Packet Protector

Latest Episodes:

PP121: How CYBR.SEC.CON Builds Community for Learning and Professional Development Aug 11, 2026

Show notes

Today we’re doing a crossover episode with the folks at Cybr.Sec.Media to talk about CYBR.SEC.CON, a community-driven security conference that JJ and Drew will be attending in Houston, TX September 15 and 16 2026. We talk with conference founders Michael Farnum and Sam Van Ryder about the origins of the event, and get into our... Read more »

PP120: News Roundup—AI Giants Praise Open Weight Models, Attackers Capture Captive Portals, a Tricky Mac Attack, and More Aug 04, 2026

Show notes

Packet Protector uncorks another News Roundup! We talk about attackers capturing hotels’ captive portals to steal Microsoft credentials, and the OpenAI-attacking-Hugging Face story and how it ties into a broader industry effort to keep the US government from blocking access to open weight AI models from China. Nvidia and the Linux Foundation launch separate AI... Read more »

PP119: Automating Firewall Ops To Stay Ahead of AI Threats (Sponsored) Jul 28, 2026

Show notes

There’s always been a gap between the discovery of a security issue and the time it takes to remediate. Now AI models can autonomously find weak points and chain together actions to exploit them. How does AI change the notion of “fast enough” for network defense? On today’s sponsored episode we dig into how FireMon... Read more »

PP118: IPv6 Risks In Dual-Stack Environments (i.e. Most Environments) Jul 21, 2026

Show notes

Unless you’ve intentionally migrated to all-IPv6, you’re operating in a dual-stack environment. And if you haven’t accounted for v6 in your monitoring and security, you leave yourself open to risks. Today we dig into some of those risks, including VPN breakouts and how attackers can use unmanaged v6 to bypass security tools. Our guest is... