Crucial Tech

With the Cyber Marketing Conference starting November 15, I thought I’d take a slight detour into the realm of executive coaching. So I called up an old business acquaintance, Brad Smith, Founder of Stellar Insight to discuss one of the biggest problems executives have in cybersecurity: connecting the dots between what their company does and what their customers actually need. That process, done r...

The last two episodes have been about imposing the doctrine of reasonable care to the production, distribution and use of AI technology.  I also wrote a story about it that posted this week on Cyber Protection Magazine.  I thought I was done with it.  I was wrong.  Lots of stuff has happened including a new bill in Congress dealing directly with liability of AI companies, Meta changing it’s terms...

I've been a professsional communicator for more than half a century, as a working journalist, a technical editor, a marketing professional, and back to journalism in the course of my career. No subject area has been more fascinating to me than cybersecurity. But it is also the industry with the worst marketing I've ever seen. Underinvested, misunderstood, misused and lacking serious commit...

In our second part of this series, we talk to companies actively involved in enforcing responsibility from users. First up is Christopher Dion Johnson, CEO of Indie Me. His company creates a registry for celebrity facial property so they can’t be used without permission in deep fakes. He is followed by Austin Worrell, an attorney and founder/CEO of Dialogica, an AI assistant that provides back off...

We took a break before launching into Season 13, which should take us to the end of the year, but we have a doozy to start out with. Earlier this week, my cat decided to throwup on our bed in the early morning and by the time I got it cleaned up I was wide awake. So I started my morning routine of reading the news around 3 am and came across the story of Anthropics IPO documents being leaked early...

Back in May the coding world reeled to the news that a hacking group, using customized AI agents, had breached Github and stolen 3,800 of its internal repositories by a threat actor group tracked as TeamPCP. The attack was designed to stay under the radar: it ran entirely within normal user permissions and explicitly avoided privilege escalation, so it looked like ordinary developer/AI-assisted ac...

Flock has been in the news recently in a backlash against municipal surveillance, but this technology has been in use for half a century. Why the problem now? We sat down to talk with a city commissioner from Del Ray Beach, Florida, Tom Markert, who also consults with the FBI on cybersecurity. He's something of a rennaissance man wh, in addition to his corporate and civic work, also writes thr...

A few months ago the tech world went into a tizzy over Anthropic's announcement that it's latest fronter AI incarnation was finding zero-day vulnerabilities. My BS meter started pinging immediately. A zero-day attack requires finding a system vulnerability that no one knows about. It is about as creative a process that a blackhatter can pull off. But AIs can't do anything new or creati...

It seems the entire cybersecurity industry went on vacation after Blackhat USA last week because every interview I scheduled for this podcast went belly up with cancellations. So at our Monday staff meeting, my EU partner Patrick Boch and I decided to fill the gap this week regarding Anthropic's AI watermark tech. We decided it's not that big a deal. The are a regulatory response (EU), not...

In a world of employment upheaval, job seekers are freely sending out millions of documents containing significant personal information. Whether called CVs or resumes, these documents can be used to impersonate and defraud employers and the job seekers alike. Chris Els, founder of P3 Audit, a data compliance and supply chain risk company, is developing a technology to help get that massive amount...

We've been getting an influx of announcements regarding shoulder surfing and technology that protects against it. However, we haven't found a single incident that actually, involved breaking into a device by looking over someone's shoulder. Instead, every report involves stealing someone's phone that hasn't been properly protected by biometrics or MFA. So we put out a call to a...

Cybersecurity is never more crucial than when it hits home. This past week, my daughter, who runs a small event planning business, was targeted by a phishing exploit known as a Click-Fix, designed to get her to go to a fake website to harvest her Google log-in credentials. She didn't fall for it and we had a lovely discussion about how she recognized it and stopped it in it's tracks. But I...

It has been a while since we talked with Ian Thorton-Trump, CISO and prognosticator at Inversion6 , so we were happy when he dropped us a note and reminded us of that lack. Boy, was this one a barn burner. Across the world, pessimism reigns in geopolitics with cybersecurity at the dead center of it. Asymmetric warfare is less about kinetic attacks by terrorists and more about nation-states using t...

The idea that humans can be excluded from technology operations has been an aspiration in the AI industry, and that interest is NOT going away. But companies are pushing the idea less and redefining how important humans are in the process, described as humans in the loop, at the helm and in the middle depending on whom you are talking to, A lot of the aspirational efforts have been in automating s...

Meta is like Hotel California. You can enter but you can't leave. That's the story I hear over and over. It isn't true. I did and have never looked back. The claims that Meta platforms can improve your business, keep relationships alive, inform the electorate and make a better society have been disproven again and again, but the thing keeps growing. It does that by suppressing the beli...

This week I talked to the good folks at the Digital Citizens Alliance about a report on residential proxies. Say what? Residential proxies? What the heck are those? They are the apps and hardware products people use to connect to the internet, and they are as secure as a sieve is water tight. The Wall Street Journal published a report on them June 15 and. Back in March the FBI issued an alert abut...

Back in April, Microsoft released an advisory about phishing gang infiltrating Microsoft Teams meetings. In stunning turn of events, it wasn't a weakness in the Microsoft product but in users turning off or bypassing multiple security controls for external users, and then forgetting to turn them back on. This is what is known as configuration drift. We talked with Reach Security's CEO Garrett Hami...

The data broker market is worth half a trillion dollars and growing at a rate of 7.3 percent annually through 2033. That means they don’t care that you want your privacy. They are making too much money selling your personal information to care. That lack of concern doesn’t just affect an individual’s privacy. It threatens their security and that of nation states. There is a technology niche dedica...

A public relations firm in the United Kingdom, Whiteoaks International, said the quiet part out loud about cybersecurity marketing: that much of it is fiction if not outright fraudulent. I sat down with the rest of the Cyber Protection Magazine team, Patrick Boch and Joe Basques to have a frank discussion about this issue. Frankly, any journalist knew this to be true but to hear it come from a pra...

Just to prove that even the most secure practitioners, like your truly, can fall for the “free lunch” offer, I inadvertently signed up for a shady but completely legal “cash back” offer. Not only did I not get any cash back I got charged for it, had to cancel a debit card and walked through the process (which I described in Cyber Protection Magazine this week. But I also called up Brian Silverstei...

AT the RSAC Conference this year a new marketing buzzword appeared in several interviews, most particularly DataKrypto and Cy4Data Labs . They are doing important work, but my interviews with them indicate they need to lift their heads up now and then and look around. Their competitive field is bigger than they think. More on Cyber Protection Magazine next week.

I talk about the nature of truth in an Ai world with documentarian Steven Rosenbaum in advance of the release next week of his book The Future of Truth , not to be mistaken by the 2025 book of the same name by film maker Werner Herzog.

The dirty secret of digital media for the past two decades has been that it doesn't really work. It's just a lot cheaper and easier than actual marketing. Lou Covey and Joe Basques of Cyber Protection Magazine have watched it in its genesis to where it is today and talk about how AI has totally flipped the script, how it changes the metrics and purpose of content and how to make it work for your c...

The great conundrum of business is how rare it is for a company to find markets they can dominate. Oh, they all say that’s what they want to do, but when asked about their business they respond, “Some of our customers are in the Fortune 100/500/1000.” That response always leaves us cold. The biggest companies will always buy one of everything just to make sure they don’t miss out. Cybersecurity is...

Back in January I had a chat with Doug Kersten, CISO for Appfire , that had soemwise words about the intersection of Ai and security. He said AI amplifies existing weaknesses. It doesn't create new threats . AI-driven attacks (phishing, deepfakes) succeed by exploiting poor security fundamentals like weak training and monitoring. And that's what we have to worry about most. This conversati...