Best cybersecurity podcasts for pentesters and offensive security (2026)

TL;DR

• Four shows earn the slot: The Cyber Mentor (TCM), Hack'n Speak (FR, worth the language barrier), Darknet Diaries, Risky Business.
• English-language offensive-security podcasting has a real tradecraft gap. No weekly show goes deep on current AD attack paths, EDR evasion, or C2 framework work. Substitute with conference talks and vendor research blogs.
• Hack'n Speak is the highest-signal offensive podcast in either language. If you read French, subscribe. If you don't, slow-listen with captions — it is still better than the English alternatives.
• Skip the OSCP-grift / cert-mill podcast category; almost all of it is funnel content for courseware.
• For bug bounty: Critical Thinking is the rare exception. The rest of the bug-bounty audio space is thin.

The offensive-security podcast scene in 2026 is louder than the defensive one but, oddly, thinner at the top. There are a hundred shows where someone calls themselves "the offensive security guy" on YouTube and reuploads to a podcast feed. There are maybe three to five that a working pentester or red teamer should actually keep in rotation. The rest is content marketing for cert prep courses, vendor podcasts pretending to be community shows, or interview shows that never get past "how did you get into hacking?"

We'd rather be honest about the thinness than pad the list. Here is what is actually worth your time if you are prepping for OSCP, billing pentest hours, running red-team engagements, or chasing bug bounty payouts. We also call out the real gap in the space — and where to plug it from non-podcast sources, because no audio show currently does what you need it to do for current tradecraft.

If you already know that gap and want the rest of the cybersecurity podcast landscape, see the main 2026 best-podcasts guide; for the defensive companion, our SOC and blue-team guide covers the other side of the table.

The four offensive-security podcasts that earn the slot in 2026

1. The Cyber Mentor — the OSCP-and-early-career on-ramp

Heath Adams's TCM Security podcast is the on-ramp for the offensive-security career path. If you're working through Practical Ethical Hacking, prepping for the PJPT or PNPT, or aiming at OSCP, this is the show. Adams's transparency about his own career arc (military, consulting, building TCM) and his certifications-honest analysis are the differentiator — he is running a competitor to Offensive Security and EC-Council and he is still candid about which of his own products beats which of theirs. That candor is rare and it is the reason the show clears the bar.

What it does well: the early-career questions other offensive shows do not address. Which certs actually matter? What does the first pentest job look like? How does the OSCP exam really feel? The episodes featuring TCM trainers like Andrew Bellini and Alex Olsen are the strongest content; the solo episodes are conversational career advice. Solid for the drive home; not the show you reach for when you want to learn something new about an AD attack path.

What it doesn't do: current tradecraft. TCM's training does that work better than the podcast does, and that is fine. Use the podcast as the meta layer around the courseware, not as the courseware itself.

Who should subscribe: OSCP candidates, anyone in their first two years of pentest career, anyone considering the offensive-security switch.

Skip if: you are already past the cert-and-first-job arc and want technical depth.

2. Hack'n Speak — the highest-signal offensive show in either language

We are putting Hack'n Speak in the English-language list because it is the single best offensive-security technical-depth interview podcast we know of, full stop. mpgn's own background — CrackMapExec / NetExec maintainer, deep in the Impacket / BloodHound ecosystem — gives him a level of technical credibility with guests that most podcast hosts simply do not have. The conversations get into Active Directory attack chains, AV/EDR evasion, tool development, and Windows internals in ways the English-language podcast space currently does not replicate.

If you read French, this is required listening for the AD-pentest / red-team space. If you don't, this is the show that should make you start a French study plan, because mpgn's guests routinely include names that never appear on English-language podcasts. Run the audio through any modern captioning tool, slow the playback, and accept that you will understand 60% on the first pass and 85% by episode ten. That 85% is still meaningfully higher technical signal than the 100% you would get from most English-language offensive shows.

Episodes are long (often 90+ minutes) and minimally edited. The format is feature, not bug — you get the actual conversation, not the broadcast version.

