About this episode

Brandyn Murtagh shares his journey from a young gamer to an elite penetration tester, revealing his experiences in hacking and cybersecurity.

In this episode, James sits down with Brandyn Murtagh, founder of MurtaSec and top-ranked bug bounty hunter. He shares stories from his early days: learning exploitation from World of Warcraft at age 9, dropping out of college after three days, and how landing an apprenticeship at 16 led him from blue team analyst to elite penetration tester who's discovered critical flaws in banks, healthcare providers, and AI platforms. But Brandyn isn't playing it safe. He reveals how he chained public Wi-Fi access into complete bank control through IBM mainframes older than him, explains why a seven-character password limit enabled total financial system takeover, and demonstrates the reality of locking himself in server racks and wading through snow at 3 AM during physical security assessments. From 48-hour incident response marathons to fabricating funds at will, Brandyn shows why with enough time, anything can get popped eventually.

People in this episode

Host: James

Guest: Brandyn Murtagh

Topics covered

• hacking
• penetration testing
• bug bounty hunting
• cybersecurity
• bank security
• physical security assessments

Keywords

• hacking
• bank security
• bug bounty
• penetration testing
• cybersecurity
• physical security
• incident response

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: MurtaSec, IBM

Places: World of Warcraft

More episodes of Adventures of Alice & Bob

• Ep. 101 – Cyber Security and the Art of Story Telling // Jeffrey Wheatman · May 8, 2026 · 56 min
• Ep. 99 – Breaches, Births and Battling BS // Rob Black · April 13, 2026 · 52 min
• Ep. 98 – From Special Ops to Mob Boss // Dahvid Schloss · March 20, 2026 · 59 min
• Ep. 97 - The Quantum State of Security / Pete Herzog · March 20, 2026 · 1h 4m
• Ep. 95 - Phishing 2.0, Deepfakes, and the Death of 'Trust But Verify' // Tim Chase · February 25, 2026 · 53 min
• Ep. 94 – Mistakes, Malware and Missile Industry Day // Silas Cutler · December 27, 2025 · 59 min

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Adventures of Alice & Bob podcast page.