Crucial Tech

#GenerativeAI was front and center at the RSA Conference 2023 in San Francisco. Companies were either promoting it as a means of improving security or warning against it as a security weakness. It was even the keynote on Tuesday by RSA CEO Rohit Ghai, who took a neutral position that leaned positive on its potential.

But as he spoke, for the most part, glowingly about the AI age we are entering there were some questions that arose. So we contacted him through his PR agency and he graciously accepted an interview appointment to answer those questions. Our focus was, primarily, on the ethical use of generative AI and the failure of the tech industry to live up to its own stated ethics. The conversation was frank and illuminating.

You can't talk in polite company about politics or religion, but everyone can talk about how they hate advertising. And for good reason. I take a break from discussing technology to rant about what tech companies do to get you to buy their stuff, and why you don;t trust them.

“Sextortion” is a popular theme in media and the news, but it may or may not be a big deal. No one can really come up with a consensus about what it is and how widespread it is. It’s even difficult to pin down whether it is a crime. We talked with Ken Kuglin from Digital Forensics Corporation, a cybersecurity firm in Ohio, about how to deal with the attacks and their free services to educate people about how to avoid or deal with sextortion.

Being a security company that gets hit with a data breach or malware attack is embarrassing, besides the fact that it scares the hell out of your customers. But the current tech fad of "decentralization" has a pretty good lesson for anyone thinking about establishing a security operations center, virtual or otherwise. We talked with the CEO of Dispel about how they've been decentralizing security operations in infrastructure clients for years now. 

It's Martin Luther King day today, which is an important holiday for me. This interview was incredibly satisfying because it demonstrates how far we've come since Dr. King Spoke in Washington DC in 1963. We have a long way to go, but this is a celebration of what is being accomplished.

To kick off the new year and our seventh season, Joe Basques and I tackle the conundrum of distrust in media and why marketing doesn't work the way it's supposed to in the technology world.

A personal bank account was hacked this week, but because I was getting regular alerts from my bank we kept the damage at a minimum. As luck would have it, I had scheduled this interview with Bruno Farinelli of Clearsale who explained how even when you do everything you can to keep your finances safe, criminals have a way to get around your protections. 

Guess what? Black Friday doesn't give you good deals and the ones you may be looking at may be scams. Take 15 minutes and get smart.

A few weeks ago I was on a panel at San Jose State, #yesyoucan, about the future of democracy and how it intersects with technology and media. It went over an hour, which twice longer than what I normally do, but it included Harry Hursti speaking on election security and Sari Stenfors regarding a "hopeful future." After what we've been through the past few months, it might help.

You've read the headlines about the stock market and the tech sector in particular. Self-proclaimed genius tech bros are hemorrhaging wealth, portfolios are crashing. But while the cybersecurity industry isn't completely unaffected, it is still attracting billions in new investment and private equity acquisitions. We talk to Brad LaPorte of Lionfish Advisors about why investments are falling in tech and why cyber is the new darling.

Want some good news about technology? Stay tuned

One of my favorite security gurus, Ian Thornton-Trump sent me a text recently about the top-five security failures in recent history that we have yet to learn from. So I decided to call him and ask what he meant. It's worth listening to.

I'm going to the RSA Conference in San Francisco this week, so I didn't do a full episode yet. This is a preview of what's to come so stay tuned.

The realities of cyberattacks are not going away. Based on what we know, we have no idea how big the problem is because a lot of individuals and organizations just don’t report attacks. Conservatively, Cyber Protection Magazine estimates that half of all the attacks are unreported. More knowledgeable people than us say it's more like 90 per cent. As we have reported in past podcasts, that is likely due to a combination of complacency and just not knowing what to do.

We talked to Emil Sayegh, CEO of Ntirety, a company that helps small to midsize organizations reach security compliance with best practices and new privacy legislation. Ntirety is one of dozens of similar companies that are doing quite well. Sayegh claims they have 2400 customers, which is impressive in and of itself. But 2400 customers is a long way from any one industry being protected. Even 240,000 would be a drop in the bucket. That doesn’t mean you have to be their customer, or a customer of any competitor to get started.

Sayegh outlined a five-point plan in our discussion. Grab a coffee and have a listen. 

Joe Basques and I took our time to talk about personal priorities in cybersecurity and in the process we ended up talking about secure browsers, privacy, abortion, state surveillance and recalling recent podcasts with Chase Cunningham and Supreet Manchanda. The upshot is we are entering a time where personal responsibility remains the single biggest determinant of vulnerability. Don't skip over and don't ignore this episode. Your finances, personal privacy and the fate of the nation is is your hands. 