Who should subscribe: French-reading red teamers, AD pentesters, anyone serious about EDR evasion tradecraft, and any English-language operator willing to do the slow-listen work.

Skip if: you actively cannot handle non-English audio even with captioning. Which, in 2026, is increasingly hard to justify.

3. Darknet Diaries — required operator narrative

Yes, it is on every list. It is on this one for a specific offensive reason: Jack Rhysider's interview access to operators is unmatched. The episodes covering carders, ransomware affiliates, NSA TAO operators, physical pentesters, social-engineering pros, scam-call-center workers, and bug bounty hunters give you the full-life-cycle narrative of offensive operations in a way no current-tradecraft show does.

For pentesters and red teamers specifically: the value is in hearing how real ops unfold end-to-end — the recon that took weeks, the OPSEC failures that burned operators, the social-engineering pretexts that landed, the moments where the op pivoted unexpectedly. That narrative literacy makes you a better operator, especially on long-cycle red-team engagements where the offensive arc is the work, not the individual technique. The physical-pentest episodes in particular have changed more entry-level pentesters' thinking on social engineering than any course has.

Treat it as cultural reading rather than current-tradecraft input. The back catalog from episode 80 onwards is the curriculum; the recent feed is the continuing education.

Who should subscribe: literally anyone in offensive security; this is the table-stakes show.

Skip if: nothing. There is no good reason to skip Darknet Diaries.

4. Risky Business — adjacent context for client-facing operators

Not an offensive show per se, but the adjacent context show that working pentesters and red teamers need. Patrick Gray covers the news cycle (breaches, threat actor activity, vendor moves, regulatory developments) in a way that gives you what to mention to clients, what to flag in scope discussions, what is actually moving in the industry you are billing into.

A red-team lead who can talk fluently about the latest CrowdStrike outage, the current Volt Typhoon coverage, the regulatory pressure on the offensive-tools market, or what the press is missing about a major breach is the red-team lead the client trusts. Risky Business is the cheapest path to that fluency. The kickoff meetings where you cite a current campaign in your scoping discussion are the ones where the client pays for the engagement scope you actually want.

The interview segments occasionally feature offensive-side guests (vendor founders, ex-government operators, researchers); when they do, the pushback Gray brings is unusual for the genre.

Who should subscribe: anyone billing offensive hours who has client-facing time.

Skip if: you are pure-research / internal red team with no client work.

Comparison: offensive-security podcasts at a glance

Adjacent shows worth occasional play

Three more shows that aren't core offensive listening but reward occasional play.

• No Such Podcast — the NSA's official podcast. Useful as a primary-source artifact for understanding how the offensive-side government voice publicly frames its work. The cryptologic-history episodes are the most substantive. Not journalism; treat it as institutional self-presentation, but the candor level is higher than newcomers expect.
• Malicious Life — Ran Levi's history-of-the-field show. The episodes on Stuxnet, the Equation Group, early carding crews, and operational history give you the chronology that makes current red-team / nation-state work make sense. Pair with Darknet Diaries for the full historical picture.
• CyberWire Daily — the daily wire. Most useful when you are heading into a client engagement and want to walk in already briefed on the week's news. Treat as situational rather than weekly listening.

For more on the daily-news layer specifically, see our daily cybersecurity news podcasts guide; for the historical / narrative cut, the history and narrative podcasts guide.

The honest tradecraft gap (and how to fill it without a podcast)

Here is where we stop pretending. The English-language offensive-security podcast scene does not have a serious current-tradecraft show. There is no equivalent of Hack'n Speak for English readers — no weekly interview podcast where named red-team operators talk current AD attack paths, current EDR-bypass techniques, current C2 framework tradecraft, current bug bounty methodology at the technical level the audience deserves.

Several shows almost get there and do not quite. The closest attempts have one of three problems: they pivot to lifestyle / career content within a year, they become vendor-marketing vehicles, or they go on hiatus and never come back. Naming the gap matters more than papering over it with the next-best option.

