Plaintext with Rich
by Rich Greene
Cybersecurity is an everyone problem. So why does it always sound like it’s only for IT people? Each week, Rich takes one topic, from phishing to ransomware to how your phone actually tracks you, and explains it in plain language in under ten minutes or less. No buzzwords. No condescension. Just the stuff you need to know to stay safer online, explained like you’re a smart person who never had anyone break it down properly. Because you are!
Episodes
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After the Click: How to Report a Security Mistake
A security mistake can leave you writing and deleting the same message to your manager. You suspect something went wrong, but finding the words feels harder than it should. Plaintext with Rich explores the first useful conversation after a suspicious click, download, or account approval…
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Task Scams: Why You Shouldn't Pay to Get Paid
Task scams can make an evening of online assignments feel like money earned. Then the withdrawal request turns into another demand, and the balance you've been watching starts to mean something different. Rich traces the sequence described in the Federal Trade Commission's August 2025 warning…
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Device-Code Phishing: The Real Login Page Trap
Device-code phishing starts with an uncomfortable possibility: the sign-in address you checked really does belong to Microsoft. The document you're expecting comes with a code, the page looks right, and the question that matters is still hiding in the request. Plaintext with Rich follows the...
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Browser Extensions: What Did You Give Permission To?
Browser extensions can stay in your working day long after you've forgotten why you installed them. That tiny toolbar icon may represent a bigger arrangement than you remember making. Rich explores what extension permissions describe, from website data to other browser capabilities, and why broad...
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ClickFix: When a CAPTCHA Asks You to Run a Command
You came for a conference agenda, and the website wants proof you're human. ClickFix can hide behind that familiar check, with instructions that deserve a much closer look. Rich follows the moment a fake CAPTCHA, a test meant to distinguish people from automated visitors, changes what it asks you...
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Last Seen - When the Phones Woke Up (Episode 4)
Episode 4: When the Phones Woke Up Finding one another doesn’t fix the city. There are still people waiting for news, families searching for loved ones, and neighborhoods trying to function without the systems they depend on. Then the phones begin waking up. In the final chapter of Last Seen,...
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Last Seen - The Meeting Place (Episode 3)
Episode 3: The Meeting Place Leah and her parent are both moving across the city, but every piece of information arrives too late. Each new clue leads to another place the other person has already left. With phones, maps, and location sharing still unreliable, a forgotten family emergency plan…
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Last Seen - The Rumor (Episode 2)
Episode 2: The Rumor A broken voice message offers one clue: “We’re going to St—” But St. where? As Leah’s parent searches hospitals, shelters, and gridlocked streets, the communications outage creates another problem. Reliable information is moving slowly, while rumors are racing across the…
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Last Seen - No Signal (Episode 1)
Plaintext is doing something different this September. Instead of breaking down one cybersecurity concept, we’re telling one story across four short episodes. In Episode One of Last Seen, an ordinary communications outage begins with a frozen card reader, missing messages, and apps that no longer...
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Google Selfie Account Recovery: Convenience vs. Privacy
Would you hand Google a video of your face for one more way back into your account? That question gets harder when you are locked out, holding a new phone, and missing every recovery route you thought would save you. In this episode of Plaintext with Rich, we look at Google's selfie video sign-in...
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AI Security Test Escape: Why Agent Containment Failed
An AI security test was supposed to stay inside a controlled environment. Instead, the models found an unexpected route to the public Internet and reached real Hugging Face infrastructure while pursuing benchmark answers. In this episode of Plaintext with Rich, we unpack how an OpenAI cyber...
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PTC Windchill Vulnerability: Why Your Product Blueprints Are at Risk
A company can lose its most valuable product plans without a broken lock, an encrypted laptop, or an obvious warning on the screen. The first clear sign may be an extortion email claiming the files are already gone. This episode of Plaintext with Rich explains the attacks disclosed against PTC...
