Crucial Tech

It is a rare thing when a company claims to be the first to do something and actually is the first. Rarer still is when that company is actually solving a significant problem with their product. Upheaval ( upheaval.io ) appears to be among those rarities with a data security platform that prevents data theft, intrusion and could solve the problem of social media privacy. This interview may be the...

The tech world sees marketing as a necessary “evil” and does it poorly. The cybersecurity industry sees it as a mystery but duplicates what the tech world does, so their efforts are generally poor and clueless. Good marketing explains the reason budgeting a particular product is a good idea and where that product is most useful. Mediocre marketing looks for the lowest hanging fruit when the ripest...

Had a fun conversation with Tim Callan, chief compliance officer at Sectigo on the un-fun topic of phishing, smishing and whether social media platforms even want to stop allowing criminals to scam their users. There is hope... just not from Facebook. See more at www.cyberprotection-magazine.com

I've spent some long, frustrating hours trying to convince realtors to adopt proven technology. I can't imagine how difficult it must be, then, to convince them to practice good digital hygiene. David Moffat is trying to. We spent few minutes talking about how the industry's attitude can make everyone less safe.

I few weeks ago I was mercilessly cajoled by a PR firm to talk to the chief marketing officer of Sepio Systems , Bentsi ben Atar about their products and services. I don't do product announcements but I do talk about the problems the products were created to solve. So Bentsi and I talked for a while about how prevalent the potential for hacking modern vehicles is. And, apparently, public EV chargi...

The term “slippery slope” is applied to a lot of hypothetical outcomes of everything from legislation to technology. In the case of Apple monitoring the use of products and services for distributing child pornography it appears there are more than one or those lubricated hillsides. At Cyber Protection Magazine we are internally debating the benefit/risk ratio of this decision and decided to air ou...

I attended Black Hat 2021 virtually again this year and wrap it up in this grab bag of issues including #AI ethics, #cybercrime legislation, #ransomware growth and control, and building #cybersecurity community to compact the organization of cybercrime. Grab a coffee and take 25 minutes to get up to speed. 

I interviewed George Finney, chief information security officer for Southern Methodist University, a couple of weeks ago for a Cyber Protection Magazine article about the state of ransomware. It wasn't encouraging. But George is a very nice guy who also helps people and companies get their act together regarding good security practices. The entire conversation was illuminating, even though I had t...

I'm being bombarded with companies trying to get me to interview them about product announcements. If I can figure out a theme to put them in context I will do it. The past couple of weeks though, it's been almost impossible. But I needed to get a podcast out and this is it.

This episode of Crucial Tech is the beginning of a search for Holy Grail of cybersecurity: Products and services that actually make us safer without breaking the budget. There is no one company that delivers everything, but we found one that provides the crucial service of penetration testing that can give a small business a starting point for securing their data with both automated tools and enha...

For a journalist to decide what to cover and when takes some discussion and this week we decided to do our editorial meeting in a public setting so you can see how we pick what to report. In this episode, Joe Basques, Patrick Boch and Lou Covey look at the changing paradigm of Ransomware, the ethics of paying ransoms, Webscraping, Amazon Sidewalk and the state of security jobs. 

Cybercrime has been with us for a while, but the business world saw it as a minor annoyance. Luckily, the criminal world kept the cost low, requiring small ransom amounts and cash cards as a delivery mechanism. #Cryptocurrency kicked the demands up because it was easier to demand more money and easier to hide the money trail. Big ransomware demands hit the news and infrastructure was threatened. B...

This week the WomenTech Global Conference ( #WTGC2021 ) is happening on the web and we thought it would be a good idea to interview a leader in the security industry, Revital Libfran of OdiX about her career and opportunities in #cybersecurity. Plus it gives us a chance to plug this great conference. Sign up at www.womentech.net and learn more.

After several decades working in and with marketing professionals we've learned a couple of things about how marketing is done. One of the more important lessons is that marketers make their jobs much harder than it needs to be. And maybe one of the worst offenders is in the world of #cybersecurity. Patrick Boch, my cofounder of Cyber Protection Magazine, share some of our frustrations insights on...

I had two conversations this week about spoofing attempts that turned into educational moments. There will be more to learn at Cyberprotection-magazine.com but this revealed a lot.

The potential of nuclear warfare is being eclipsed by the potential of cyber warfare as the ender of civilization, so I guess their is that upside. No, seriously, it's becoming apparent to rogue nations that cyber warfare is more effective, cheaper and has less chance for retaliation than a nuclear strike. We talk to cyber warfare experience Pano Yannakogeorgos from New York University about the p...

When you peel back all the layers, digital marketing and consumer tracking on social media apps presents the most significant security flaw in our digital world. Apple's giving individual IoS users control over that decision is a big step forward into making us all safer. It also removes a lot of the hype and fraud that comes from unrestricted tracking. Joe Basques and Lou Covey answer a user ques...

Lithium-ion batteries are in almost all electronics, all electric vehicles and are expanding through the power grids worldwide to store energy during system outages. They are crucial to continued operation of “green” data centers. When you talk about renewable energy, you have to talk about where lithium-ion batteries fit in the discussion. That’s not necessarily a good thing. Lithium-ion technolo...

This interview with Warren Savage, guest researcher t the University of Maryland in IoT security is a follow up to an interview I did with him last year at the @DesignCon conference in Santa Clara. In the interview and his keynote at the show, he talked about how vulnerable the electronics supply chain was. A year later we are stuck in a semiconductor supply chain slowdown and one of the reasons i...

2021 is quickly becoming the year we realize that supply chains are what make the developed world. SolarWinds, the Suez Canal, the worldwide semiconductor shortage, and the “snowpocalypse” in Texas has shown us that one glitch can wipe out our standard of living for weeks, months and years. With that in mind we start a series of podcasts and articles in cyberprotection-magazine.com on the supply c...

We talk to Harry Haramis, GM of Prime Key, about public key infrastructure (PKI) and certificate authority (CA), which may be the most boring technologies you come in contact with, but are foundational to keeping you secure on the internet and even in your car. The problem is that few companies will let you know what they are doing about managing those things and if it is done badly, you are screw...

We started looking into insurance coverage for cyber attacks a few weeks ago and contacted analyst Maxine Holt of Omdium about it. And then more questions came after the talk. So this episode is a part of additional coverage you will see in Cyber Protection Magazine and additional podcasts. It's the complex, but we are going to try to make it understandable.

Securing an organization's data isn't easy, or cheap, but relatively tiny section of the cyber-protection industry, known as content disarm and reconstruction (CDR) might be a solid beginning. If only they would spend enough on marketing to build awareness. We open the fourth season on Crucial tech with Taeil Goh, CTO of OPSWAT , about his companies threat detection and removal technology and why...

Season 3 concludes with Joe Basques interviews Lou Covey and Patrick Boch, co-editors of the recently launched Cyber Protection Magazine (www.cyberprotection-magazine.com), an international joint project between the Footwasher Media in the US and Fabogi in Germany. The new publication will focus on practical implementation of cybersecurity for businessmen and the non-technical among us. 

If you are a small business hoping for a grant from California to stay alive during the COVID-19 lockdown, you need to listen to this podcast. The state has chosen to work with third-party financial institutions to transfer the funds to banks, but those organizations are asking applicants to violate basic good practices for maintaining security. Moreover, some business banks have internal security...