast anymore, although it is incredibly a podcast also. So there's a whole company around it. Tell me how things went from five people, the CyberWire Daily, to N2K and the company that it is now. It was a great question, and it's a lot of blood, sweat, tears. You know, it's really hard to make a company. It's actually very hard to make a media company. I was very fortunate to have that, you know,

be part of a founding group that was as dedicated as they were. But we were very fortunate in the early days to have companies coming to us and saying, we love what you do and we want to support it no matter what, even we hadn't figured out, like, what does ROI mean for our customers? And, you know, it just, that started to snowball and take us down a great path. we were able in a very short period of time to become a profitable company. We've around the 2018 mark, you know, we thought to ourselves, well, it would be great to it'll take this to the next level to be able to grow, both in content and quality, you know,

spread our wings, so to speak. So we raised a seed round of capital through Data Tribe. And that took us on a new path, you know, having a board of directors and, you know, being answerable to others. And they've been amazing partners, by the way, really helping us grow and mature as an organization. And we continued to grow throughout the years. And we decided that we were ready to grow yet again in around the 2022 mark.

And in searching for that next investor, we came across the good people at Graham Holdings. Graham Holdings, you may well know them. They used to own the Washington Post, sold that to Jeff Bezos. They owned Slate and Foreign Policy. They were also created the podcast hosting platform we used today called Megaphone. We reached out to them to talk about what we were doing. They expressed interest in being a part of an A round with us.

But they also saw something in our company. I'm really glad actually we were touching base on. this. They saw that we're not just providing information or situational awareness or news. We're actually helping people get up the knowledge curve and helping people advance in their careers, helping even organizations advance in their careers. And as they thought about what we were doing, they had thought very carefully about that educational piece. And Graham Holdings also owns one of the educational pioneers in the industry called Kaplan, again, one of the pioneers in online education.

And they said, hey, we have a cybersecurity training organization called CyberVista. How would you like to accelerate this idea of helping people get up the knowledge curve? And they proposed a union between Cyberwire, Inc. and CyberVista. We became N2K. And 2K stands for news to knowledge. It's that continuum of learning from being in the know, in the now, what do I need to do my job today, to the things you need to learn to be able to get that next job or to make your organization more resilient or to help your organization through some transformation or other. So we did that in first year operating together was 2023. And today, in addition to being the largest B2B cybersecurity podcast network, N2K is the world's leading provider of practice test content for cybersecurity certifications.

Many of the world's largest training platforms by their learning content from us. And this not only just gives us another thing that we do, but the idea that we help people learn, the things that they're making, the data set that we're producing about all of the different vendors and security organizations, everything else, that informs everything that we do on a daily basis. Organizations have even reached out to us to license this content for AI purposes. And it's vital to what it is that we do as a business, not just as an extra. So it's exciting to be, have gone from Cyberwire to N2K and to be able to help the industry in all these different ways. I'll just add what a joy it's been to meet all of these folks as we sort of, you know, blended this family, these two families kind of, you know, Brady Bunch style. All of a sudden we had access to these subject matter experts.

The people who are writing these test questions, they know their stuff. and so it's just one more source of information and knowledge and expertise that we can lean on and rely on. So it's really helped us up our own game and taken us to an even higher standard by having that level of expertise in-house. So it's been a really good experience, I think, for those of us on the editorial side as well. Yeah, it's an incredible group of people that we've come together with. and, you know, being a larger family now, it's exciting to be able to learn from others and benefit from the experience and expertise of a broader team.

And there's really great overlap culturally, you know, and how we do things, the dedication to quality, helping people get up to the next level. I was at a conference, and I was on a little, some tour bus, you know, heading to the airport. And somebody's sitting next to me, an IT professional in Europe.

And he goes, oh, you know, that's interesting. You know, I took the such and such, you know, test from, I don't want to name names, such as such company. And I was like, you took our tests. You know, those were the practice test that we made. It's just randomly running into some guy, you know, who we were part of his career story.

It's really gratifying. It seems to be a common thread in many different ways for not just the Cyberwire Daily, but also largely at N2K, hearing those gratifying stories, yeah. Well, you think about what we do, like literally the hundreds of thousands per month, millions per year of listeners that we have,

literally hundreds of thousands of people per year are utilizing test content that we work on day in and day out. So we're touching experts all over the world. Given that you've been working on this show for, again, 10 years, but really longer than that, I'm sure there's a lot of people that you want to say a thank you to or things that you're especially appreciative of. And I want to make sure we give that some space. So over to you on that.

Well, I say all the time that I feel like I'm the luckiest person to have the job that I have, that I came, I stumbled into this thing that just happens to use so many of the skills that I'd acquired along the way over the course of, you know, a life with fits and starts and successes and blind alleys. So to have all that come together in a way that is both successful but also gratifying and, intellectually stimulating day after day with the people I get to meet and work with and all that sort of thing. I'm just really, really grateful and happy. I don't have to do this. I get to do this. And I'm just really thankful for everybody who's made that possible, both our team, but also all the sponsors and guests who have believed in us along the way. I just, I never take for granted the luck that we've had,

you know, with a good sprinkling of hard work as well. I just want to reiterate some things that Dave said, you know, what we do today at N2K, you know, is not the vision or work of a single genius, you know, that's like behind the scenes making it work. It's really teamwork that makes it work. You know, to work at a place where we can bring together the imagination, creativity,

a spirit of fun, and actually make something that people like and enjoy. And actually, the products that we have, companies have been supporting us for a long time, not just out of charity, but we hope because of our voice that we've developed in the marketplace,

we've been able to help companies grow and succeed. And to become a vital part of the marketplace, you know, to become a nexus of information about technology, about people, about expertise, about the evolving threat landscape is enormously gratifying, and it's the work of many that makes it happen. And of course, all of the listeners that are tuning in day and day out, not just tuning in, but sending us notes engaging with us.

We've developed over the last decade an incredible network of people who we work with, who we have access to be able to reach out to, make double check our work, make sure that we're doing, going the right way and to get the expertise that the community needs. It's been really exciting to be a part of what we're doing. And I too feel gratitude for being able to be a part of it. It's a privilege. Well, Peter and Dave, thank you for a wonderful 10 years of the Cyberwire.

I think as someone who has been a listener well before I worked with you, I just want to also say my own personal gratitude because it also helped me immensely in my career. So thank you for everything that you all have been building. I'm going to be the voice of the listener in this case. Genuinely, thank you. And congratulations, genuinely, on a wonderful 10 years. May things continue even longer than another 10, onward and upward.

Here's the next 10. Here's to the next 10. So Peter Kilpey, CEO of N2K, Dave Bittner, the host, the voice of the Cyberwire Daily. Gentlemen, it's been an absolute joy. Thank you for speaking with me today. A pleasure, Maria. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you back here next time.

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