In this episode, we uncover the reality of “Zero Trust theater”—where organizations invest in flashy front gates like MFA prompts, dashboards, and vendor logos while leaving the walls behind them flimsy and unprotected. Listeners will learn how these illusions are built, where attackers push through the cardboard, and the specific tactics adversaries use to bypass props. From consent phishing and token replay to legacy carve-outs and SaaS trust chains, the episode paints a vivid picture of why optics without structure fail.

You’ll also gain practical insight into the skills that strengthen real Zero Trust. By the end, you’ll understand how to operationalize least privilege, enforce identity at every hop, design microsegmentation that actually holds, and measure resilience through meaningful metrics rather than green lights. This is more than theory—it’s a guide to recognizing illusions, breaking free from stagecraft, and building durable frameworks that withstand pressure.

Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.

This is your weekly cyber news roll-up for the week ending November 21st, 2025. We track a crippling cyberattack on a major automaker that shut factories and erased hundreds of millions in profit. We also follow a suspected China aligned espionage group that turned an artificial intelligence, A I, coding agent into an automated intrusion assistant. Fresh consumer and supporter data breaches, including a social engineering hit on a food delivery platform and exposure of political affiliation records, show how one person or vendor mistake can unlock large data sets. Critical flaws in Fortinet FortiWeb web application firewalls and an actively exploited Windows kernel bug round out the list of urgent patches for the week.

You will hear clear run downs of each of the week’s biggest stories, from industrial shutdowns and agent driven intrusions to social engineering breaches and vendor failures. We explain how third party services, software supply chain projects, law enforcement case systems, and cloud platforms like Azure are being probed and stressed, and what that means for executives, security teams, builders, and students trying to stay ahead. Along the way we call out who is most exposed, which signals in logs and dashboards deserve a second look, and which updates should move to the front of the queue. The episode is designed as a fast, practical briefing that you can replay or share with your teams, available at DailyCyber.news.

Don’t wait to learn the fire drill while the building’s on fire. In this Cyber Talk developed by BareMetalCyber.com, Army veteran and cyber resilience strategist Daniel Hammond shows how to move past check-the-box drills and turn exercises into a core learning culture. He walks through goal-driven planning (so every exercise serves a sponsor’s real need), the HSEEP spectrum from seminars and workshops to tabletops, drills, and full-scale events, plus when to go operations-based, run no-notice tests, and invite regulators, comms, and third-party partners into the room. 

Daniel shares hard-won lessons from building programs at Fortune 500s: validating response playbooks, avoiding “single-layer defense” with purple teaming, closing gaps regulators spot across your industry, and using board briefings to turn findings into funding. If you lead incident response, risk, or compliance—and you want confident teams that discover blind spots before adversaries do—this talk is for you. Join us, bring questions, and leave with practical patterns you can run this quarter.

In this episode, we cut through the alphabet soup of cybersecurity—EDR, NDR, XDR, MDR, and even the tongue-in-cheek WTF-DR. You’ll learn what each of these acronyms really means, how they differ, and where they overlap. More importantly, you’ll gain clarity on how they fit together in practice, why no single tool is enough, and how to build a layered defense without wasting budget on hype. Through clear explanations and vivid scenarios, the episode brings order to the chaos of detection and response technologies.

Listening will sharpen your ability to evaluate tools, vendors, and services with confidence. You’ll improve your skills in mapping security investments to real outcomes, spotting hidden gaps in coverage, and asking the right questions about integration, costs, and response workflows. Whether you’re a security leader, analyst, or simply navigating the jargon jungle, this episode equips you to separate buzzwords from business value.

Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.

This is your weekly cyber news roll-up for the week ending November 14th, 2025. This week centers on phones, clouds, and core identity systems under pressure from well funded attackers who prefer to move quietly. You will hear how new spyware campaigns abuse Samsung devices and WhatsApp features, while hotel and travel scams blend real booking details with fresh malware delivery. The episode also walks through developer and infrastructure risks, from poisoned code editor extensions to critical flaws in firewalls and container platforms that can turn one foothold into broad access. It all adds up to a week where leaders and defenders need to rethink how personal devices, travel workflows, and cloud control planes intersect in daily operations.

