Crucial Tech
Unraveling the technology that affects us all but that few of us understand, in a format to give you a basic understanding in the time it takes to drive to and from the grocery store.
- Update frequency
- every 8 days
- Average duration
- 24 minutes
- Episodes
- 235
- Years Active
- 2019 - 2025
Episode 9.6 - FHE starts getting serious
I bet you never heard of FHE. Me neither. Then I got a pitch about it. Tried to ignore it because I had never herd of it, but they were insistent. Turns out to be interesting.
Fully homomorphic encry…
Special episode -Threat reports for October 21
After getting knocked for a loop with a dose of Covid I'm slowly crawling back to the desk and providing some timely advice regarding current and predicted threat reports from our friends at Fletch.
Episode 9.5 - Pig butchering: It's not just for breakfast
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 billio…
Episode 9.4 - Digital tech is hitting the physical wall
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. …
Episode 9.3 - AI and telemarkeing: Marriage from Hell?
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. Turn…
Episode 9.2 - Innocence is not a defense against online fraud
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 cra…
Episode 9.1 - Getting serious about PQC
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 …
Episode 8.23 - Fixing marketing in Tech
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 rel…
Episode 8.22 - Social engineering affects nations
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…
Episode 8.21 - Have we reached peak ransomware? One lawyer's view
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, howev…
Episode 8.20 - Crowdstrike: who's at fault?
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…
Episode 8.19 -- Are we losing the data war, Part 2
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…
Episode 8.18 -- Are we losing the data war? Part 1
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 despera…
Journalism needs a kick in the a**
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 professi…
Episode 8.17 - Elder fraud: bigger than you think and not how you think.
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 ranso…
Episode 8.16 - Avoiding election scams
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 A…
Episode 8.15 -- Old man yells at clouds during grad week
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.
Episode 8.14 -- Generative AI is accelerating phishing attacks
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 claim…
Episode 8.13 - Finding gold in Metomic survey
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 mo…
Episode 8.12 - Madison Horn wants to increase Congress' tech IQ
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 fo…