Packet Protector

Latest Episodes:

PP131: Making Security Awareness Training Actually Effective; Plus, How IT and OT Overlaps Oct 20, 2026

Show notes

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 »

PP130: News Roundup—FBI and Pentagon Breached, AI Amplifies Threat Actors, UK Rolls Out Passkey Option, and More Oct 13, 2026

Show notes

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 »

PP129: Inline Segmentation – HPE Networking’s Easy Button for Zero Trust (Sponsored) Oct 06, 2026

Show notes

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 »

PP128: The Unseen Impacts of AI on Vulnerability Research Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

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 »

PP127: Network Configuration and State Visibility at Scale with Unimus (Sponsored) Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

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 »

PP126: Trying (and Failing) the CCIE Security Exam Sep 15, 2026

Show notes

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 »

PP125: News Roundup—Cyberattack Impacts Pacemakers, OpenAI Publishes Eye-Opening Postmortem, and More Sep 08, 2026

Show notes

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 »

PP124: How Coruna, DarkSword, and Other Exploits Slice Up Apple iPhones Sep 01, 2026

Show notes

Coruna and DarkSword are exploit frameworks that have successfully targeted Apple iPhones to steal cryptocurrency and harvest data including messages, email, location data, and browsing history. On today’s show we trace the provenance of these exploits (Coruna was originally developed by a contractor for the US government), their rapid evolution in the cyber underworld, and... Read more »

PP123: Using Gridctl to Keep MCP Configs From Leaking Secrets Aug 25, 2026

Show notes

If you’ve been spinning up AI tools — Claude Desktop, Cursor, Copilot, and so on — there’s a decent chance that API keys, credentials, and access tokens are sitting in plaintext on your laptop. With MCP, every quickstart guide tells you to paste your credentials right into a config file. That was a bad habit... Read more »

PP122: Using Burp Suite to Understand How Apps Collect and Share Our Data Aug 18, 2026

Show notes

Zack Whittaker is a journalist for TechCrunch and author of the newsletter “This Week In Security.” He recently wrote a post describing how he uses Burp Suite, an open source penetration testing tool, to see what data apps are collecting from users, and what other sites those apps share that data with. Zack joins JJ... Read more »

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