Across these stories you will move from data exposure at an artificial intelligence company ecosystem to massive breach data feeds landing in tracking services, and from long running espionage inside a policy nonprofit to new tools that help small businesses fight review extortion. Executives will gain a faster sense of which threats can disrupt revenue and trust, while security teams hear where to focus monitoring, patching, and multi factor authentication, M F A, improvements right now. Builders and cloud operators get practical insight into container escape flaws, risky extensions, and identity platform weaknesses that change how they should think about shared environments. Students and early career defenders can use the narrative to map how scams, espionage, and infrastructure bugs all connect in real attacks. Listen in to get the full story arc in one pass, available at DailyCyber.news.

In this episode, we explore phishing as a rigged arena where attackers decide the rules and employees become the unwilling contestants. You’ll learn how phishing has evolved from clumsy spam into precision-engineered deception powered by AI, reverse proxies, and multi-channel choreography. We unpack the psychology that adversaries exploit—urgency, authority, and scarcity—and show how identity protections, layered defenses, and cultural shifts can flip the script. From role-specific vulnerabilities to the industrialization of phishing kits, this episode equips you with a clear view of the battlefield and the tools needed to navigate it.

Listening also sharpens practical skills that directly improve resilience. You’ll gain insight into recognizing subtle red flags across devices and platforms, understanding the tactics that bypass traditional MFA, and adopting verification habits that make the safe path the easiest one. Beyond individual awareness, the episode builds leadership and organizational skills: how to embed verification into workflows, design effective simulations, and foster a culture where reporting is rewarded. By the end, you’ll see how to shift the odds, not by chance, but by readiness. Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.

This is this week’s cyber news for November third through November seventh, twenty twenty-five. The week unfolded with relentless attacks on edge infrastructure, high-stakes data breaches, and fresh discoveries in global espionage campaigns. Cisco faced active exploitation of its Secure Firewalls and routers, SonicWall confirmed a state-backed backup theft, and Conduent revealed exposure of over ten million personal records. From telecom networks to government mail servers, the week showed how attackers are targeting both the perimeter and the core of modern systems.

Listeners will hear twenty-five stories that define the shifting threat landscape — from router implants and cloud misconfigurations to insider indictments and major ransomware playbooks. Each segment stays focused on what happened, who was affected, and why it matters to defenders and decision-makers. The narrated version of this full report is available anytime at DailyCyber.news.

In this episode, The Cult of the Dashboard: Vanity Metrics Anonymous, we expose the seductive world of flashy dashboards and meaningless numbers. Listeners will learn why organizations cling to vanity metrics, how executive reports can hide more than they reveal, and what truly matters when measuring security. From the psychological pull of green stoplights to the perverse incentives that reward compliance theater, the discussion unpacks how activity counts distract from the real goal: reducing risk in the face of determined adversaries.

Beyond awareness, this episode sharpens practical skills for security leaders and practitioners. You’ll gain insight into building outcome-driven measurement programs, creating metrics that highlight exposure and effectiveness, and framing results in ways that drive decisions. The episode also helps refine executive communication, teaching how to transform numbers into narratives that motivate action instead of applause. By the end, you’ll be better equipped to design metrics that measure what attackers care about—not what looks good on a slide. Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.

This is this week’s cyber news for October 27th through October 31st, 2025. The week opens with trusted update lanes under attack and an emergency fix to protect enterprise patching. A zero day in Oracle E-Business Suite put finance and supply-chain records at risk, while a fresh B I N D issue threatened cache poisoning across hundreds of thousands of resolvers. A live Chrome exploit tied to a surveillance vendor kept risk high for targeted users, and a rebuilt ransomware toolkit reappeared with broader reach. Together, these stories show how core plumbing, business systems, and user browsers can all become first-impact points.

You will hear how agencies were ordered to patch exploited virtualization paths, how developer tokens were stolen via look-alike packages, and how a polished board-invite lure harvested executive credentials. We cover a Windows Subsystem for Linux encryptor tactic, active attacks on shop-floor software added to the K E V list, and hands-on tampering of exposed industrial controls. Also in the mix: a global identity outage, mass exploitation of abandoned plugins, near-field payment relay kits, an enclave side-channel, a crash-looping link, rumor control, and account-security policy changes. Leaders, defenders, and builders get practical takeaways, with the narrated episode available at DailyCyber.news.

In this episode of Bare Metal Cyber, we break down the monthly ritual every security team knows too well: Patch Tuesday. You’ll learn why the very act of publishing a patch creates a roadmap for attackers, how exploits move from proof-of-concept to widespread weaponization in a matter of hours, and why so many organizations struggle with the dreaded “patch gap.” We’ll also explore the speed advantage of adversaries, the realities of legacy systems, and what a 72-hour response playbook looks like when executed correctly.

