The best cybersecurity podcasts for 2026

TL;DR

Five podcasts earn a permanent feed slot in 2026: Risky Business, Darknet Diaries, CyberWire Daily, Click Here, and Defensive Security. Everything else is supporting cast.

The right "I want to keep up without losing my evenings" build is one daily news read plus one weekly opinion show. CyberWire + Risky Business is the gold standard.

Vendor-hosted shows are mostly sales theater. Two earn an exception (Malicious Life, Click Here) because the editorial reads as independent. The rest can go.

French-speaking security pros should run NoLimitSecu as their anchor, then layer Le Comptoir Sécu, Hack'n Speak, and Hacker Spirit.

If you are new to the field, this is not your list — read our beginners' rotation first.

There are more cybersecurity podcasts in 2026 than any working professional can keep up with. The honest count is in the low thousands across English, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese, and the majority are vendor marketing wearing a podcast hat. A few are the genuine article — shows that working SOC leads, threat-intel analysts, CISOs, incident responders, and security journalists actually queue up on the Monday morning commute.

This list is the rotation. It is ranked by editorial quality and signal-to-noise, not by listener counts, sponsor budgets, or which show currently has the most aggressive LinkedIn presence. A two-friends-on-Skype show with 5,000 listeners and a decade of real incident-response context beats a glossy 50,000-listener feed that recycles vendor press releases. That hierarchy holds for the whole article.

If you want the same exercise applied to a specific niche, we have separate pieces on the best daily security news podcasts, the best blue-team and SOC podcasts, the best offensive-security and pentest podcasts, the best history and narrative podcasts, and the best French-language podcasts. This piece is the pillar — read it for the working rotation, then drill down where you need depth.

These five earn the feed slot without conditions. If you work in security and you are not subscribed to all five, you are not in the conversation your peers are having. The order matters less than the fact that the set is complete.

1. Risky Business — the most-cited podcast in the working-professional rotation

Risky Business is the show Patrick Gray plays at 1.5× on Thursday mornings. It is the single most-cited cybersecurity podcast among working CISOs, threat-intel leads, and security journalists, and has been for most of the last decade. Gray and Adam Boileau do a one-hour weekly news-and-industry brief from Australia, with a sharp editorial voice and a sponsor-segment format that — unusually — does not bleed into the news block.

What makes it work is the editorial independence. Gray pushes back on guests, including paying ones. He calls vendors out by name when their press releases overstate the case. The Risky Biz News daily companion (Catalin Cimpanu's separate feed) covers the items Gray references with full reporting and is the strongest news-plus-podcast pairing you can build in this field. Subscribe to both.

The right register if you have been in security less than two years is "I am eavesdropping on a smarter conversation." That is fine. Stay. In a month the references stop sliding past you.

2. Darknet Diaries — the genre's defining narrative show

Darknet Diaries is the show your CTO's spouse listens to on long drives, and it deserves the audience. Jack Rhysider's long-form interview-driven narrative work is the genre's quality leader and the best entry point in the entire space. Single-story episodes built around long interviews with named participants — carders, ransomware negotiators, NSA operators, physical pentesters, scam victims, scammers themselves.

The show's defining strength is interview access. Rhysider gets people on the record who do not usually speak publicly, and the back catalog — particularly episodes 100 through 200 — functions as an audio history of the field with no real competitor. Episode 1 is rough; do not start there. Pick any title in the 100–180 range that grabs you and work outward.

If you only ever subscribe to one cybersecurity podcast in your life, this is it. Required listening for anyone in or adjacent to security work.

3. The CyberWire Daily — the briefing that gets you to Monday already informed

The CyberWire Daily is Dave Bittner's 25-minute daily news read, produced to broadcast standards. No opinion. No commentary. No vendor-pitch hot takes. Just the wire — read with a discipline most tech podcasts do not even attempt. The show works at 1.0× and becomes unintelligible past 1.4×, because Bittner's pacing is pro-grade and there is nothing to compress.

If you run a SOC, lead a threat-intel team, write the morning briefing, or hold a CISO seat, this is non-optional. The interview blocks that rotate through CyberWire's sister shows (Hacking Humans, CSO Perspectives, Career Notes, Research Saturday) are the value-add beyond the news read. The N2K Networks family has expanded extensively since 2020 and most of the sister shows are worth a separate look.