The SEC is considering requiring corporations provide a board seat to the CISOs. It's something I've seen as long overdue especially considering how security illiterate most boards are. And in the start-up world that literacy needs to start with venture capitalists. I decided to talk to one of my favorite entrepreneurial investors, Supreet Manchanda, and ask him what he thought an investor's role in security would be.

Woke up this morning to the news that high-flying quantum cryptography company, Arqit, is being hit with fraud lawsuits in the UK and US throwing shade on the viability of its technology. In preparation for an article on the news for Cyber Protection Magazine I had a chat with Gerry Kennedy, CEO of Observatory Holdings, about the importance of the case not only for future standardization but to companies looking to keep data safe when quantum computing becomes a thing.

This is the day you should not just THINK about backing up your data, but actually DO it. It really isn’t that hard. It can be done while you re getting a cup of coffee. It can be done automatically, and it can be done for free for most people. We spent a bit of time outlining all ways it can be done without muss or fuss.

The security of our schools is always a concern. Many have been targeted by criminals with ransomware, so when a PR rep talked me into an interview on "What teachers need to know about cybersecurity?" I thought it was a good idea. That interview didn't work out but I remembered I knew a guy. Kyle Brumbaugh is the Director of Technology and Innovation at the Redwood City School District and has been an educator for decades. We had a great talk about how his district had prepared for the pandemic lockdown without actually knowing it was coming. More importantly, they took steps to make sure that the teachers didn't need to worry about security. It's a message of hope for the future.

Personal data isn’t just about your name, phone number, credit cards and social security numbers. It’s also about your online habits. All that stuff is recorded, filed and analyzed by various companies, including your employers. That data can identify who you are and are as much a part of your digital identity as your user name and password. In fact, that data might be more accurate than your password. But whether a company is employing that kind of protection is a question that needs asking.

This was one of the scarier interviews I’ve done on this podcast. I’m talking with Paul Smith, country manager for Sweeft Digital, a UK agency helping companies manage their digital presence, including compliance with UK and Europe privacy regulations in the UK and Europe. He confirmed many of the concerns I have about the US versions of the GDPR, which do more to regulate whether users can stop companies from selling personal data than they do the companies collecting it. Bottom line is, each of us has to take care of ourselves. Our governments are not going to.

For the past five years, the Mozilla Foundation has published reviews of products rated on their relative privacy aspects. The least private products are labelled "Very, Very creepy. We interviewed Jen Caltrider, Mozilla's lead in their Privacy Not Included Division and found what makes a product or service creepy. Hint: the better the price, the creepier it becomes.
This will be available on Spotify in video or on all other platforms in audio only.

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 fruit is at the top of the tree. Journalists have to cut through mediocre marketing to make that reason clear to the customer. This is why I don’t like writing about product introductions. What is more interesting is the process of discovering why the product exists and who can best use it. That’s why I decided to take this interview with XM Cyber. They have good technology. They have mediocre marketing like pretty much everyone else in the tech world. I thought it might help to see how the sausage is made.

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 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 to do it over my iPad due to a tech glitch. Ah the modern digital age....

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 enhanced with professional services cost below $100. Ronin Pentest offers an automated, web-based tool that can be used by anyone to go through the top 10 vulnerabilities as listed by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP).

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. But in 2020 and 2021, law enforcement figured out some ways to track those criminals down. Extraditions began and ransoms were recovered. The gloves are coming off and CEOs find themselves squarely in the crosshairs of regulators and stakeholders along with the criminals. In September 2020, Gartner Research predicted that CEOs would be held criminally and fiscally liable for cyberattacks that harmed people physically if the company had not taken basic precautions to prevent it. We talk with Mathieu Gorge, CEO of VigiTrust and author of the Cyber Elephant in the Boardroom, about what CEOs need to be investing in to keep themselves out of jail.

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 how companies can promote their products and services more effectively. It really isn't that hard.

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 question about the significance of the new feature.

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 technology is fraught with social, environmental, and security downsides. Forced child labor, the lack of effective recyclability, potential poisonous fires and explosions and complex, imminently hackable control systems are all aspects of the industry that just won’t be going away soon. But there is hope. There are alternatives.

This is the subject of this episode of Crucial Tech. We talk to Jack Pouchet, Vice President of marketing for Natron Energy, a company manufacturing a sodium-ion battery that lacks all the downsides of its lithium cousin and offers significant upsides that we need. The good news is that it looks like this technology will be going into large-scale production just before the Lithium-ion technology collapses under its own weight.