Until something fills that gap, the rotation for working tradecraft has to come from non-podcast sources. The serious ones:

• Conference talks. DEFCON, Black Hat, x33fcon, Insomni'hack, OffensiveCon, Hexacon, SO-CON, Troopers, NorthSec, RingZer0, MCH. The talks are the most current tradecraft published in the field, and they are free on YouTube within weeks. Treat the talk feed as your audio-and-video podcast substitute for offensive content. OffensiveCon and Hexacon are where the bleeding-edge AD and Windows internals work lands.
• Vendor research blogs from teams whose work you respect. SpecterOps (BloodHound, GhostPack), Outflank (red-team tradecraft and tooling), MDSec (red-team training and research), TrustedSec, NCC Group, IBM X-Force Red, Synacktiv. The blog posts from these orgs are the closest English-language equivalent to current tradecraft input.
• The HackTheBox and TryHackMe rooms as practice-while-listening. Not literal podcasts; the practice is the input.
• Maintainer Twitter / Bluesky / Mastodon for the tooling you use — the NetExec org, BloodHound Enterprise team, Sliver maintainers, Mythic C2, the Havoc framework community. The blog posts these accounts link to are the current tradecraft.
• The print canon: Bug Bounty Bootcamp (Vickie Li), Real-World Bug Hunting (Yaworski), The Hacker Playbook 3 (Kim, older but still load-bearing for the methodology layer), Operator Handbook for the field reference, Red Team Field Manual for the cheat-sheet layer.

We say this not to pad the article but because the honest thing to do is name the gap. You will not learn current AD red-team tradecraft from any English-language podcast in 2026. The audio space currently is not where that conversation happens. Plan your input diet accordingly.

Don't subscribe to these

The categories of offensive-security podcasts that get recommended and should not be. Skewerings, one line each.

• The OSCP-grift cert-mill podcasts. Almost all of them. The format: a host with a freshly minted OSCP rebrands as "the cert coach," sells a study guide, and the podcast is the funnel. The content is recycled exam tips with affiliate links. Spend the slot on Adams's TCM.
• "How I got into hacking" interview shows. A name guest, the same five questions, no episode ever lands a technical detail you would put in a report. There are at least fifteen of these. Pick the worst one by episode title and unsubscribe; repeat.
• Vendor-CEO interview shows. The format where a host interviews offensive-vendor CEOs about company strategy. Useful exactly never to a working operator. Read the company's TechCrunch profile in two minutes instead.
• Most bug-bounty hunter podcasts. A few are real motivation content. As tradecraft input they are thin. Real bug-bounty tradecraft is in the write-ups — read disclosed reports on HackerOne and Bugcrowd, follow the maintained list of disclosed CVEs at the firms doing the work. Critical Thinking — Bug Bounty Podcast (Justin Gardner, Joel Margolis) is the exception worth following; technical depth on web tradecraft is meaningfully higher than the alternatives.
• "Offensive security CEO" thought-leadership podcasts. A CEO with a podcast and "offensive security" in the bio is selling something. Audit which thing before you give them a feed slot.
• AI-cybersecurity hype podcasts. The wave of 2024–2025 shows promising "AI-powered offensive" content that turned out to be ChatGPT prompt demos. A handful are real. Most are not. If the first three episode titles all have "AI" in them, skip.
• The No Name Security Podcast. Vendor-funded API-security marketing. Sharper than generic AppSec shows, but not offensive listening.
• Anything that calls itself "the Joe Rogan of cybersecurity." Self-evident.

How to use this list: sequencing audio against TCM coursework and OSCP prep

Three rules for offensive-side listening specifically:

1. Audio is the cultural layer; talks and blogs are the tradecraft layer. Do not expect podcasts to teach you current technique. Expect them to give you the narrative — career, ops history, industry context — that you cannot easily extract from talks alone.
2. Listen to one French show. Even if you do not speak French fluently, Hack'n Speak is worth the slow-listen effort because the technical signal is meaningfully higher than what the English-language offensive scene currently produces. Captioning has improved enough in 2026 that this is more accessible than it was three years ago.
3. Re-listen to Darknet Diaries during ops downtime. Specific episodes (the physical-pentest stories, the social-engineering pretext breakdowns, the carding-era OPSEC-failure narratives) hold up to multiple listens and seed methodology ideas that do not come from technical material.

