i was surprised at how many people responded positively with the question of this podcast and am working on a larger story about it for Cyber Protection Magazine. One respondent was surprising, however: Heather Clauson Haughian, founder and managing partner for Culhane PLCC. Having a non-techie view of the situation was illumiinating. --- Support t…

This podcast will be the kickoff to a larger article about the Crowdstrike failure, which is the current obsession with technology. We talked with Action1 founder Mike Walters about the complexity of current technology and whether the problem is fixable. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/crucialtech/support…

In the first part of this series we provided a potential solution to the out-of-control growth of data theft, for individuals that could be most at risk. Today we talk to John Meyer, senior director at Cornerstone Advisors, to help us understand just how bad the situation is. For example, ner the end, John states quite flatly that everyone whould j…

To answer the question, yes, it seems so. There are announcements of data breaches at least weekly and the amount of data exfiltrated affects all levels of society. But before we get into how desperate the situation is, we met with Mike Britton, chief information security officer for Abnormal Security, one of a growing number of companies that will…

I was absolutely livid watching the presidential debate last night, and not because of the performance of the debaters, who did exactly as I expected. I was severely disturbed by the lack of professionalism of the moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. I was relieved to find today, that several other journalists were equally concerned about their f…

An article in CNN began this podcast and connected story. What we found out about elder fraud kinda blew our mind. Like the fact that in the U.S. it is three times bigger in scope and cost than ransomware. And who are the most vulnerable was a real surprise. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/crucialtech/support…

The problem with election security is not a failure of the technology to keep the vote honest, it's the lack of technology available to individual voters to reduce fraud. We talked with YouMail CEO Alex Quilici about how some SPAM-mail technology can help, but also what kind of dangers there are that voters should be aware of. --- Support this podc…

I went to a high school graduation for the first time in decades. What I saw and heard filled me with compassion and concern for the next generation. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/crucialtech/support

This week we talked to SlashNext's CEO Patrick Harr and Field CTO Stephen Kowski regarding a study about the growth of criminal activity using generative AI SlashNext’s State of Phishing Report claimed a 1,265% increase in malicious phishing emails and a 967% increase in credential phishing between Q4 2022 to Q3 2023. . While ransomware attacks get…

Cyber Protection Magazine gets a lot of marketing materials described as studies, surveys, and reports. The flow of those documents increases as major trade shows approach. For example, in the two months leading up to the RSA Conference, we received 56 before we stopped counting. More have come in since but it is now a trickle. We read each one. Lu…

A few people know that I am something of a political junkie. I did some presidential campaigning in high school, then I got into journalism and covered national politics during Watergate. I'm less focused on it now but anyone can drag me into a conversation about it A few weeks ago I got a call from the press secretary for Madison Horn, who is runn…

The RSA Conference was a firehose of information, some of it good, some of it absolutely false, but always a good way to get perspective on the industry. I met with Rohit Ghai, CEO of RSA to get his particular take and he did not disappoint. More to come next week on Cyber Protection Magazine. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.co…

Had a disappointing two weeks trying to cobble together an interview for this week, and had no luck for a variety of reasons. Plenty of content, just little worth reporting. But as I head off to the #RSAC in San Francisco this week, I thought I'd give a history lesson about the relationship of public relations, the press, and technology companies, …

Last week, Google started removing California-based news sites from search results in retaliation for the legislature advancing the California Journalism Protection Act. The act requires Google to pay the sites when they provide links to news coverage that people are searching for. (See article in Cyber Protection Magazine) Google has tried to stro…

We are neck-deep in politics here in the US, but did you know that by the end of this year, two-thirds of the planet will be making some sort of political decision about their country? That means election interference will be at a historical high. We will have a larger story on this next week in Cyber Protection Magazine but today we talk with Crys…

We have written several articles at Cyber Protection Magazine under the title of Defense Against the AI arts and this interview today falls into that category. The company’s name is Enkrypt and the CEO is a nice guy named Sahil Agarwal. What the company does, among other things is it provides a red-team service for companies integrating a new AI, e…

A very, special episode providing some perspective, without offering an opinion on the legislation, about the TikTok controversy, The debate over the appropriateness of the Congressional action against TikTok can be debated for a long time and probably will until the Senate takes action—which could be weeks. What is less debatable is TikTok’s, and …