4. Click Here — the genre's quality leader for long-form journalism

Click Here is what NPR-grade investigative journalism sounds like applied to the cybersecurity beat. Dina Temple-Raston spends weeks on a single story and the production values — scoring, pacing, editing — are not approached by any other show in the genre. The Iranian operation against US water utilities, the Belarusian Cyber Partisans, the Volt Typhoon reporting: these arcs are the format's strongest material and the reason to subscribe.

Recorded Future sponsors the show. The editorial does not read as shaped by it. Treat Click Here as funded journalism that has earned its independence, the same way you treat ProPublica.

The cadence is unpredictable — episodes ship when the reporting lands, not on a schedule — which is the right way to run an investigative shop and the wrong way to fill a daily commute. Pair with CyberWire if you need rhythm.

5. Defensive Security Podcast — the most criminally underrated show in the genre

Defensive Security Podcast has been running since 2014 and the longevity shows. Jerry Bell (decades of CISO-track experience) and Andrew Kalat (hands-on consulting practice) get on what is functionally a Skype call once a week and talk shop. The production is unpolished by design. The content is the highest signal-to-noise of any blue-team-focused podcast in audio.

This is the show working IR responders, SOC leads, and detection engineers send each other when nobody else is in the room. Bell and Kalat say out loud the things vendor-influenced shows will not — the unfunded mandates, the regulator absurdities, the "this product does not work the way the deck says" reality of the EDR market — and they say it with the grounded perspective of people whose actual job is defending networks.

If you are a working blue-teamer and not subscribed, fix that today. If you are not a working blue-teamer, this is the show that will teach you how the defender actually sees the field.

Comparison: the 2026 permanent rotation at a glance

Show	Best for	Cadence	Rating	Skip if…
Risky Business	Working pros who want one weekly opinion brief	Weekly, ~60 min	5/5	You want neutral coverage or you are brand-new to the field
Darknet Diaries	Anyone in or near security; best entry point	Bi-weekly, 60–90 min	5/5	You want news or current incidents (it is not a news show)
CyberWire Daily	SOC leads, threat-intel, journalists, briefers	Daily, ~25 min	4/5	You already work off raw RSS and threat-intel feeds all day
Click Here	Policy, threat-intel, anyone who wants journalism	Variable, ~30 min	5/5	You need a predictable cadence to commute to
Defensive Security	Blue team, IR, detection engineering, CISOs	Weekly, ~60 min	4/5	You want polished production or offensive content

The next tier: four podcasts worth the feed slot in 2026

These four earn the subscribe with the right caveats. Pick the ones that map to your beat; do not load all four if you already run the five above.

Malicious Life — Ran Levi's narrative history of the field. The right complement to Darknet Diaries (Levi covers chronology and context; Rhysider covers incidents and people). The WANK worm, the Crypto Wars, the Conficker Working Group, the early carders — Levi reaches stories no English-language book has covered in this detail. Cybereason sponsors. The editorial does not read as captured.
Smashing Security — Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault. The funniest show in the space and the only one in the rotation you can recommend to your non-security spouse without apologising. Two senior ex-AV voices, generalist by design, and the "pet peeve" / "gadget of the week" segments are quietly one of the better consumer-privacy beats in the press.
Hacking Humans — Bittner, Joe Carrigan, and Maria Varmazis on social engineering, phishing, and the human side. The Catch of the Day format alone is worth subscribing for if you run an awareness program; the archive of dissected phishing emails is the cleanest training asset you can hand a new SOC analyst.
The Cyber Mentor — Heath Adams's TCM Security podcast. A strong on-ramp for the OSCP / early-pentest-career audience and the most honest analysis of certification value you will find from someone running a competing training shop. Less useful once you are past the first offensive role.

French-language: the four shows the French security scene actually runs on

If you work the French-speaking security scene, you do not need to default to English. The catalog is smaller but the quality at the top is genuinely on par.

