Crucial Tech

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....

It has been a bad month for cybercrime. Yes, attacks are on the way up. Yes, they are still extorting money and causing infrastructure chaos. But there is a massive, shadow-busting spotlight on them right where they live and defense technology is advanced enough that they are hearing footfalls of law enforcement behind them. Recently a faked call from "President Joe Biden" to New Hampshi...

Biometric multi-factor authentication is all the rage in security. And yet it is also the cause of terror for security-minded folk. For every breakthrough we get a news story about how it has caused harm. Some systems can’t identify people of color as well as it can caucasian people, which has been a problem of photographic technology for decades. Police using the systems have ended up surveilling...

Generally speaking, 70-90 percent of digital breaches in the world result from human error; someone just not taking proper precautions like not clicking on a link in an email from someone you don't know. But in the healthcare industry, human error is the least of their problems. A whopping 84 percent of breaches are the result of vulnerabilities in the network, both hardware and software. One...

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI has infamously said the goal of AI companies is to build AI without concern for application or safety. The safety stuff can be figured out later, he thinks. Luckily there are multiple industries popping up to take care of the application and safety issues concurrently with AI development. Companies like Centific are prt of that effort making sure the data used in training...

Every year, Wired Magazine publishes an article naming the most dangerous people on the internet and, quite frankly, who gets chosen is fairly obvious, but not altogether accurate. At least that is what we think at Cyber Protection Magazine. So this year, we took our shot at naming the most dangerous people. Give a listen and tell us what you think.

Harri Hursti is an internationally recognized expert on election security and was a focal point in two HBO specials on the subject: Hacking Democracy (2006) and Kill Chain: The Cyber Wars Against America's Elections. So when we decided to do a special issue on election security at Cyber Protection Magazine this year, getting an interview with him was high on our priority list. We didn't ex...

In a world awash in AI-generated, intentional misinformation and urban myths, would you bet your job on the reliability of the information you want to share? You might be betting someone's life on it. Disinformation (intentional misinformation) has become a major support for both sides of all conflicts in the world. Once called propaganda, technology, mostly social media, has turned state-controll...

Two years ago we interviewed Jen Caltrider, head of Mozilla foundation's Privacy Not Included group and got an earful about how bad Meta's privacy was in its products. This year we caught up to Jen and she said they are still bad, but in two years they've been surpassed by Amazon and Google. Before you head out to buy those IoT gifts for Christmas, you might want to listen to this podc...

Synthedia, a data research company focused on generative AI and synthetic media markets, dropped a study recently on awareness of deep fake and voice cloning technology that raised some interesting numbers. We are doing a deeper dive on the subject at Cyber Protection Magazine next week, but we sat down with Vijay Subramaniyan, the CEO of PinDrop , a study sponsor, to talk more generally about the...

The bulk of this episode is about the importance of updating your software no matter how painful it is, and we learn some valuable information about the FREE services of Trackd from its CEO Mike Starr that will help you do that with minimum fuss. But the REAL reason I did this interview is that in their pitch to me and in Mike's interview, they used some statistics about the problem of cybercr...

Instances of LinkedIn users having their accounts hijacked are a familiar occurrence on social media. Reddit has multiple discussions about the nightmare of trying to restore access to this crucial business tool. So when a friend called me in a panic about having it happen to him, I knew it would be a great opportunity to test out the advice I give to others who have been hit. It isn't easy. I...

The breach of the Las Vegas casinos in August has been the subject of a lot of news and commentary, but one thing that hasn't been discussed is what went on in the 15-minute call to the help desk. This interview with Ryan Healey-Ogden of Click Armor, and Bojan Simic of HYPR takes two completely different takes on that conversation and what can be done to prevent similar breaches.