Søren Brandbyge & Adam Burns on Email and DNS

Email is the one application almost everyone on the internet uses every single day, and almost nobody understands how fragile it really is. In this two-part episode, Jeremy Snyder sits down with two guests to pull it apart. First, Søren Brandbyge, who was involved in the early email RFCs, walks through how email actually came to be: an experiment built on trust, never designed for the world it now runs. His verdict is blunt, every email is really an open postcard tossed into the world in the hope it reaches the right person. In part two, Adam Burns of Black Veil Security picks up where the history leaves off, explaining SPF, DKIM, and DMARC in plain English, the mistakes almost everyone makes configuring them, and why AI has turned weak DNS and email hygiene into a scale problem, dropping the cost of reconnaissance to near zero.

Key Discussion Points

• How email was born out of curiosity and accident, built layer upon layer of specifications with no built-in handshake, delivery guarantee, or sender verification.
• Why email is best understood as an open postcard, and why Søren argues that understanding should be mandatory training for CEOs on down.
• The trust-based origins of the early internet, and why spam, phishing, and business email compromise are the bill for a system that was never designed to tell a legitimate sender from a criminal one.
• SPF, DKIM, and DMARC explained with a bouncer-at-the-bar analogy: are you on the guest list, are you who you say you are, and did you come from where you claim.
• The most common configuration mistakes, from DMARC left on p=none to SPF soft-fail, and why the journey from monitoring to reject can take one to three months.
• Why DNS is the quiet foundation under all of it, and why hijacking a zone file can mean hijacking an entire business.
• How AI has collapsed the cost of attacker reconnaissance, letting someone canvas a hundred businesses and generate tailored phishing campaigns in minutes rather than weeks.

About the Guests

Søren Brandbyge describes himself as a security freak looking for ways to simplify things. He was involved in the RFCs around email in its early days and brings a first-hand account of how the system was designed, and why so much of what we rely on today was never designed in at all. He is based in Denmark.

Adam Burns is the founder of Black Veil Security, which helps organizations find and fix weak DNS and email security configurations. A returning Modern Cyber guest, Adam previously joined the show's breach series to talk through his experience in the MSP world and responding to a ransomware event. Blackveil offers a domain scanner that flags spoofing and configuration gaps in plain English, with a multi-tenant SaaS platform in trial.

Episode Links

Please confirm and add the remaining official links before publishing. Only the link stated on-air is included below.

• Black Veil Security — https://www.blackveilsecurity.com
• Søren Brandbyge — https://www.linkedin.com/in/soerenbrandbyge/?locale=da
• Adam Burns — https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-burns-blackveil-security-b8307664/