NoLimitSecu is the canon. Running since 2013, weekly roundtable with a rotating panel that includes most of the names you would expect from the French scene (Hervé Schauer, Johanne Ulloa, Nicolas Ruff). The closest French equivalent to Risky Business and unmissable if you operate in France or French-speaking Europe.
Le Comptoir Sécu is the warm-interview register and the right entry point for French-speaking newcomers. Career episodes and parcours conversations that map the French training and CISO landscape better than anything else in audio.
Hack'n Speak is the offensive-tradecraft show — Active Directory attack chains, EDR/AV evasion, NetExec / BloodHound / Impacket walkthroughs. mpgn's own track record as a NetExec maintainer means guests do not get away with hand-waving.
Hacker Spirit is the newest of the canon — long-form monthly interviews with named technical guests (Charlie Bromberg of Exegol, Jonathan Spedale) built around the hacker-mindset register rather than the news cycle. Editorial restraint unusual at this stage.

For the full French rotation including La French Connection (the Quebec voice) and Café Cyber (the awareness-friendly format you can send to non-security colleagues), see our dedicated French-language podcasts piece.

This is the section that should exist in every "best of" list and never does. If you only have so many feed slots, you also need a stop-list. These shows get recommended in 2026 listicles by people who have not actually listened.

Security Now — The "for beginners" recommendation that aged into a problem. Steve Gibson's technical confidence routinely exceeds his accuracy, and as a new listener you have no way to know which specific claims to fact-check. Useful as a primary-source artifact of how security was explained to enthusiasts across two decades. Risky as a single source for any decision that matters.
The No Name Security Podcast — Sharper API-security focus than generic AppSec podcasts, but the editorial scope is bounded by the vendor's commercial interest (now Akamai's, post-acquisition). Pick OWASP API Security Top 10 docs over this for the real material.
No Such Podcast (NSA official) — Subscribe as a primary-source artifact, not as journalism. Worth knowing what NSA chooses to discuss, frame, and elide. Not a substitute for the Bamford-and-Greenberg adjacent reading list.
Every "CISO Talks" / "CISOs in Conversation" / "Cyber Leaders" interview show — The genre is sales-cycle theater. You will learn what vendors want CISOs to say on stage, not what CISOs actually think when the recording stops. Skip until you can read the marketing register fluently enough to extract the rare useful clip.
Any podcast whose host's title is "Chief Marketing Officer" or "Field CTO" — There are no exceptions. The format is built for pipeline, not for you. The good guests give better interviews on shows where the host is a working practitioner.
The "AI changes everything in cybersecurity" gold rush of 2024–2025 shows — The handful that survived have settled into legitimate beats; the rest are GPT-wrapper marketing. If a 2026 show's first three episodes all have "AI" in the title and the host has fewer than five years of security background, the answer is no.

The trade you are making by subscribing to any vendor podcast is your attention for their lead-gen funnel. Make sure the editorial is actually worth it. For the five vendor-funded shows in this piece (Click Here, Malicious Life, CyberWire family, Hacking Humans, The No Name Security Podcast), four pass that test. Most do not.

How to actually run a security podcast rotation without falling behind

Three rules separate "subscribed to too many shows" from "actually keeping up." Most working pros learn these the hard way.

Drop anything you have skipped three weeks in a row. Your time is the constraint, not the catalog. If you keep swiping past an episode, the show is not in your rotation — your guilt is. Unsubscribe. You will not miss it; if you do, resubscribe.
Match playback speed to format, not to ego. Daily news read at 1.0× (Bittner's pacing is broadcast-pro and gets unintelligible past 1.4×). Weekly chat shows at 1.3–1.5× (there is padding to compress). Narrative shows at 1.0× (they are scored). If you cannot tell the difference, your retention is lower than you think.
Pair one daily with one weekly opinion. That is your spine. CyberWire + Risky Business is the gold-standard build. Anything else is layered on top — narrative for context, journalism for depth, blue-team for peer perspective, social engineering for awareness work. Without the spine, you are dipping; with it, you are tracking.

A working SOC analyst's realistic week in audio is about three to five hours: 25 minutes a day on CyberWire (two hours), an hour of Risky Business, one Darknet Diaries or Click Here episode (60–90 minutes), and one Defensive Security or Hacking Humans for the peer or awareness register. That is enough. Past that you are not keeping up, you are performing keeping up.

