macOS detection engineering has had a documentation problem for years. Everyone told Olivia Gallucci she was locking herself into a platform nobody cared about. Then infostealers showed up, enterprise Mac fleets exploded, and suddenly her work was the most in-demand research nobody knew existed.

Olivia is a security engineer at Datadog living inside macOS internals...from Apple Silicon boot chain to ESF event families to IOKit abuse....and she is single-handedly dragging macOS DE into the light.

In this episode we get into:

• Why you can't just flag osascript anymore and what to look at instead
• The process tree trap that trips up every Windows-native DE who crosses over
• Background Task Management: the persistence metadata everyone's sleeping on
• Living off the Orchard binaries
• Why your EDR is abstracting macOS telemetry from you and what to do about it
• Jonathan Levin's books, Jaron Bradley's Sprite Tree, and the resources that actually matter

Follow Olivia's work on:

• oliviagallucci.com | [ret]2read — An OS Internals Newsletter (Substack)
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/olivia-gallucci
• 2026 main stage at BlackHat

Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version) is an independent detection engineering & threat hunting podcast. Rebuilt. Community-first. Featuring a lineup of the real and active projects pushing the limits of detection engineering, threat hunting, and everything in between.

GRC has been called the passenger princess of security for too long. In this episode, Alex sits down with Ayoub Fandi, GRC engineer and author of the GRC Engineer newsletter, to make the case that GRC and detection engineering are solving solving the same problems and somehow still not working together.

This episode covers:

• Why GRC plays PvE while everyone else in security plays PvP and why that actually makes them your best ally
• How auditors certify 100% coverage from less than 1% of your environment
• Detection debt meets GRC debt: what inheriting someone else's program looks like on both sides
• Vibe coding, AI agents deleting production databases, and what that means for both of our jobs

Ayoub's newsletter and podcast: GRCengineer.com

Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version) is an independent detection engineering & threat hunting podcast. Rebuilt. Community-first. Featuring a lineup of the real and active projects pushing the limits of detection engineering, threat hunting, and everything in between.

What happens when a philosopher walks into a SOC? Apparently, he builds one from the ground up, spends a decade making sense of detection engineering across financial services, global IR teams, and now Canva.

Diego Perez is a detection engineer who studied philosophy, taught himself security at 2am with a newborn in the other room, and has been quietly writing some of the sharpest unsloppy takes on the internet about what detection engineering actually is versus what we pretend it is. His blog Quasarops lives by one rule: words are cheap, sense making is not.

We hit on:

• Why "garbage in, garbage out" is a heuristic that stops short of actually helping anyone
• The Cynefin framework and why knowing which detections you need lives in the complex domain, not the complicated one
• Detection as code: is it overrated now that coding agents exist, or are we asking the wrong question entirely
• The Red Queen effect, Jevons' paradox, and why you do actually need AI in your SOC whether you like it or not
• Agentic threat hunting: whose tokens do you trust, yours or a vendor's black box
• Why the human element is more important than ever, and who exactly gets blamed when the model gets it wrong
  
  Follow Diego's substack: https://quasarops.com

Detection Dispatch (Alex's Version) is an independent detection engineering & threat hunting podcast. Rebuilt. Community-first. Featuring a lineup of the real and active projects pushing the limits of detection engineering, threat hunting, and everything in between.