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CVE-2026-50522: Why SharePoint Patching Is Only Step One
A critical SharePoint alert arrives, the update goes in, and the ticket closes. But what if an attacker entered before the lock was fixed and left with secrets that still work? In this episode of Plaintext with Rich, Rich explains why CVE-2026-50522 is more than an ordinary patch story. The...
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AutoJack Attack: How Malicious Pages Hijack AI Browsing Agents
You told your AI assistant to book a flight and compare hotels. You come back, and it did all of that. It also ran commands on your machine that you never approved. What just happened? This episode unpacks AutoJack, a demonstrated attack pattern where malicious web pages hijack AI browsing agents...
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North Korea Mastra NPM Supply Chain Attack: How It Works
You installed a dependency before lunch. Tests passed, app booted, nothing looked wrong. By dinner, your machine had quietly run someone else's code. This episode covers the Mastra npm supply chain compromise Microsoft attributed to North Korea linked threat actors. We break down how postinstall...
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Patch Tuesday 206 Vulnerabilities: AI Discovery vs Remediation Speed
Your update dashboard keeps climbing. Not ten fixes, not fifty. Two hundred and six security patches waiting for approval, and everyone is asking if work stops now. That was June 2026, the largest Patch Tuesday on record. This episode covers why record patch volumes are becoming normal, what...
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Instagram AI Takeover: How Attackers Exploited Meta Support Bots
Your profile photo vanishes. Your email is changed. A password reset you never requested lands in someone else's inbox. You're locked out of your own Instagram account, and you didn't click a single suspicious link. In early 2026, attackers manipulated Meta's AI support chatbot to approve…
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FortiBleed: When Your Firewall Becomes the Front Door
Your firewall is supposed to be the thing that keeps attackers out. FortiBleed is the story of what happens when it becomes the way in. In June 2026, roughly 86,644 sets of working Fortinet credentials turned up circulating among attackers across 194 countries. On June 18th, CISA issued an...
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Post-Quantum Cryptography: Start the Inventory Before Q-Day
You don't inventory your house the morning of the move. You start months before. So why are most organizations still treating post-quantum cryptography as a 2035 problem? Episode 31 of Plaintext with Rich treats the post-quantum crypto migration as what it actually is. A logistics problem, not a...
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Cybersecurity Careers and AI: The Squeeze and the Opening
Someone pulled Rich aside at a conference recently. Six years in IT, ready to break into security, and asking the question more people ask every week. Should I even bother right now? Here's what the data actually shows. Episode 30 of Plaintext with Rich unpacks the cybersecurity career paradox of...
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Supply Chain Attacks: How One Update Hit OpenAI
A routine software update. No phishing. No sketchy download. Then a security team finds the unthinkable: trusted code has been hijacked, and the breach rode in through the exact channels engineers rely on every day. I walk through the supply chain attacks that piled up across April and May 2026,...
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Microsoft Exchange Zero-Day Under Attack: One Email Hijacks OWA
It's Monday morning. You open the third email of the day. Nothing visible happens, but in the background, an attacker just borrowed the proof you were logged in. Episode 28 of Plaintext with Rich is a hot take on CVE-2026-42897, the Microsoft Exchange Server zero-day under active exploitation…
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Work-Life Balance in Cybersecurity: The Structural Fix
You finish at 6:00pm. At 6:47 you reopen the laptop, 'just to check something.' By 9:00 the evening is gone. The boundary didn't fail tonight. It was never there. Episode 27 of Plaintext with Rich closes the Month of Mindfulness, a five-week series on self-care for people working in security and...
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Cybersecurity Burnout: Not a Character Flaw, a System Problem
You're reading a breach report. Third one this month. Last year a story like this would have lit something in you. Today you scroll past it. That's not you. That's the bill. Episode 26 of Plaintext with Rich is the fourth installment of the Month of Mindfulness, a five-week series on self-care…
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Physical Health in Cybersecurity: The Body Keeps the Receipts
It's Friday morning. You stand up to refill your water and your back doesn’t move the way it used to. The systems are up and running smoothly. Your body hasn’t gotten the same memo. Episode 25 of Plaintext with Rich is the third installment of the Month of Mindfulness, a five-week series on...