With the exception of people in insurance, nobody like to talk about insurance. That's why, three years ago, few people felt sorry for the insurance industry as it reeled from claims due to multiple natural disasters, rising costs of automobile repairs and, more specifically, data breaches. Last year, however, was a banner year for cyber insurance …

It has been a bad month for cybercrime. Yes, attacks are on the way up. Yes, they are still extorting money and causing infrastructure chaos. But there is a massive, shadow-busting spotlight on them right where they live and defense technology is advanced enough that they are hearing footfalls of law enforcement behind them. Recently a faked call f…

Biometric multi-factor authentication is all the rage in security. And yet it is also the cause of terror for security-minded folk. For every breakthrough we get a news story about how it has caused harm. Some systems can’t identify people of color as well as it can caucasian people, which has been a problem of photographic technology for decades. …

Generally speaking, 70-90 percent of digital breaches in the world result from human error; someone just not taking proper precautions like not clicking on a link in an email from someone you don't know. But in the healthcare industry, human error is the least of their problems. A whopping 84 percent of breaches are the result of vulnerabilities in…

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI has infamously said the goal of AI companies is to build AI without concern for application or safety. The safety stuff can be figured out later, he thinks. Luckily there are multiple industries popping up to take care of the application and safety issues concurrently with AI development. Companies like Centific are prt of…

Every year, Wired Magazine publishes an article naming the most dangerous people on the internet and, quite frankly, who gets chosen is fairly obvious, but not altogether accurate. At least that is what we think at Cyber Protection Magazine. So this year, we took our shot at naming the most dangerous people. Give a listen and tell us what you think…

Harri Hursti is an internationally recognized expert on election security and was a focal point in two HBO specials on the subject: Hacking Democracy (2006) and Kill Chain: The Cyber Wars Against America's Elections. So when we decided to do a special issue on election security at Cyber Protection Magazine this year, getting an interview with him w…

In a world awash in AI-generated, intentional misinformation and urban myths, would you bet your job on the reliability of the information you want to share? You might be betting someone's life on it.Disinformation (intentional misinformation) has become a major support for both sides of all conflicts in the world. Once called propaganda, technolog…

Two years ago we interviewed Jen Caltrider, head of Mozilla foundation's Privacy Not Included group and got an earful about how bad Meta's privacy was in its products. This year we caught up to Jen and she said they are still bad, but in two years they've been surpassed by Amazon and Google. Before you head out to buy those IoT gifts for Christmas,…

Synthedia, a data research company focused on generative AI and synthetic media markets, dropped a study recently on awareness of deep fake and voice cloning technology that raised some interesting numbers. We are doing a deeper dive on the subject at Cyber Protection Magazine next week, but we sat down with Vijay Subramaniyan, the CEO of PinDrop, …

The bulk of this episode is about the importance of updating your software no matter how painful it is, and we learn some valuable information about the FREE services of Trackd from its CEO Mike Starr that will help you do that with minimum fuss. But the REAL reason I did this interview is that in their pitch to me and in Mike's interview, they use…

Instances of LinkedIn users having their accounts hijacked are a familiar occurrence on social media. Reddit has multiple discussions about the nightmare of trying to restore access to this crucial business tool. So when a friend called me in a panic about having it happen to him, I knew it would be a great opportunity to test out the advice I give…

The breach of the Las Vegas casinos in August has been the subject of a lot of news and commentary, but one thing that hasn't been discussed is what went on in the 15-minute call to the help desk. This interview with Ryan Healey-Ogden of Click Armor, and Bojan Simic of HYPR takes two completely different takes on that conversation and what can be d…

The rise of generative AI products for commercial use is probably the fastest and most controversial of any technological advance in history. Governments are scrambling to understand and regulate its use. Billions are being invested in development. At the same time, the general public’s interest in the technology has waned and industry pioneer Open…

An August report from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security said over the next two years, Canada is going to face significant threats from state-supported cyberattacks from Russia, China and North Korea. Canada? What the heck did Canada do to earn the ire of those folks. Canadians are arguably the nicest people in the world. So we called up our fa…

Most people don't think about accessibility when it comes to the internet. We think of ramps and braille signs and audiobooks. But physical and developmental issues are much more complex than being able to get into a restaurant, especially when it comes to security. I talked with Justin Merhoff, chief of security for Deque (pronounced Dee-cue) Syst…

There are several reports indicating that the gravy train is about to come to a screeching halt in the cybersecurity industry. Fortune 1000 companies are freezing or cutting back on purchasing budgets for tools and services, which will hit the majority of private and start-up companies that have focused on that segment for 10 years. It's not all ba…