Beyond awareness, this episode sharpens your practical skills. You’ll gain insight into prioritizing vulnerabilities based on real-world risk, using canary deployments and automation to patch faster with less disruption, and applying compensating controls when immediate fixes aren’t possible. Most importantly, you’ll build the mindset to treat patching as frontline defense rather than routine maintenance—transforming Breach Wednesday from a certainty into just another day.

Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.

This is the Friday Rollup for October twentieth through October twenty-fourth, twenty twenty-five. A turbulent week put resilience and identity under the microscope: a broad Amazon Web Services disruption rippled through logins and checkouts, while a Windows change broke authentication on cloned machines with duplicate S I Ds. We saw active exploitation against Oracle E-Business Suite, critical flaws in T P-Link Omada and WatchGuard Fireware, and convincing Microsoft 365 phishing hosted on Azure itself. Add in developer risks—from lagging Chromium inside A I code editors to a high-severity Kestrel bug—and the message is clear: fundamentals matter when everything is connected.

You’ll hear crisp, plain-English briefs on each item: how Magento “Session Reaper” drives checkout fraud, what Pwn two Own means for your next patch sprint, why Vidar’s speed boost and Mermaid-based prompt injection change identity defense, and how Polar Edge, ToolShell, and a Rust tar parsing flaw widen the perimeter. We also cover agent abuse, certificate subversion, and an M C P registry leak that exposed thousands of servers and keys. Leaders, defenders, and builders get concrete actions to reduce blast radius, tighten identity, and harden edge and dev tooling—available at daily cyber news dot com.

In this episode, we unpack why the popular slogan “don’t paste {Sensitive Thing} into {Cool Bot}” has become the lazy default for GenAI policy—and why it fails. Listeners will learn how vague rules fuel shadow AI, create inconsistent behavior, and ultimately increase risk rather than reduce it. We explore how to replace empty slogans with real frameworks: data tier maps, risk-based tool catalogs, guardrails that operate in real time, and a one-page policy template that employees can actually use. By the end, you’ll see why clarity, context, and culture matter more than catchy warnings.

Along the way, this episode sharpens your ability to design and evaluate AI governance in practice. You’ll build skills in risk classification, vendor evaluation, and creating guardrails that balance safety with productivity. You’ll also gain insight into cultural adoption—how to move from compliance theater to real trust. The goal isn’t just knowing what not to do, but mastering how to make the safe way the easy way. Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.

The Bare Metal Cyber — Friday Edition is your end-of-week cybersecurity intelligence wrap, turning five days of breaking threats into one fast, actionable update. For the week ending October 17th, 2025, we unpack everything from nation-state intrusions and zero-day exploits to record-setting DDoS attacks, policy moves, and vendor fallout — all explained in plain English for business leaders, defenders, and technology teams alike.

This week’s episode dives into F5’s confirmed breach where attackers stole BIG-IP source code and vulnerability data, the UK’s £14-million fine against Capita for poor breach response, and the discovery of a six-billion-record data leak from an unsecured Elasticsearch cluster. You’ll also hear how phishing campaigns spoofed LastPass and Bitwarden to install remote-control tools, why the massive “ClickFix” campaign tricked users into running malicious commands, and how Microsoft’s October patch cycle delivered 172 fixes — including six exploited zero-days — just as Windows 10 reached its support deadline.

We’ll explain how Chinese threat groups turned ArcGIS servers into backdoors, why VPNs and backup configurations became attacker blueprints, and how North Korea seeded npm with malicious packages to target developers. Plus, researchers exposed satellite traffic leaking unencrypted calls and telemetry, Apple doubled its bug bounty to $2 million, and the Aisuru botnet reached nearly thirty terabits per second in record-breaking denial-of-service floods.

Each story includes three things: what happened, why it matters, and one clear action you can take now. Whether you manage risk, run IT, or lead a security program, you’ll walk away knowing exactly where to focus your attention next week.

For more cybersecurity insights, visit BareMetalCyber.com for the full written wrap, or subscribe to the daily newsletter and podcast at DailyCyber.news — news you can use, and a daily podcast you can commute with.

In this episode, we dive into the unsettling paradox of Schrödinger’s Firewall—where your data is both safe and already compromised in the looming quantum era. Listeners will learn why today’s trusted encryption methods like RSA and ECC may soon resemble digital Swiss cheese, how Q-Day could arrive faster than expected, and what industries—from finance to healthcare to defense—stand to lose the most. We also unpack the race to post-quantum cryptography, exploring emerging algorithms, hybrid models, and the global urgency to prepare before attackers unlock decades of encrypted information.

