Crucial Tech

A personal bank account was hacked this week, but because I was getting regular alerts from my bank we kept the damage at a minimum. As luck would have it, I had scheduled this interview with Bruno Farinelli of Clearsale who explained how even when you do everything you can to keep your finances safe, criminals have a way to get around your protections. 

Guess what? Black Friday doesn't give you good deals and the ones you may be looking at may be scams. Take 15 minutes and get smart.

A few weeks ago I was on a panel at San Jose State, #yesyoucan, about the future of democracy and how it intersects with technology and media. It went over an hour, which twice longer than what I normally do, but it included Harry Hursti speaking on election security and Sari Stenfors regarding a "hopeful future." After what we've been through the past few months, it might help.

You've read the headlines about the stock market and the tech sector in particular. Self-proclaimed genius tech bros are hemorrhaging wealth, portfolios are crashing. But while the cybersecurity industry isn't completely unaffected, it is still attracting billions in new investment and private equity acquisitions. We talk to Brad LaPorte of Lionfish Advisors about why investments are falling in te...

I'm working on a story about some interesting numbers regarding the state of cyber crime. The number seem to indicate that, overall, we might be making progress on reducing it, though not eliminating it. But to be sure I've spent the past two weeks talking to experts about the numbers who are totally pessimistic and doubtful. One of them is Gerry Kennedy, CEO of Observatory Strategic Management, a...

Want some good news about technology? Stay tuned

I was pleasantly introduced to a non-profit cybersecurity company this week. Quad9 was established 6 years ago with the goal of reducing human error as the source of breaches, which makes of more than 90 percent of all successful cyberattacks. And they do it for free. Their website (www.quad9.com) has a lot of easy to understand and use tools to block malicious actors from accessing your systems a...

The most innocuous things can be open invitations to criminbals to hack your data, or infiltrate your company. Adam Levine , cybersecurity podcaster and founder of Credit.com talked with Crucial Tech about "office phishing" and the "three M's" of personal cyber protection.

Quantum computing is often in the news, mostly about how it's going to destroy the world as nation states bust the hardest encryptions around so they can steal national and corporate secrets. However, there are no quantum computers available today that can actually accomplish the task and, thankfully, there are whole industries popping up to deal with the worst aspects of the tech while encouragin...

I get a new report from a different research company almost every week about the state of cybersecurity. Most of them say the same thing, but I do read them all the way through. Recently received a report from a company called HelpSystems , a cybersecurity services company that works with some pretty big name companies and they issued a report that got me yawning almost immediately. But their rese...

Period and ovulation trackers have been around for quite a while but they are not, for the most part, privacy forward. In fact, according to the Mozilla foundation, only a few even have privacy policies. That is problematic for women in states that are criminalizing abortion where they are subpoenaing records of women even searching for options. Virtru, a security software company decided to fix t...

As a journalist, I am morally bound to be objective. That's why, because I'm not a big fan of cryptocurrency, I have made an effort to give enthusiasts of the technology every chance to defend their positions. But I got a chance to interview Bruce Schneier about the subject and had to take it. I tried very hard to be supportive of the innovative uses of blockchain and its primary application in th...

Quantum computing has been in the news for some time but most people don't know why they should care. They should. Jack Hidary, CEO of SandboxAQ explains why.

Even the promising announcements from Apple and Google about the end of passwords is going to take a long time to spread through the user base. But the technology exists to make them disappear if only we weren’t so stubborn about using them. We talked to Boian Simic, CEO of HYPR , a company making true passwordless tech… that is yet available to anyone but the wealthiest among us.

The wildly popular massive-multiplayer online games don't make the news much for big security breaches, but it appears they are vulnerable to lateral attacks that can steal data and abuse children. The companies that run these platforms tend to blame the users for breaching security. We spent some time with Raj Dodhiawala, CEO of Remediant , a cybersecurity SaaS company that defends networks again...

One of my favorite security gurus, Ian Thornton-Trump sent me a text recently about the top-five security failures in recent history that we have yet to learn from. So I decided to call him and ask what he meant. It's worth listening to.

The Metaverse can be used for immersive education that can engage students and enhance the experiential aspects of education. It certainly makes for more interesting field trips. But the potential for disaster looms.  Luckily there are some, while recognizing the upsides of the technology, who take a very realistic view of the potential downsides. One of them is Jaime Donnelly. Donnelly is an...

The week after #RSAC2022 seems to be a good time to start a new season of Crucial Tech, so here we go. I talked to a lot of people at the conference about how to keep foreign agents out of your network and some of what I learned is in a larger article in Cyber Protection Magazine , but. I went to someone who wasn't there -- Grant Wernick, CEO of #Fletch -- to chat about the problem, how to find th...

I'm going to the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week, so I didn't do a full episode yet. This is a preview of what's to come so stay tuned.

The realities of cyberattacks are not going away. Based on what we know, we have no idea how big the problem is because a lot of individuals and organizations just don’t report attacks. Conservatively, Cyber Protection Magazine estimates that half of all the attacks are unreported. More knowledgeable people than us say it's more like 90 per cent. As we have reported in past podcasts, that is likel...

Joe Basques and I took our time to talk about personal priorities in cybersecurity and in the process we ended up talking about secure browsers, privacy, abortion, state surveillance and recalling recent podcasts with Chase Cunningham and Supreet Manchanda. The upshot is we are entering a time where personal responsibility remains the single biggest determinant of vulnerability. Don't skip over an...

Most individuals and businesses know they need to address cybersecurity, but they don't know where to start. That's understandable because the digital world is like a sieve with thousands of holes. You may patch most of them but there are always a few for criminals to slip through. The question is, what are the most important holes to plug. The Zero Trust approach is proving to be the most compreh...

The SEC is considering requiring corporations provide a board seat to the CISOs. It's something I've seen as long overdue especially considering how security illiterate most boards are. And in the start-up world that literacy needs to start with venture capitalists. I decided to talk to one of my favorite entrepreneurial investors, Supreet Manchanda, and ask him what he thought an investor's role...

Woke up this morning to the news that high-flying quantum cryptography company, Arqit, is being hit with fraud lawsuits in the UK and US throwing shade on the viability of its technology. In preparation for an article on the news for Cyber Protection Magazine I had a chat with Gerry Kennedy, CEO of Observatory Holdings, about the importance of the case not only for future standardization but to co...

Much of the West has feared Russian aggression since the Cuban Missile Crisis 1962. Then it was their technologically superior military. Most recently it’s been their vaunted cyber warfare capabilities. This podcast episode is about the one positive coming out of the Ukraine war: the Russians are not as scary as we thought they were. Oh, they are still scary, but scary like a feral, rabid house ca...