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Spiritual Health in Cybersecurity: The Why Behind the Work
Spiritual health on a cybersecurity podcast sounds like a stretch. Stay with us. Because somewhere between the vendor pitches, the patch cycles, and the 3 a.m. page, a lot of us stopped working for the why and started working for the number. Episode 24 of Plaintext with Rich is the second...
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Mental Health in Cybersecurity: The Weight of Vigilance
It's 6:47 a.m. The incident was contained hours ago. The systems are fine. You're the one still running hot. This episode opens the Month of Mindfulness, a five-week Plaintext with Rich series on mental health, spiritual health, physical health, burnout, and work-life balance for people working…
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Threat Intelligence: Why Most Organizations Get It Backwards
A dashboard lights up with indicators of compromise. The analyst copies the top five into a ticket, tags it "actionable," and sends it to the SOC. Nobody reads it not because they don't care, but because it didn't tell them what to do or why it mattered. That's not an intelligence failure. That's…
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Roll for Security: What D&D Teaches About Cyber Defense
The fighter absorbs hits up front. The rogue finds traps before the party walks into them. The cleric keeps everyone alive when things go wrong. And the bard convinces the people with resources to actually fund the quest. Nobody does everything. Everybody has a role. Now replace the dungeon with...
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Why Reading Code Makes You Dangerous (In a Good Way)
A vulnerability advisory drops on a Tuesday. Two people read the same report. One sees a severity score and waits for a patch. The other understands what a heap-based buffer overflow actually means and starts reducing risk before a fix even exists. This episode breaks down why code literacy is a...
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Hacking on Screens and Pages: Pop Culture That Shaped Cybersecurity
Someone sits down at a keyboard, mashes keys for six seconds, and says "I'm in." Every security professional dies a little inside but that scene is probably the reason half of us got into this field. This episode walks through the movies, TV shows, books, graphic novels, and video games that…
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Linux vs. Windows vs. macOS: Where Security Actually Differs
People love to ask which operating system is the most secure. That's the wrong shape of question. Each one is designed for a different job, and that shapes how it gets attacked. This episode clears up what Linux actually is, how it compares to Windows and macOS, and why the differences matter for...
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APIs: The Control Points Hiding Inside Every App
You tap a button and a ride shows up. You check out online and your bank approves it in seconds. It feels automatic. But nothing in software is automatic. Something received a request, decided it was valid, did some work, and sent back a response. That something is an API. This episode breaks…
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Securing AI at Work: What the Chat Box Actually Touches
At 4:47 p.m., someone pastes a customer escalation into an AI assistant and asks it to rewrite the tone. The reply is perfect. It also includes a private note from the internal thread. No breach. No attacker. Just a new workflow that doesn't know what should stay inside. This episode breaks down...
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AI Is an Umbrella Word (And That's the Problem)
Every company says they're using AI. Some mean chatbots. Some mean automation. Some mean statistics with a new logo. If everything is AI, the word stops meaning anything. This episode untangles what people actually mean when they say "AI" by breaking the umbrella into its real components. It…
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Why Security Fails When Everyone Is Right
The access made sense. The exception was justified. The shortcut saved time. Each decision worked on its own. And somehow, together, they added up to failure. This episode tackles the uncomfortable truth that most security failures aren't caused by ignorance or carelessness. They're caused by...
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Zero Trust: What It Actually Means Beyond the Buzzword
The breach didn't come through a broken firewall. It walked in through a valid login. Nothing exploded. Nothing looked suspicious at first. Someone just signed in and kept going. This episode clears up what Zero Trust actually is and what it isn't. It's not a product, not a box you install, and…
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Supply Chain Cybersecurity: When the Breach Starts Upstream
You can lock down every system you own. Patch everything. Train everyone. And still lose control, because the failure didn't start with you. It started somewhere upstream. This episode breaks down supply chain cybersecurity by explaining why attackers who can't reach you directly look for someone...
