Crucial Tech

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...

An article in CNN began this podcast and connected story . What we found out about elder fraud kinda blew our mind. Like the fact that in the U.S. it is three times bigger in scope and cost than ransomware. And who are the most vulnerable was a real surprise.

The problem with election security is not a failure of the technology to keep the vote honest, it's the lack of technology available to individual voters to reduce fraud. We talked with YouMail CEO Alex Quilici about how some SPAM-mail technology can help, but also what kind of dangers there are that voters should be aware of.

I went to a high school graduation for the first time in decades. What I saw and heard filled me with compassion and concern for the next generation.

This week we talked to SlashNext's CEO Patrick Harr and Field CTO Stephen Kowski regarding a study about the growth of criminal activity using generative AI SlashNext ’s State of Phishing Report claimed a 1,265% increase in malicious phishing emails and a 967% increase in credential phishing between Q4 2022 to Q3 2023. . While ransomware attacks get all the publicity, the reality is phishing i...

Cyber Protection Magazine gets a lot of marketing materials described as studies, surveys, and reports. The flow of those documents increases as major trade shows approach. For example, in the two months leading up to the RSA Conference, we received 56 before we stopped counting. More have come in since but it is now a trickle. We read each one. Luckily, our chief editor can read at 6,000 words pe...

A few people know that I am something of a political junkie. I did some presidential campaigning in high school, then I got into journalism and covered national politics during Watergate. I'm less focused on it now but anyone can drag me into a conversation about it A few weeks ago I got a call from the press secretary for Madison Horn , who is running for the US Congress out of the 5th Oklaho...

The RSA Conference was a firehose of information, some of it good, some of it absolutely false, but always a good way to get perspective on the industry. I met with Rohit Ghai, CEO of RSA to get his particular take and he did not disappoint. More to come next week on Cyber Protection Magazine.

Had a disappointing two weeks trying to cobble together an interview for this week, and had no luck for a variety of reasons. Plenty of content, just little worth reporting. But as I head off to the #RSAC in San Francisco this week, I thought I'd give a history lesson about the relationship of public relations, the press, and technology companies, and explain our policies about press releases,...

Last week, Google started removing California-based news sites from search results in retaliation for the legislature advancing the California Journalism Protection Act. The act requires Google to pay the sites when they provide links to news coverage that people are searching for. ( See article in Cyber Protection Magazine ) Google has tried to strongarm governments in Australia and Canada when t...

We are neck-deep in politics here in the US, but did you know that by the end of this year, two-thirds of the planet will be making some sort of political decision about their country? That means election interference will be at a historical high. We will have a larger story on this next week in Cyber Protection Magazine but today we talk with Crystal Morin, the cybersecurity strategist for Sysdig...

We have written several articles at Cyber Protection Magazine under the title of Defense Against the AI arts and this interview today falls into that category. The company’s name is Enkrypt and the CEO is a nice guy named Sahil Agarwal. What the company does, among other things is it provides a red-team service for companies integrating a new AI, either homegrown or third party, and tells the comp...

A very, special episode providing some perspective, without offering an opinion on the legislation, about the TikTok controversy, The debate over the appropriateness of the Congressional action against TikTok can be debated for a long time and probably will until the Senate takes action—which could be weeks. What is less debatable is TikTok’s, and pretty much all of the social media industry’s con...

With the exception of people in insurance, nobody like to talk about insurance. That's why, three years ago, few people felt sorry for the insurance industry as it reeled from claims due to multiple natural disasters, rising costs of automobile repairs and, more specifically, data breaches. Last year, however, was a banner year for cyber insurance while cyber criminals took the financial hit....