PODCAST · news
Crucial Tech
by Lou Covey
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.
Episodes
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Episode 3.3 - CyberMarketingCon is coming. Be there.
I've been a professsional communicator for more than half a century, as a working journalist, a technical editor, a marketing professional, and back to journalism in the course of my career. No subject area has been more fascinating to me than cybersecurity. But it is also the industry with the...
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Episode 13.2 - Licensing AI use, part 2
In our second part of this series, we talk to companies actively involved in enforcing responsibility from users. First up is Christopher Dion Johnson, CEO of Indie Me. His company creates a registry for celebrity facial property so they can’t be used without permission in deep fakes. He is...
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Episode 13.1 - Drivers licensing for AI use
We took a break before launching into Season 13, which should take us to the end of the year, but we have a doozy to start out with. Earlier this week, my cat decided to throwup on our bed in the early morning and by the time I got it cleaned up I was wide awake. So I started my morning routine…
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Episode 12.21 - Is AI destroying collaborative engineering
Back in May the coding world reeled to the news that a hacking group, using customized AI agents, had breached Github and stolen 3,800 of its internal repositories by a threat actor group tracked as TeamPCP. The attack was designed to stay under the radar: it ran entirely within normal user...
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Episode 12.20 - Cities make like shepherds and get the Flock out
Flock has been in the news recently in a backlash against municipal surveillance, but this technology has been in use for half a century. Why the problem now? We sat down to talk with a city commissioner from Del Ray Beach, Florida, Tom Markert, who also consults with the FBI on cybersecurity.…
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Episode 12.19 - I knew it was AI marketing BS!
A few months ago the tech world went into a tizzy over Anthropic's announcement that it's latest fronter AI incarnation was finding zero-day vulnerabilities. My BS meter started pinging immediately. A zero-day attack requires finding a system vulnerability that no one knows about. It is about as...
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Episode 12.18 - So what's the deal with AI watermarks?
It seems the entire cybersecurity industry went on vacation after Blackhat USA last week because every interview I scheduled for this podcast went belly up with cancellations. So at our Monday staff meeting, my EU partner Patrick Boch and I decided to fill the gap this week regarding Anthropic's…
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12.17 - Getting back control of personal information
In a world of employment upheaval, job seekers are freely sending out millions of documents containing significant personal information. Whether called CVs or resumes, these documents can be used to impersonate and defraud employers and the job seekers alike. Chris Els, founder of P3 Audit, a…
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Episode 12.16 - The totally avoidable shoulder-surfing vulnerability (sponsored by Haven
We've been getting an influx of announcements regarding shoulder surfing and technology that protects against it. However, we haven't found a single incident that actually, involved breaking into a device by looking over someone's shoulder. Instead, every report involves stealing someone's phone...
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Episode 12.15 - Fighting a Click-Fix attack for Small Businesses, Sponsored by Haven
Cybersecurity is never more crucial than when it hits home. This past week, my daughter, who runs a small event planning business, was targeted by a phishing exploit known as a Click-Fix, designed to get her to go to a fake website to harvest her Google log-in credentials. She didn't fall for it...
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Episode 12.14 - Ian and Lou talk brighter times ahead
It has been a while since we talked with Ian Thorton-Trump, CISO and prognosticator at Inversion6, so we were happy when he dropped us a note and reminded us of that lack. Boy, was this one a barn burner. Across the world, pessimism reigns in geopolitics with cybersecurity at the dead center of…
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Episode 12.13 -- Are we realizing AI can't replace humans?
The idea that humans can be excluded from technology operations has been an aspiration in the AI industry, and that interest is NOT going away. But companies are pushing the idea less and redefining how important humans are in the process, described as humans in the loop, at the helm and in the...
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Episode 12.12 - Escape Meta's hellscape
Meta is like Hotel California. You can enter but you can't leave. That's the story I hear over and over. It isn't true. I did and have never looked back. The claims that Meta platforms can improve your business, keep relationships alive, inform the electorate and make a better society have been...
