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What if you could see the internet the way attackers do—before the headlines, before the breach, before the phish hits your inbox? We sit down with Aidan Holland, senior security researcher at Censys, to unpack how daily global scans reveal the live shape of the web: assets you didn’t know you own, services you thought were private, and the malicious infrastructure gearing up for its next move.

Aidan explains how distributed scanning nodes in eight regions capture real banners, certificates, and configuration details, then stitch that telemetry into a searchable index. We dig into two high-value outcomes: attack surface management that links stray assets back to your org through DNS and certs, and threat hunting that tracks bulletproof hosting, brand impersonation, and the flood of fake captcha kits. You’ll hear why internal inventories miss internet-facing systems—rotating IPs, scattered cloud accounts, mergers—and how external vantage points and AI assistants help teams query in plain English, triage vulnerabilities, and fix what matters first.

The stories are gripping and practical: wastewater controls left on the open web, shipboard networks forwarding every port over Starlink, and navigation systems exposed to anyone who could find them. We also talk about the quiet shift back to on-prem and the renewed pressure to patch Exchange-class systems on a tight cadence. Looking ahead, Aiden shares how IPv6 changes the game—no brute force, smarter traversal—and why faster, more diverse scanning is key to catching ephemeral threats.

If you care about cybersecurity, visibility, and measurable risk reduction, this conversation gives you tools and perspective you can use today. Subscribe, share with a teammate who wrangles shadow IT, and leave a review with the biggest “unknown asset” you’ve uncovered lately.

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