Crucial Tech

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...

The 12th season of Crucial Tech begins today after a month off. But we haven't been napping. The 2026 RSAC Conference consumed my time and I came back with some definition of the cybersecurity industry. Mostly I learned just how bad the industry is explaining itself to its customers. One area I've been meaning to investigate is the Cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPP) sect...

Two weeks ago I did in interview with Claude, ChatGPT and Grok about what could possibly cause the collapse of the AI industry. Little did I know that within the next two weeks there would be a convergence of events that might create that collapse. So this is part two of that podcast. And this podcast is the final one of season 11. We will be back after the RSA Conference with Season 12.

On January 1, California's Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP) went live and almost 200,000 California residents have already signed up. We talked with Captain Compliance CISO, Alex Proctor about the importance of this platform and the impact on the data industry. More next week on Cyber Protection Magazine but to get you up and running, here's the link to the platform, and here&#39...

I read news stories every day, several times a day. When it comes to AI I hear that the industry is booming/it's crashing/it's a miracle/it's a nightmare. Everyone has an opinion and it isn't nuanced. It is also all speculation. I wondered who could give me a balanced view of whether AI will survive or thrive in it's current form. Then I was listening to one of my favorite podc...

At the beginning of 2025, vibe coding (using LLMs to create computer code) was all the rage. By June, the bloom had fallen off the rose. Studies showed professional coders were losing skill, and falsely believing they were made more productive using it rather than doing it themselves. This failure of AI to produce efficiency made the fad of vibe coding crash faster than any other AI-related applic...

Last week, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Act of 2015 faded away without Congressional action (and because of some pretty stupid reasons from Senate Homeland Security Committee chair Rand Paul). But like Dumbledore's Phoenix could arise from the ashes in a new form. Who knows and who cares? Well, we talked to Gigamon 's CSO Chaim Mazal this week about the act, and whether it&#39...

As the Superbowl and Olympics approach, ticket scammers are getting ready to separate fools from their money. Maybe that is harsh but it takes a pretty clueless person to fall for most phishing scams today. I talked with Anomali CISO about how emotional decisions are at the core of most online fraud and what can be done about it.

Last week we discussed the trend toward decentralization of technology, and we discuss that more next week in Cyber Protection Magazine . But while it may be a global trend, it doesn't mean everywhere. This week we met with Lisa Pent, CEO of ThePentEdge.com , a consulting organization that works with small to mid market banks and credit unions where consolidation is still very much standard. W...

We kick off 2026 with a prediction episode where we call decentralization and sovereign cloud efforts as the trend for this year and for a few years. Co-editor Patrick Boch and I see the failures of Cloudflare, AWS, Microsoft and other cloud suppliers, along with growing deglobalization are reversing the efforts to consolidate the cybersecurity industry.

Last week I attended the most honest tech conference I can remember. The ironic thing was that it wasn’t a tech conference at all. If was the California Press Foundation (CPF) annual conference. The CPF traces its history back to 1878 when it was formed originally as the California Press Association to represent the journalism industry in the state. It morphed and partnered with different journali...

Every year at this time I start getting pitches from PR folks offering client's predictions for the coming year. Lots of publications put out their annual predictions articles in December with their own, plus a few selected from these pitches. At Cyber Protection Magazine we do it a bit different. Our predictions don't come out until January so we can give equal review to the stuff that co...

The technology industries run penurious marketing programs. Most spend half as much of their budgets as most of the S&P, and then complain that customers don't respond. They also blame the marketing and PR folks for the bad results of their cut-rate budgets. It doesn't have to be that way. We sat down with Beth Trier of Trier Company , a successful and well-considered agency in San Fra...

Joe Basques and I were having a conversation about the state of the tech world and decided to hit the record button. There was a lot of ground covered in 20+ minutes. First off, it's that time of year when publications do stories about what can be expected in the next year, which means journalists get swamped with pitches from companies about their executives' predictions. Most of them are...