Crucial Tech

James Bore is a cybersecurity consultant, speaker and publisher based in the UK. He has a refined sense of cynicism that clicks with my own, so we've been chatting back and forth for several months on various subjects and decided it's probably time to record some of our interaction. Today, we are looking at the preferred marketing practice (shiny objects) of sewing fear, uncertainty and do...

For about two years, the team at Cyber Protection Magazine has debated whether Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram and * shudder * WhatsApp) were valuable or even necessary for the reach of our magazine. For two years, I've been outvoted every time. Instead, I unilaterally decided to divorce from the platforms. Providentially, Mark Zuckerberg made two announcements in as many weeks that made the d...

We open a new year and a new season with our friend, Ian Thornton-Trump, chief information security officer at the MSSP Inversion6 and in 30 minutes we take on some pretty meaty subjects. First we discuss how China strategically infiltrated technology systems in the US and other countries as a geopolitical message rather than attacks. He discusses the challenges of securing complex, interconnected...

The available guests for this last podcast of the year dried up pretty quickly so I thought I would give some closing thoughts on a big issue facing the world: Trust and the lack of it. Also, our last threat reports courtesy of Fletch.ai

Our friends at Fletch provide a grand slam of threats for Thanksgiving week, covering Apple, Android, AWS and Microsoft vulnerabilities No regular podcast this week but we will be back next week with a possible new way to abuse AI.

This is part two of our mashup of recent surveys. This time we talk with Tom Tovar, CEO of Appdome about their comprehensive annual survey of consumer attitudes regarding security in digital technology. The good news is there is a groundswell of security "consciousness" regarding the subject. The bad news is the consumers are not confident that corporations even care.

This week, a two-parter. I’m still trying to make sense of all the surveys and studies sent to me. Between trying to figure out if they are plagiarized, use inadequate samples, are a lame attempt at self-promotion or are actually good data is almost a full-time job. Luckily I got a couple of good ones this month and am doing another mashup. Today’s interview is with Frank Teruel, CFO of Arkose Lab...

This episode includes our weekly top cyber threats with help from Fletch and this week Cyjax , and a shot interview with cybersecurity contrarian James Bore, a consultant in the UK with a kindred spirit. The interview is introducing the theme for Cyber Protection Magazine next year. Put up or shut up. The past decade has been filled with optimism in the tech sector about what they thought they cou...

I received more than dozen studies and reports on the "state of cybersecurity" all with different foci depending on the company that was pushing the document. It seems like they are replacing press releases as a primary marketing tool. But there was one thing that jumped out of me. Almost every one of them had a throwaway line that customers had #zerotrust in the effiicacy of the tools and service...

Here's our top three threat reports for the week. Hackers are targeting gambling apps on mobile devices and obsolete Microsoft products. Thanks to the folks at Fletch for the info

Our friends at Fletch. AI dropped a bunch of threat reports this week, here's what we see as the top three.

I bet you never heard of FHE. Me neither. Then I got a pitch about it. Tried to ignore it because I had never herd of it, but they were insistent. Turns out to be interesting. Fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, has been talked about for about five years but not it has its very own industry association and NIST is starting to take it very seriously. It doesn't eliminate quantum encryption standa...

After getting knocked for a loop with a dose of Covid I'm slowly crawling back to the desk and providing some timely advice regarding current and predicted threat reports from our friends at Fletch .

Quick, what is the biggest single category of cybercrime today? If you said pig butchering, you get a gold star. (If you said ransomware you need to stop believe press releases). It's big. $75 billion in stolen funds, mostly cryptocurrency last year alone. And it wasn't from lonely elderly people. We talked with Arkose Labs CEO Kevin Gosschalk about the growing phenomenon and how you can defend yo...

Firts, apologies for the sound quality. Tried out a new microphone and I definitely do not like it. Going back to the tried and true. But it stands as an example of what we are talking about today. When people from one discipline start talking about moving into another discipline where they lack expertise, things go haywire. Such is the case with the digital world and energy production. The big ne...

I had an encounter with an AI-driven telemarketing scam a day before I got pitched to talk to a company introducing and AI-driven telemarketing services. So I was ready for bear when we started. Turns out I may have been talking to the one entrant in this field that was not only following the law but using AI in a productive way for both potential customers and the merchant. The company is 2X and...

Recently, someone on Mastodon asked, "Looking for an article or blog or text, that succinctly describes, at grade 1 level English, why “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” is a crazy and bad argument, and perhaps also includes what some good arguments are. Need it for a family member. " I thought that was an excellent request. So along with an article posted with this...

About twice a year, the post-quantum computing (PQC) niche of the cybersecurity industry pushes out truckloads of press releases and articles about the coming quantum computing apocalypse. In all of this content there is little explanation regarding what this means for most people. It seems like everyone should be concerned, based on the level of urgency the companies present, but in the end, no o...

The tech industry is more than technology. It's also marketing. Underfunded, questionably productive, and often plagiarized marketing. The job of a journalist is to poke through the piles of news releases, reports, studies, and other assorted verbiage like a scatologist on safari and find something valuable. That has gotten more difficult as the number of journalists have dropped since the tur...

The English riots this past week provide a Dickensian “best of times…worst of times.” context to politics in the United Kingdom and possibly the United States later this year. They highlight the fact that digital security concerns reaches far beyond the confines of corporate CISO offices. We spoke with Cyjax CISO Ian Thornton-Trump about the English riots and the potential for that to come to the...

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.

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.

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 just assume their social security number is being s...

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 search our text, phone, and email communications,...

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 a bout their failure to moderate a debate. But this came as a c...