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Phishing and Social Engineering: Why the Strongest Defense Is Being Slower
You don't need to break a system if someone will open it for you. You don't need malware if a message feels urgent enough. Most modern breaches don't start with code. They start with a conversation. This episode breaks down phishing and social engineering by explaining why these attacks keep...
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Ransomware and Double Extortion: Why Backups Alone Don't Save You Anymore
You don't get locked out first. You get watched. Someone maps your systems quietly, copies your data quietly, and waits until they're sure you can't avoid the conversation. Only then do the screens go dark. This episode breaks down how ransomware actually works today and why double extortion...
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IoT Security: Why Every Smart Device Is a Computer That Inherits Risk
Your house didn't suddenly become unsafe. It just became chatty. Little devices, quietly talking to the internet, all day, all night. Most of them were never meant to be guarded. This episode explains IoT security by starting with a translation: if a device needs an app to work and Wi-Fi to…
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Cloud Security: Why Identity and Configuration Are the Real Perimeter
Nothing broke. Nothing crashed. No alarms went off. Someone clicked a box, someone skipped a setting, someone assumed the default was safe. And the cloud did exactly what it was told. This episode explains cloud security by starting with the most important shift: in the cloud, identity is the...
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Passkeys and Passwordless Login: Why Shared Secrets Are the Problem
You don't lose access to an account because someone knows your name. You lose access because they reused something you were told to keep secret. For years, the internet has worked on copying secrets and then acting surprised when copies escape. This episode breaks down passwordless authentication...
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Quantum Computing and Encryption: Why "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" Matters
Some secrets are meant to stay secret for decades. Medical histories. Legal records. Trade agreements. Now imagine someone copying all of it today. Not to read it. Just to wait. Because someday, the lock changes. This episode explains what quantum computing actually threatens about encryption and...
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The Dark Web: Where Stolen Data Gets a Price Tag
When your data is taken, it doesn't fall into a void. It moves. It gets packaged. It gets priced. And while you're changing a password, someone else is deciding how many times they can reuse your name. This episode strips away the mythology around the dark web and explains what it actually is: a...
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Identity Theft: Why Data Breaches Don't Stay Abstract
Nobody needs to take anything from your pocket to steal your identity. They don't need your wallet or your phone. They just need information that already exists, and most of it didn't come from you. This episode breaks down how identity theft actually works and why it's happening more now than...
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AI Deepfakes: When Trust Becomes the Attack Surface
Someone calls you, sounds exactly like your boss, uses the phrases they always use, and says they need help right now. You don't hesitate. But what if the voice is real and the person isn't? This episode breaks down AI deepfakes: audio, video, and images created by AI to convincingly impersonate...
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What Cybersecurity Actually Is (And Why It's Everyone's Job)
You lock your doors at night. Not because you expect a break-in. Because the world is messy and you'd rather sleep. Cybersecurity is the digital version of that decision. This episode strips cybersecurity all the way down to what it actually means: protecting digital things that matter from being...
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Plaintext with Rich: Security and Tech Without the Jargon
Most tech talk feels like it was written for someone else. Too many acronyms, too much fear, and not enough clarity. That changes here. This is the first episode of Plaintext with Rich, and it lays out a simple promise: short, story-driven breakdowns of cybersecurity and technology that swap…
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About this show
Cybersecurity is an everyone problem. So why does it always sound like it’s only for IT people?
Each week, Rich takes one topic, from phishing to ransomware to how your phone actually tracks you, and explains it in plain language in under ten minutes or less. No buzzwords. No condescension. Just the stuff you need to know to stay safer online, explained like you’re a smart person who never had anyone break it down properly. Because you are!
Hosted by
Rich Greene
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