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 is the inability to secure it. Things haven't gotten much better but Savage sees progress. This is part two of a series on supply chain.

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 screwed. Time to start tasing questions. 

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 mechanisms that prevent the connections being made between the state and the banks. You can do this safely, but you need to take precautions. We give your those precautions in this podcast. 

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 that resulted in the arrest, extradition and prosecution of a ransomware ring. We will hear more from Flory in the coming weeks but his recommendations can bear fruit as hackers become more brazen.

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 Hanna about the only way to deal with security: vigilance.

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 journalism. That makes this a happy Christmas as fare as we are concerned.

Thanks for the support this year. We've grown 400 percent in listenership a engagement. Looking for great things in the coming year.

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 Red Herring 100.

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.

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 of information is self-defeating.

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 ran across Airgap.io. Holy crap. Is this what I've been searching for? It's affordable, scalable from a home network to a #Fortune100 company, and it stops ransomware from spreading throughout all connected devices in the network. 

Bob Frankston is an e engineer whose work has arguable been more responsible for how most people interact with the internet. You probably have never heard of him... but I have. After following Bob Frankston's IEEE column off and on since 2013 we were thrown together earlier this year on social media and was absolutely star struck when he agreed to this interview about 5G networks. As I suspected, 5G is more about marketing than technology, but it is also about getting around net neutrality. Listen and learn.

Even the most security-conscious people and organizations get hacked, so it's not always something you can stop. We go back to talk with #Sectigo's VP of IoT security, Alan Grau to talk about how a security training from got hacked through a common phishing scam, how deep the flaws in our technology are and finally, how Sectigo is helping companies make secure technology.

We have a few episodes this month talking about drastic changes in advertising and marketing and until this week, it looked like everything was under control... until Facebook admitted this week that the changes are going to severely hamper their ability to send those creepy targeted advertising posts your way. And that's going to affect their revenues.

You may have heard of quantum computers. You may actually think they are mostly hype. They are. We won't see them come into real use for a decade. In the meantime, people are freaking out over how they can be used to makes us all less safe.  The good news is some companies, like Sectigo, are working on ways to make sure we are all safe when they actually become a reality. So grab a coffee and listen to our take on quantum computer security.

In our last episode we reported on presentations at BlackHat USA 2020 about election interference. In this second part, we look specifically at the Russian and Chinese approaches to disinformation campaigns and how it is less technology hacking and more about strategic use of social media.

Our first re-run of the season is going back to our report on election hacking, a two-parter, that doesn't dwell on the technology of elections as much as how they can be influenced. For several years we have heard about how technologically vulnerable our elections systems are, but it turns out that physically hacking a system is a lot harder and yields insignificant fruit in national elections. It is much easier to sway voters with disinformation.

Are you concerned about how social media seems to know exactly what you are thinking about? Are you’re that they are listening to you and your friends on mobile devices? Well, they don’t and they aren’t. You’ve been freely telling them what your concerns are and what you want to buy. But all that may be coming to an end.  Find out how in the next episode of Crucial Tech.

We thought we would be able to wrap up the last three episodes featuring Tim Bajarin and Matthew Rosenquist, but then life happened and more AI disasters occurred. This is yet another launching point for our coverage of surveillance technology.

Last week, we had @TimBajarin give a fairly pessimistic view of the future of #AI and #facial recognition. This week we bring in the positives (sort of) with security and AI guru @MatthewRosenquist. This technology is probably inevitable but to make it a global issue we are going to either have to give up some freedom and privacy, or we are going to have to work hard to fix the deficiencies. either way, the combination of this and the last two episodes will make you well informed enough to be the expert in most conversations even if you aren't an engineer.

By the time we finished last week's episode on security settings a lot happened. So I started making some calls to those who know what was going on. This week, we talk to the Analyst di tutti Analysts, Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies about ethics, facial recognition and AI, why it's so hard to do any of that well, and how Apple's announcement of iOS 14 is so earth-shaking.

My business partner, Joe Basques called me up and started asking questions about #Facebook security, which morphed into #AI, which moved into #facial_recognition. So we decided to start from the beginning of the conversation and record it. You will find out some tricks about how you can make your Facebook experience safer, what Facebook can actually track even when you think you are secure, and what the future holds for you in a corporate surveillance state.

However, the subject got even more interesting in the days following our talk so this becomes part one of a broader discussion with industry luminaries. So, get ready. It's going to be an interesting ride.