What changed since 2024 and what to expect through 2026

The genre has stabilised. The 2021–2023 vendor-podcast explosion peaked, the GPT-wrapper "AI in cyber" gold rush of 2024 is mostly gone, and the survivors have settled into legitimate beats. Click Here's expansion of investigative arcs, Hacker Spirit launching as the long-form French entry, the N2K Networks consolidation around CyberWire, and Defensive Security crossing its tenth year all signal that the format has found its working canon.

What to expect through 2026: more deepfake-driven social-engineering coverage on Hacking Humans, more Volt-Typhoon-style nation-state attribution work on Click Here, continued consolidation of vendor podcasts (most by acquisition or quiet shutdown), and probably one or two new entrants from the journalism side as Recorded Future and Bloomberg compete for the cyber-beat audience. Patrick Gray will still be making the most-cited weekly editorial. That is not changing.

FAQ

What are the best cybersecurity podcasts in 2026?

For working practitioners, the five-show core is Risky Business (weekly opinion), Darknet Diaries (narrative), The CyberWire Daily (news read), Click Here (long-form investigative), and Defensive Security Podcast (blue-team peer talk). Add Malicious Life, Smashing Security, Hacking Humans, and The Cyber Mentor selectively. Everything else is optional or vendor noise.

Is Darknet Diaries worth listening to in 2026?

Yes. Darknet Diaries is the single best entry-point podcast in cybersecurity and the cleanest narrative archive of the field's history in audio. Jack Rhysider's interview access is unmatched and episodes age unusually well. If you only subscribe to one show, this is it.

Which cybersecurity podcast is best for working SOC and threat-intel analysts?

Pair The CyberWire Daily (Bittner) for the morning brief with Risky Business (Gray) for the weekly editorial. That two-show combination is what most working SOC leads and threat-intel analysts already run. Add the Risky Biz News daily companion (Cimpanu) for full reporting on the items Gray references.

Five. Past five, you stop keeping up and start skimming. One daily news read, one weekly opinion, one narrative, one blue-team peer show, and one wildcard (long-form investigative, history, or social engineering depending on your beat). Drop anything you have skipped three weeks in a row.

Is Security Now still good in 2026?

Security Now is useful as 101-level enthusiast scaffolding and a primary-source artifact of how security was explained to non-specialists over two decades. It is not a reliable source for current professional decisions: Steve Gibson's technical confidence regularly exceeds his accuracy, and a working practitioner has no upside from treating any single claim on the show as authoritative.

Are vendor-produced cybersecurity podcasts worth listening to?

Almost never. Two exceptions earn slots: Malicious Life (Cybereason) and Click Here (Recorded Future) have demonstrably independent editorial despite vendor funding. Everything labelled CISO Talks, branded after an EDR or SASE vendor, or hosted by a CMO is sales-cycle theater. Unsubscribe.

What is the best French-language cybersecurity podcast?

NoLimitSecu, running since 2013, is the canon — the closest French equivalent to Risky Business. Pair it with Le Comptoir Sécu for community and career, Hack'n Speak for offensive-tradecraft interviews, and Hacker Spirit for long-form profiles of the people who built the French scene.

Where should a beginner start with cybersecurity podcasts?

Start with Darknet Diaries and Smashing Security, in that order. Add Malicious Life when you want historical depth and Hacking Humans when you want a social-engineering on-ramp. Hold off on Risky Business, CyberWire Daily, and Defensive Security until month three — they assume vocabulary and recurring storylines you do not have yet. The full sequencing is in our beginners' guide.

Where to go next

If you are new to security, do not subscribe to this list yet. Start with the beginners' rotation — it sequences the same shows in the order that will not drown you, and tells you which ones to grow into.

If your beat is a specific corner of the field, drill into the lane:

Best daily cybersecurity news podcasts for 2026 — for the morning briefing build.
Best blue-team and SOC podcasts for 2026 — for working defenders.
Best offensive-security and pentest podcasts for 2026 — for red-team, OSCP, and bug-bounty audiences.
Best history and narrative cybersecurity podcasts for 2026 — for the long-form storytelling lane.
Meilleurs podcasts de cybersécurité francophones 2026 — the dedicated French-language deep-dive.

For the full catalog — every show on the site, who it is for, who it is not for, and what to pair it with — see the podcast index or the broader best-podcasts topic page. Pick three from this article. Subscribe today. Drop one in three weeks if you have not played it.

The permanent rotation: the five podcasts every working security pro should subscribe to in 2026