As generative AI (GAI) platforms become more commonplace, concern over their security issues is growing. As with any digital product, security relies on four arenas. User responsibility, corporate accountability, government regulation and industry standards. The first two are unreliable because users feel put out by having to protect themselves and…

One of the major points of contention in the SAG-Aftra/Writers Guild strike is over ownership of the image and voice of performers. Bob Iger said allowing actors to control the use of the image is disruptive to the current paradigm. But my conversation with Anna Bulakh of Repeecher revealed what the studios want is actually the disruption. Anna is …

Most of the discussion about generative AI is either focused on how good or bad it is, without ever discussing that it is JUST a tool. We talked with Anurag Gurtu, chief product officer of StrikeReady, about how the technology can enhance, not replace human involvement. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/crucialtech/s…

It's hard to stay positive about the state of the world as long as you listen to everyone complain about it. One truth overrides that for me: Nothing is as bad as it seems nor as good as some people might tell you. The trick is to focus on the goal. When you see progress... anywhere... take heart. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotif…

The team at Cyber Protection Magazine doesn't just look at cybersecurity technology. Sometimes we just argue about tech in general. Chief editor Lou Covey and co-founder Patrick Boch have been talking about the Apple Vision Pro headset since it was first announced and still don't agree on it, but we thought the discussion would help others make up …

Generative AI is BIG business. Maybe too big. In the rush to commercialize and cash in on billions of dollars of investment, Big Tech is letting security slip through the cracks again. Adversaries are weaponizing AI to supercharge phishing attacks, destabilize governments and blackmail innocent people. This episode is the first entry in a months-lo…

Telesign is part of a growing security niche market dedicated to providing the infrastructure companies need to keep customer data safe. We talked with company CMO Kristi Melani about how the industry needs to educated not just corporations but the users in what is available to them. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show…

This episode is our very first book review. I edited Data for All late last year and had my eyes open to both the massive amount of customer data collected by almost every corporation in the world, and the amount of digital waste produced by the effort. There is also a mini-review of Not with a Bug, but with a Sticker. These are two books that if y…

#GenerativeAI was front and center at the RSA Conference 2023 in San Francisco. Companies were either promoting it as a means of improving security or warning against it as a security weakness. It was even the keynote on Tuesday by RSA CEO Rohit Ghai, who took a neutral position that leaned positive on its potential. But as he spoke, for the most p…

You cannot spit without hitting a news story about generative AI (AKA ChatGPT, Bard, etc.). Some of the news is good, some of it bad, and all of it fairly confusing. ⁠Cyber Protection Magazine⁠ has been digging through the detritus and find what really is good or bad about it and today we continue that with an interview with a very smart man: Dr. J…

TikTok has been in the news for quite a while, but at Cyber Protection Magazine, we are pretty sure we aren't getting the whole story, so we are starting a series of articles and podcasts to get to the bottom of the issue, starting with this episode. We talk to Ian Thornton-Trump -- raconteur, iconoclast, cyberwarrior, and CISO for Cyjax -- and he,…

You can't talk in polite company about politics or religion, but everyone can talk about how they hate advertising. And for good reason. I take a break from discussing technology to rant about what tech companies do to get you to buy their stuff, and why you don;t trust them. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/crucial…

“Sextortion” is a popular theme in media and the news, but it may or may not be a big deal. No one can really come up with a consensus about what it is and how widespread it is. It’s even difficult to pin down whether it is a crime. We talked with Ken Kuglin from Digital Forensics Corporation, a cybersecurity firm in Ohio, about how to deal with th…

Cybersecurity has a healthier and older relationship with artificial intelligence (AI) than pretty much any other industry niche. That’s because the information available on cyber threats is better vetted than 90 percent of what is fed into ChatGPT and the Google and Microsoft versions of generative AI. But putting that data to use in security is n…

Vishing, short for "voice phishing," is on the rise again. But then, it’s been rising almost exponentially for the past two years. Last summer various organizations were reporting anywhere between 500-650 percent increases over the previous six quarters. Now, as US citizens prepare their tax returns, the scam is getting another bump. We had a chat …

Being a security company that gets hit with a data breach or malware attack is embarrassing, besides the fact that it scares the hell out of your customers. But the current tech fad of "decentralization" has a pretty good lesson for anyone thinking about establishing a security operations center, virtual or otherwise. We talked with the CEO of Disp…