I'm deep into writing a book with Richard Bach, a security guru from the UK, on the ethical development of #AI technology and have found that there are really not a lot of books offering practical guidelines for ethical thought in engineering. There are lots of books about why it's important and about ethical lapses, so maybe it's time for an Ethics for Dummies (Boy, am I qualified). In my research, I came across Jamais Cascio, a general futurist who does a lot of work with the Institute for the Future (www.iftf.org, @iftf) and who has a lot to say about the subject. Out of a very long conversation I culled these 30 minutes. The rest is going in the book. I imagine your brain will hurt by the time it's over.

In the last episode, we looked at changes in how tech media and businesses are changing during the #COVID19 #pandemic and how @FootwasherMedia has been predicting these changes for decades. We've also had our thoughts about entertainment and #venturecapital are going to change, but we kept that to ourselves because we aren't entertainers nor are we investors. But we do know some people who are and in this interview with Fabrizio Capobianco of @MinervaNetworks we take a look at how the current crisis is changing that, as well.

Joe Basques and I have been working in the tech world and media for several decades. We have often warned clients of what was to come and that they should be ready for it and almost universally we have been ignored or ridiculed. The funny thing is within 3-5 years things we warned of have come true, like the slow death of tech media and the rise of social media to replace it. Each time companies have raced and struggled to adapt. the #COVID19 #pandemic has rushed even more of our predictions to the forefront, including #videoconferencing, #telemedicine, and #digitalmigration of the #economy. We are taking a moment to gloat but also to remind you that everything has changed and probably for the better. Part 2 will look at changes in #venturecapital, #investment and #entertainment

When searching the web, do you ever get a request to renew or accept a certificate? Yeah, you have but you probably had no idea what it was about. It's kind of important, it should be more widespread and there are a few companies involved in the process. One of them is @Keyfactor. They would like to be more widespread, I can assure you. Listen in and maybe you can push your providers to look into them. #security #authenticatiion 

I hope that headling caught your attention. It should. We hear a lot about how the US government is watching us, but the information that Edward Snowden said was being collected on us pails in comparison to what Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are allowing other corporations and foreign governments to collect from us. And those companies are getting paid to allow them that access even if they aren't saving and sharing that data for themselves. What's more, there is little you can do to stop it except for eliminated digital devices from your life. But there are things you can do to limit it. This commercial-free episode may be the most important information you need right now.

This week I found opt that is it probably less likely that the government is watching you than Amazon is. More importantly, to law enforcement you may not exist at all. Check out how tech firms are helping the good guys catch the bad guys.

The title is a bit melodramatic but history shows us that nothing devised by man lasts forever and, thanks to state, national and international laws as well as new technology, the hegemony of Amazon, Facebook, Ebay and Google over retail may be coming to an end. We talk to the CEO www.maikeinc.com and look at the increasingly hostile environment facing online behemoths.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing faster than the original internet. Cisco Systems predicts that internet-connected devices will represent 75 percent of all the internet traffic in less than 10 years, and Gartner predicts that there will be five times more IoT devices in use than there are people on the planet. But more than 90 percent of all those devices are easily hackable and will remain so for the foreseeable future. There are some companies working hard to fix the problem but until manufacturers decide to start designing for security, it's going to be a long road, indeed.

You've probably heard of the data privacy laws in the EU and California but you might not know what they do for you. A lot. We talk to an international expert, Patrick O'Keeffe on the subject of privacy and regulation, You need to meet this guy. He's the real deal.

It has been a bad couple of years for Facebook and it isn't getting easier. This week, we look at social networks that do not have advertising and don't sell your information to anyone. In fact, they don't even collect it. Both ways that all social media platforms have traditionally made their money. We talk to David Glassco, CEO of one of those networks, Neone (nay o nay) and their pay-for -play paradigm. Will it work? Only you have that answer.

Happy New Year and welcome back after the holiday break. This season on Crucial Tech we will be looking at changes in social media, consumer privacy laws, new security challenges for the common man and more, but today we kick-off the first in a random series on cryptocurrency and blockchain technology with two friends, Joe Basques and Matthew Rosenquist. As always, donations will help us eliminate advertising and you can make audio comments on the Anchor.fm platform that could make you a star on a future episode

I had a chance to interview a handful of Finnish tech start-ups at the 2019 TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco and was m,ore then pleasantly surprised by what I heard. There are many reports about how Finnish publlc education is exceptional but exporting all the techniques are difficult for a variety of reasons. The technology I saw changes that.

You m ight want to be ready to turn up the sound in a couple of the interviews, because the Finns are often softspoken and there was a lot of background noise and electronic interference in Moscone Hall, but it is all worth the listen, especially if you care about education.

