PP131: Making Security Awareness Training Actually Effective; Plus, How IT and OT Overlaps

It’s a packed security news roundup. We start with a multi-billion dollar crypto heist, plus a hardware supply chain attack against crypto wallets, and then discuss the PHP fire drill. European grocery stores feel the heat from OT cyber attacks, and Google discovers an OEM was slipping malware past Google’s security checks into Android-based set-top... Read more »

On today’s Packet Protector we get a good look at HPE Networking’s SRX firewall, including recently updated product families for branch locations. We’ll get an overview of speeds and feeds, and then dig into threat protection capabilities, AI integration, and more. If your firewall fleet is getting long in the tooth and you’re thinking about... Read more »

On today’s episode we talk about what security teams can learn about OT security from the Death Star. Guest John Burns recaps his CYBR.SEC.CON talk “The Empire Had a SOC — And Still Got Blown Up Twice”. We jump off from this delightfully nerdy framing to get into serious matters around OT security, including problems... Read more »

In this double-header episode, JJ and Drew talk with two cybersecurity experts. First up, Jayson E Street talks about how to make security awareness training effective and engaging. Instead of having employees sit through a video or lecture, or get scolded for failing a phishing test, Jayson’s approach, which he calls Silver Teaming, engages employees... Read more »

Our October news roundup is a boiling cauldron of consternation. The FBI and the Pentagon suffered breaches, serious exploits are targeting network gear, and researchers discover a lone threat actor who successfully hit hundreds of sites with the help of AI agents. Infostealer malware is impersonating brands such as LastPass to trick users into downloading... Read more »

Sponsor HPE Networking comes to Packet Protector to talk about zero trust inline segmentation. This is a feature available in Juniper switches that can segment LAN traffic using group policy tags without the complexity associated with VXLAN or other segmentation mechanisms. On today’s show we dig into how inline segmentation works, common use cases, how... Read more »

AI models have proven very effective at finding software vulnerabilities. This has dramatically increased the number of people (and agents) who can find bugs. But the number of experts who can verify and validate those bugs, and write fixes, has stayed exactly the same. On today’s Packet Protector we talk with Trey Ford, Chief Strategy... Read more »

Today’s Packet Protector is a sponsored show that sits very nicely at the networking/security intersection. Our sponsor is NetCore, which makes the Unimus network configuration management software. Unimus supports network automation, configuration management and backup, change management, and auditing and compliance. We dive into how Unimus provides visibility into both the running config and the... Read more »

Today we talk about trying and failing. More specifically, guest Keith Tokash wrote a pair of blogs on Packet Pushers about taking, but not passing, the CCIE Security written exam. Failure’s a hard thing to talk about, particularly in this age where every public utterance on LinkedIn feels like it has to document one’s ever-upward... Read more »

If it feels like everything is on fire, today’s News Roundup will not dispel that feeling. We discuss consumer routers that ship with factory-installed backdoors, US law enforcement agencies shutting down hacking domains, and how a threat actor tied to China is targeting Cisco IOS-XR routers. Android-based auto infotainment systems are susceptible to malware, OpenAI... Read more »