Crucial Tech

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...

There is important stuff in tech, and then there is stupid stuff. And lately the stupid stuff has been a bit more interesting. We take a look at four or the more interesting stupid stories.

For about 10 years the conventional wisdom about #ransomware was to just pay it and start improving your security. According to John Flory III, CISO for Harbor Networks, that just doesn’t work anymore. In our interview with Flory he explains why it is absolutely necessary to go on offense now and hunt the hackers down. He gives us a preview of a case he worked on with international law enforcement...

As soon as the SolarWinds breach hit the news, press releases started pouring out of the cyber security industry with claims that their products or services would have prevented the breach, but talking to people in the trenches, that is a dangerous claim to believe. The truth is, human error and intention can defeat any security protocol or technology. We talked to Matthew Rosenquist and Steve Han...

We were going to do this after the first, but the queue is getting long with 2021  interviews and articles for Cybersecurity-Magazine.com so here's our Christmas gift to you. Legislation, litigation, public opinion and technology are combining in 2021 to put the breaks on #disinformation and #Trumpism next year and the foreseeable future. It looks bad for social media but good for print journ...

Before we get into be thankful of stuff on Thursday we need to get one thing off of our chest, namely the wasteful use of time and money spent on corporate awards programs that are nothing more than a naked attempt to build valuable mailing lists and take money from startups that they can't afford or leave them  vulnerable to a corporate raider. And there are no more blatant efforts than the...

President-elect Joe Biden has been catching flack for stating that we will transition out of fossil fuel in favor of green energy, but that has less to do with government regulation and more to do with market forces. And in the case of hydrogen, we cannot decouple that clean energy from fossil fuel extraction. We look at this in a short podcast because it is that simple.

In part three of this series, we take a look at the debate over Section 230 in Title II of the Federal Communications Act that is targeting social media political bias and discuss why it is a misdirected controversy, and how it might restore the fortunes of and trust in #MSM. We will conclude the series with a couple of tools to help you create your own mental filter on what you see online.

In part two of our miniseries on journalism in a digital world, we take a look at the causes of bias in the press. Some of that is legitimate, but a lot of it is just personal perception and crowd think. The bias most of us see is actually a mirror image of our own. We talk about some of the ways you can combat bias but we admit it may be beyond one's desire to seek balanced news. THERE WILL BE A...

It is popular to say you don't trust the news media. Some of that distrust is valid, but few people can actually identify why. Joe Basques and I decided to do a deep dive into the subject in this episode... that went so long we had to make it a multiparter. There may even be a part 3. In this day and time we need all the help we can get to find the truth and randomly cutting off reliable sources o...

Next week, on Crucial Tech, more about journalism and digital content than you've ever known.

I have talked to a lot of companies developing digital security devices and systems. Virus scans catch about 50 percent of the attacks at best but don't stop them from happening. Network equipment and software services are way too expensive and do very little to protect against people doing stupid things behind the firewall. It has really seemed hopeless for a while and very frustrating. Then I ra...