Beyond awareness, this episode sharpens critical cybersecurity skills. You’ll gain practical insight into crypto agility, strategies for testing and adopting quantum-safe algorithms, and approaches to educating leadership teams about long-term risks. You’ll also learn how to identify vulnerable systems, evaluate vendors, and build resilience into your security architecture. By the end, you’ll be equipped not only to understand the quantum threat but to act on it with clarity and foresight. Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.

This week’s wrap cuts through the noise. We break down North Korea’s multi-billion-dollar crypto theft problem, the Salesforce-adjacent extortion wave targeting customer exports, and active exploitation against Oracle E-Business Suite. We also cover a critical Redis flaw with app-wide blast radius, Cisco edge firewall abuse with public exploit code, Zimbra’s KEV-listed email bug, GoAnywhere MFT ransomware activity, mass scanning of Palo Alto VPN portals, and a UnityVSA bug that threatens backups.

In plain English, you’ll hear why these stories matter for the business, who’s most exposed, the single action to take next, and what to watch next week. Perfect for leaders who need decisions, and defenders who need a checklist.

Subscribe for the daily brief and share this episode with your incident lead before Monday’s stand-up.

In this episode, we take on the fatigue that often comes with Zero Trust—those endless logins, rigid rules, and culture-draining compliance routines. Listeners will discover how to simplify security without weakening defenses, turn routine practices into engaging challenges, and humanize policies with humor and empathy. Through vivid examples and practical strategies, the episode shows how Zero Trust can shift from being seen as a burden to becoming a shared, sustainable approach that builds trust and enthusiasm across teams.

You’ll come away with skills that improve both leadership and everyday practice: designing policies that people actually follow, creating security habits that last, and using gamification and communication to increase engagement. We also cover strategies to prevent burnout, foster psychological safety, and build a positive culture where vigilance thrives. These are actionable takeaways for anyone leading security programs or participating on the front lines.

Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.

This is the Friday Rollup for September 29th through October 3rd, 2025. It was a week of edge-device pressure, identity weak spots, and evolving email tradecraft. We cover Red Hat’s internal GitLab intrusion, Outlook’s move to block inline SVG lures, and a critical DrayTek router RCE. We track Allianz Life’s SSN breach and CERT-UA’s CABINETRAT via Excel XLLs, plus a broader pivot from Office macros to ZIP-packed LNK files. You’ll hear why a federal shutdown slowed CISA’s KEV cadence, how OpenShift AI, OpenSSL, and OneLogin issues landed, and where Windows 10’s October 14th end-of-life raises stakes. From DNS hijacks and Exchange espionage to Cisco exposure and a long-running VMware zero-day, the signals were clear.

Ransomware is no longer just about malicious code—it’s about business models, negotiation tactics, and the psychology of fear. In this episode, we break down how ransomware gangs operate like startups, with affiliates, commissions, customer service desks, and even loyalty programs. You’ll learn how they choose victims, manipulate negotiations with countdown clocks and empathy language, and sustain their criminal economy through double extortion and crypto laundering.

By listening, you’ll sharpen your ability to recognize the psychological games attackers play, improve your response strategies under pressure, and strengthen your team’s readiness to disrupt the ransomware cycle. You’ll gain insight into building resilience through backups, playbooks, and cultural readiness while learning how to turn ransomware defense from panic-driven reaction into disciplined preparation.

Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.

In this episode, we expose the illusion of security created by SMS-based multi-factor authentication. Listeners will learn why text-message codes fail to deliver true two-factor protection, how attackers exploit SIM swaps, phishing kits, and MFA fatigue, and why compliance checkboxes don’t equal resilience. The episode unpacks the vulnerabilities in telecom infrastructure, the psychology attackers weaponize, and the step-by-step path toward phishing-resistant authentication that organizations can trust.

Beyond awareness, this episode sharpens critical security skills. Listeners will come away better equipped to evaluate MFA options, spot weak fallback mechanisms, and design identity systems that prioritize phishing resistance over convenience. Leaders and practitioners alike will gain practical insights on segmenting users, strengthening recovery processes, and guiding organizations up the maturity ladder from SMS toward cryptographic passkeys. It’s not just a story about what’s broken—it’s a roadmap to building authentication that actually holds. Produced by BareMetalCyber.com.