And one sequencing schedule for the OSCP-prep arc. Audio in the left column, paired with the prep work in the right:

Adjust to your timeline. The point is that podcast input should track where you are in the career arc — entry-level cultural input early, narrative and depth as you move into billable work.

FAQ

What is the best podcast for pentesters in 2026?

It depends on where you are in the career arc. For OSCP candidates and early-career pentesters, The Cyber Mentor (TCM Security) is the on-ramp — Heath Adams covers certifications, first jobs, and the realities of billable pentest work. For working red teamers and AD specialists who read French, Hack'n Speak is the highest-signal show in either language. For everyone in offensive security, Darknet Diaries is required listening for the operator narratives.

Is The Cyber Mentor podcast worth it for OSCP prep?

Yes, but as the meta layer, not the prep itself. Adams's strength is career and certification context — what the OSCP exam actually feels like, which certs matter, what the first pentest job looks like. The technical work for OSCP happens on the courseware and in HackTheBox / TryHackMe rooms; the podcast is what you listen to while walking the dog between lab sessions. Subscribe; don't expect it to teach you buffer overflows.

Should English-speaking red teamers listen to Hack'n Speak even though it's in French?

Yes, if you can follow technical French. mpgn is a CrackMapExec / NetExec maintainer, and his guests routinely include names from the European offensive scene who never appear on English-language podcasts. The technical depth on AD attack chains, EDR evasion, and tool development is higher than anything currently produced in English. Slow-listen, use auto-captions if needed, and treat it as the most underused resource in the English-language operator's stack.

Is there a podcast for current red-team and EDR-evasion tradecraft?

Not in English at the level the audience deserves. The English-language offensive-security podcast scene has no serious weekly tradecraft show — no equivalent of Hack'n Speak where named operators discuss current AD attack paths, current EDR bypasses, current C2 framework choices. Fill the gap from conference talks (OffensiveCon, x33fcon, SO-CON, Hexacon, Insomni'hack, DEFCON) on YouTube, vendor research blogs (SpecterOps, Outflank, MDSec, TrustedSec), and maintainer feeds for the tooling you actually use.

What are the best bug-bounty podcasts in 2026?

Critical Thinking — Bug Bounty Podcast (Justin Gardner and Joel Margolis) is the exception worth subscribing to. The technical depth on web tradecraft, recent CVEs, and live methodology is meaningfully higher than the bug-bounty content elsewhere in the podcast space. Beyond that, the real bug-bounty tradecraft is in disclosed reports on HackerOne and Bugcrowd, not in audio form.

Are OSCP prep podcasts worth subscribing to?

Most are not. The OSCP prep podcast format is overwhelmingly cert-mill content marketing — courseware funnels with thinly disguised affiliate links and motivational filler. The actual prep is buffer overflows, AD lateral movement, and reporting practice on the Offensive Security PEN-200 labs. The Cyber Mentor is the rare exception because TCM has its own credible curriculum and Adams is honest about which certs do and do not justify their price.

How does Darknet Diaries help pentesters and red teamers specifically?

Through narrative literacy. The episodes on physical pentesters, social-engineering pros, carders, ransomware affiliates, and NSA TAO operators give you the full-life-cycle narrative of real operations — recon that took weeks, OPSEC failures that burned operators, pretexts that landed, moments when the op pivoted unexpectedly. That narrative literacy makes you a better operator on long-cycle engagements where the offensive arc is the work, not the individual technique.

Where to go next

The offensive-security podcast diet is smaller than the field's noise suggests. Four shows in active rotation, a couple of adjacent listens, and the honest acknowledgment that the bulk of current tradecraft input will come from non-podcast sources. The good news: that is a manageable amount of audio, which leaves time for the practice that actually builds the skill.

For the full catalog — every show on the site, who it is for, who it is not, and what to pair it with — see the podcast index. If you want the same opinionated cut applied to other listener profiles, the Best Podcasts series covers beginners, blue team and SOC, daily news, and history and narrative with the same cut.