Crucial Tech

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...

The genesis of this podcast was a convoluted pitch that was three steps removed from the client. A marketing company working for the client hired a PR agency to distribute a press release, who then farmed out the pitching to a freelancer. I tried to get some clarity on the pitch from the freelancer and it became apparent that she had never talked with the client. Luckily, I had already met with th...

Proxies are the largely hidden lubricant of the internet. They both protect us and make us vulnerable. The AWS and Microsoft Azure outages in the past few weeks were examples of what happens when proxies are correctly maintained. But as they protect our privacy they also protect the identities of bad actors luring us with their own malware. We talked with Sarah Ralston, CPO of Proxyware about how...

The journalism industry is in trouble and has been for most of the 21st century. But the advent of AI generated content has made professional journalists absolutely crucial not just to democracies but to business success. One of the most prolific and successful technology journalists is Bolaji Ojo. He has headed editorial efforts for the EETimes, AspenCore Media, the recently closed Ojo-Yoshida Re...

Our expanded coverage of the viability of the AI industry, and how it could affect the cybersecurity industry, continues with this episode. We've blown out our time limit of 30 minutes because we are talking with three entrepreneurs with less dependence on AI as a product feature. We talk with Tony Garcia, CISO of Infineo; Luigi Caramico, CEO of the innovative encryption company DataKrypto ; a...

We've been having a lively debate at Cyber Protection Magazine about the potential, dangers, and chances AI is going to survive in its current form. Co-editor Patrick Boch likes to say I'm something of a Luddite about it, and it's true (Luddites were not against technology, but were adamant about protecting workers using it). I like to say that Patrick is overly optimistic. But, then, He's a lot y...

I was attending the AI Infra Summit recently and was handed a book with an interesting title : AI Made Easy for Parents and was intrigued by the title. It is an easy read, but ultimately disappointing, at least from an educator's view.

More often than not, when I'm interviewing a corporate leader about the news they are presenting to me, I find a bit of news in their own content that they didn't see, That was the case when I interviewed Mike Wiacek, founder and CTO of Stairwell. The company is in a very competitive market with almost 250 companies dedicated to identifying malware before it can mess up your system, The re...

When it comes to the implementation of AI in a corporation, the question is not if or when. It’s more like, “How much if a disaster are we willing to accept?” A whole new industry niche is arising to help companies determine just how mediocre and unsafe they want to be. Tumeryk is one of those companies helping provide that insight.

The first of September began with a bang. I've got a lot to write and talk about, but barely had time to do this much. There is an AI infrastructure conference coming next week, along with a special issue on AI economics. But companies really need to start learning how to tell a story all over again. Generative AI and marketese is killing a lot of really good technology. Listen in and find out...

A few weeks ago I talked with Paul Valente, CEO of VISO TRUST . In the excitement of Agentic AI adoption, a massive security hole has opened and Valente's goal is plugging that hole. Our conversation adds a needed reality check to the AI euphoria/

I got a pitch from Reality Defender (deepfake video detection) about a partnership with ValidSoft (deepfake voice) last week. We don’t generally cover partnership agreements because, well, we get a handful every week and they just aren’t news. But the pitch threw out a few statistics that seemed a bit off. After some research, I found out how off they were. See, fraud can be divided into two types...

We are starting out the 11th season of Crucial Tech is a bang. I am completing an article on a significant security hole in AI agents that shows how the tech industry makes security an afterthought every, damn, time. One of the companies pitching a solution is Teleport , which manages identity access and I had a friendly but contentious conversation about it with their CEO, Ev Kontsevoy who insist...