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Episode 12.11 - The bad guys are in your smart TV. You can do something about it.
This week I talked to the good folks at the Digital Citizens Alliance about a report on residential proxies. Say what? Residential proxies? What the heck are those? They are the apps and hardware products people use to connect to the internet, and they are as secure as a sieve is water tight. The...
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Episode 12.10 - The problem of configuration drift with Reach Security
Back in April, Microsoft released an advisory about phishing gang infiltrating Microsoft Teams meetings. In stunning turn of events, it wasn't a weakness in the Microsoft product but in users turning off or bypassing multiple security controls for external users, and then forgetting to turn them...
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Episode 12.9 - Data brokers and health care with Rob Shavell of Deleteme
The data broker market is worth half a trillion dollars and growing at a rate of 7.3 percent annually through 2033. That means they don’t care that you want your privacy. They are making too much money selling your personal information to care. That lack of concern doesn’t just affect an...
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Episode 12.8 - Marketing misinformation
A public relations firm in the United Kingdom, Whiteoaks International, said the quiet part out loud about cybersecurity marketing: that much of it is fiction if not outright fraudulent. I sat down with the rest of the Cyber Protection Magazine team, Patrick Boch and Joe Basques to have a frank...
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Episode 12.7 - When scams are legal: a Chat with MirrorTab's Brian Silverstein
Just to prove that even the most secure practitioners, like your truly, can fall for the “free lunch” offer, I inadvertently signed up for a shady but completely legal “cash back” offer. Not only did I not get any cash back I got charged for it, had to cancel a debit card and walked through the...
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Episode 12.6 - Reporter's Notebook on Breach Irrelevance
AT the RSAC Conference this year a new marketing buzzword appeared in several interviews, most particularly DataKrypto and Cy4Data Labs. They are doing important work, but my interviews with them indicate they need to lift their heads up now and then and look around. Their competitive field is...
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Episode 12.5 - The Future of Truth, Stephen Rosenbaum
I talk about the nature of truth in an Ai world with documentarian Steven Rosenbaum in advance of the release next week of his book The Future of Truth, not to be mistaken by the 2025 book of the same name by film maker Werner Herzog.
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Episode 12.4 - Forward, into the past: AI makes legacy media relevant again
The dirty secret of digital media for the past two decades has been that it doesn't really work. It's just a lot cheaper and easier than actual marketing. Lou Covey and Joe Basques of Cyber Protection Magazine have watched it in its genesis to where it is today and talk about how AI has totally...
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Episode 12.3 -- $500/m security with MirrorTab/Haven and DNSfllter
The great conundrum of business is how rare it is for a company to find markets they can dominate. Oh, they all say that’s what they want to do, but when asked about their business they respond, “Some of our customers are in the Fortune 100/500/1000.” That response always leaves us cold. The...
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Episode 12.2 - Putting AI and security into perspective
Back in January I had a chat with Doug Kersten, CISO for Appfire, that had soemwise words about the intersection of Ai and security. He said AI amplifies existing weaknesses. It doesn't create new threats. AI-driven attacks (phishing, deepfakes) succeed by exploiting poor security fundamentals…
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Season 12.1 - Reporter's notebook: Orca Security, intro to CNAPP
The 12th season of Crucial Tech begins today after a month off. But we haven't been napping. The 2026 RSAC Conference consumed my time and I came back with some definition of the cybersecurity industry. Mostly I learned just how bad the industry is explaining itself to its customers. One area…
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Episode 11.24 - Is the AI industry collapse beginning?
Two weeks ago I did in interview with Claude, ChatGPT and Grok about what could possibly cause the collapse of the AI industry. Little did I know that within the next two weeks there would be a convergence of events that might create that collapse. So this is part two of that podcast. And this...