Josel L:orenzo, VP of product development for Axiado and an AI guru talks about the different levels of autonomous vehicles and whether humans can have any actual presence in controlling them. This is the last of 4 parts

We went to San Jose to talk to Chet Babbla, vice president for automotive technology for Arm Ltd., about a new consortium focused on autonomous vehicles. Cooperation in a multi-faceted and challenging technology like autonomous vehicles is a good idea. But in this case, do we have enough knowledge about the components needed to make a dent?

Besides the difficulty in getting the technology to work, we still have a significant problem in making autonomous vehicle safe from hackers. We talk with Matthew Rosenquist, cybersecurity guru.

We're starting this three part series with Rik turner, principal analyst at Ovum, a british analysis firm, to get a history of how long vehicle automation has been with us, where it is today and how far we have to go before we have what we think is just on the horizon.

Friday, September 27 we will start a three-part series on the state of autonomous vehicles. Tune in and find out the 411

Catfishing is the biggest scam on the internet. It is not easy to get out of it once you fall into the trap and it is very embarrasing, but it can be done with a minimum of effort, some patience and honest self-reflection., But avoiding it is very easy. Thism episode is brought to you without commercial interruption. So chip in at https://anchor.fm/crucialtech.

This week we talked with Ugan Naidoo who, besides having a pretty neat name, is the CTO of Inetco, a Vancouver, BC company that monitors financial transactions for banks and large retailers worldwide. This is a pretty technical discussion, but once you hear it, you will understand how not paying attention to this ussue is costing you and everyone else, money.

Hackers can appropriate you computer system to make money on cryptocurrency without you knowing it's happening. It's annoying but not bad for individuals like you and me. For big corporations and governments it can be lethal.

I wrote a column in EEWeb.com a few weeks ago talking about the security issues developing in open source software, Linux in particular. And old friend popped up in the discussion. Meet Bill Weiberg. We will probably be hearing more from him in the future/

In this episode we learn about certificates,  securing Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), botnets, DDOS, secure boot... It's jam packed. We interview Alan Grau, CTO of the Icon Labs division of Sectigo.
Thanks to the late, great Alfonso Bedoya for the headline

This episode is packed into 40 minutes with news of the week, an interview with the director of Global Platforms and much more.  This is stuff you need to know.

This is an interview I did a few months ago with Matt Rosequist, former senior security analyst for Intel. It's a wide ranging interview that cov ers a lot of issues you may not be aware is affecting you.

Yes, you read that right. The biggest threat to our infrastructure are cute, furry rodents. We interview the CEO of Critter Guard who is saving the world one pole at a time.

Government hearings are all the rage now for tech CEOs trying to justify massive breaches in privacy, security and basic trust within their markets. The discussion on how to make sure development of new tech, especially in artificial intelligence is bubbly to the surface. Maija-Riita Ollilie, an ethics scholar in Finland, was our guest this week with a view on how ethics will develop naturally with adoption of technology. 

A few weeks ago I met Lisa Jiggetts, founder and president of the Women's Society of Cyberjutsu, dedicated to helping young women start careers in cyber security. A fascinating and important effort. Check out the website at https://womenscyberjutsu.org.

Julian Assange was arrested last week in London. Some call it the death of free journalism, but it might be something else. And what it reveals about your personal security is probably more important.

A few weeks ago I interviewed Forresters senior analyst Amy DeMartine about her predictions for cyber security in 2019. Now that I have a chance to publish it, two of those predictions have already come true and it is just mid April. And the reasons for the growth of cybercrime are sitting in out pockets.

The Green New Deal in Congress is going to be debated for at least two years and I thought it was worth tying in a tech angle to the debate. We interview Evan Johnson, CTO of Hytech Power in Redmond, Washington about how his technology can actually make this happen with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of results.

BTW, If you listen to this podcast on Anchor.fm, you can leave messages, ask questions and make recommendations for inclusion in future episodes. Otherwise you can contact me on the Footwasher Media Facebook page, on my Linkedin page, or on Twitter @newtechpress.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a major theme in technology news, investment and science fiction and the conventional wisdom is that it can be very dangerous. Is that true? Maybe not. In this episode we talk to Axel Kloth, CTO of Axiado Corporation, about the potential dangers of AI and the potential benefits.

Dr. Prasad Calyam at the University of Missouri is working with a team of researchers to create a novel way of stopping hackers from staling data or installing malware in cloud-based systems.

The last week of February was a bad one for digital security and we thought it would be a good time to start this podcast, focusing on the biggest news of the weeK: The Cloudborne vulnerability in cloud servers... all of them.