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Episode 11.23 - DROP and give me privacy! New California mechanism for deleting your records
On January 1, California's Delete Request and Opt-out Platform (DROP) went live and almost 200,000 California residents have already signed up. We talked with Captain Compliance CISO, Alex Proctor about the importance of this platform and the impact on the data industry. More next week on Cyber...
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Episode 11.22 - A conversation with Claude: AI industry on a knife edge
I read news stories every day, several times a day. When it comes to AI I hear that the industry is booming/it's crashing/it's a miracle/it's a nightmare. Everyone has an opinion and it isn't nuanced. It is also all speculation. I wondered who could give me a balanced view of whether AI will...
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Episode 11.21 - Vibe coding losing it's shine, but we're trying it anyway
At the beginning of 2025, vibe coding (using LLMs to create computer code) was all the rage. By June, the bloom had fallen off the rose. Studies showed professional coders were losing skill, and falsely believing they were made more productive using it rather than doing it themselves. This…
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Episode 11.20 - Will you miss CISA 2015 now that it's gone?
Last week, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Act of 2015 faded away without Congressional action (and because of some pretty stupid reasons from Senate Homeland Security Committee chair Rand Paul). But like Dumbledore's Phoenix could arise from the ashes in a new form. Who knows and who...
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Episode 11.19 -- Are you naive enough to fall for a ticket scam
As the Superbowl and Olympics approach, ticket scammers are getting ready to separate fools from their money. Maybe that is harsh but it takes a pretty clueless person to fall for most phishing scams today. I talked with Anomali CISO about how emotional decisions are at the core of most online...
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Episode 11.18 - Decentralization for many, not all
Last week we discussed the trend toward decentralization of technology, and we discuss that more next week in Cyber Protection Magazine. But while it may be a global trend, it doesn't mean everywhere. This week we met with Lisa Pent, CEO of ThePentEdge.com, a consulting organization that works…
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Episode 11.17 - Decentralization and Sovereign Cloud Predictions
We kick off 2026 with a prediction episode where we call decentralization and sovereign cloud efforts as the trend for this year and for a few years. Co-editor Patrick Boch and I see the failures of Cloudflare, AWS, Microsoft and other cloud suppliers, along with growing deglobalization are...
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Episode 11.16 - California Press Foundation: Saving journalism with tech
Last week I attended the most honest tech conference I can remember. The ironic thing was that it wasn’t a tech conference at all. If was the California Press Foundation (CPF) annual conference. The CPF traces its history back to 1878 when it was formed originally as the California Press...
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Episode 11.15 - How to make proper predictions
Every year at this time I start getting pitches from PR folks offering client's predictions for the coming year. Lots of publications put out their annual predictions articles in December with their own, plus a few selected from these pitches. At Cyber Protection Magazine we do it a bit…
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Episode 11.14 - Cheap marketing gets poor results
The technology industries run penurious marketing programs. Most spend half as much of their budgets as most of the S&P, and then complain that customers don't respond. They also blame the marketing and PR folks for the bad results of their cut-rate budgets. It doesn't have to be that way. We sat...
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Episode 11.13: Prediction failures, dysinformation, and affordable marketing
Joe Basques and I were having a conversation about the state of the tech world and decided to hit the record button. There was a lot of ground covered in 20+ minutes. First off, it's that time of year when publications do stories about what can be expected in the next year, which means…
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Episode 11.12 - The will to market is weak in cyber training niche
The genesis of this podcast was a convoluted pitch that was three steps removed from the client. A marketing company working for the client hired a PR agency to distribute a press release, who then farmed out the pitching to a freelancer. I tried to get some clarity on the pitch from the…
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Episode 11.11 - The problem with proxies
Proxies are the largely hidden lubricant of the internet. They both protect us and make us vulnerable. The AWS and Microsoft Azure outages in the past few weeks were examples of what happens when proxies are correctly maintained. But as they protect our privacy they also protect the identities of...
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Episode 11.10 : Bolaji Ojo explains why companies should support journalism
The journalism industry is in trouble and has been for most of the 21st century. But the advent of AI generated content has made professional journalists absolutely crucial not just to democracies but to business success. One of the most prolific and successful technology journalists is Bolaji…
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Episode 11.9 - Can AI survive? (Part Two)
Our expanded coverage of the viability of the AI industry, and how it could affect the cybersecurity industry, continues with this episode. We've blown out our time limit of 30 minutes because we are talking with three entrepreneurs with less dependence on AI as a product feature. We talk with…
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Episode 11.8 - Can AI survive? (part one)
We've been having a lively debate at Cyber Protection Magazine about the potential, dangers, and chances AI is going to survive in its current form. Co-editor Patrick Boch likes to say I'm something of a Luddite about it, and it's true (Luddites were not against technology, but were adamant about...
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Episode 11.7 - Book Review: AI Made Easy for Parents
I was attending the AI Infra Summit recently and was handed a book with an interesting title : AI Made Easy for Parents and was intrigued by the title. It is an easy read, but ultimately disappointing, at least from an educator's view.
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Episode 11.6 - Making the case for winning the cyberwar
More often than not, when I'm interviewing a corporate leader about the news they are presenting to me, I find a bit of news in their own content that they didn't see, That was the case when I interviewed Mike Wiacek, founder and CTO of Stairwell. The company is in a very competitive market with...
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Episode 11.5 - Giving up and accepting mediocrity for AI
When it comes to the implementation of AI in a corporation, the question is not if or when. It’s more like, “How much if a disaster are we willing to accept?” A whole new industry niche is arising to help companies determine just how mediocre and unsafe they want to be. Tumeryk is one of those...
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Episode 11.4: Coming attractions and how to bury the lede
The first of September began with a bang. I've got a lot to write and talk about, but barely had time to do this much. There is an AI infrastructure conference coming next week, along with a special issue on AI economics. But companies really need to start learning how to tell a story all over...
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Episode 11.3 - Fixing the hole in Agentic AI
A few weeks ago I talked with Paul Valente, CEO of VISO TRUST. In the excitement of Agentic AI adoption, a massive security hole has opened and Valente's goal is plugging that hole. Our conversation adds a needed reality check to the AI euphoria/
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Episode 11.2 - Separating fact from fiction in Deepfakes
I got a pitch from Reality Defender (deepfake video detection) about a partnership with ValidSoft (deepfake voice) last week. We don’t generally cover partnership agreements because, well, we get a handful every week and they just aren’t news. But the pitch threw out a few statistics that seemed…
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Episode 11.1 - Controlling access could help close Agentic AI security holes, but it's not security
We are starting out the 11th season of Crucial Tech is a bang. I am completing an article on a significant security hole in AI agents that shows how the tech industry makes security an afterthought every, damn, time. One of the companies pitching a solution is Teleport, which manages identity...
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Episode 10.27 - Why some companies don't carry cyberinsurance
Today ends the 10th season of Crucial Tech, 250+ episodes over six years and not a single repeat subject. Today we look at an aspect of cyber insurance not yet discussed as far as we can find: Why do so few cybersecurity companies carry cyber insurance? We bring in our friend and benefactor,...
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Episode 10.26 - The rise of NHI and the impact of Predatory Sparrow
If you are one of the smart people who have a subscription to Cyber Protection Magazine you will soon receive our next special issue focused on the rise of non-human identities (NHI) and their impact on society. If not, you get just this podcast with a hint of what is in the issue. We talk with...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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.
HOSTED BY
Lou Covey
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Crucial Tech have?
Crucial Tech currently has 278 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Crucial Tech about?
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.
How often does Crucial Tech release new episodes?
Crucial Tech publishes regularly with 278 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Crucial Tech?
You can listen to Crucial Tech on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Crucial Tech?
Crucial Tech is created and hosted by Lou Covey.
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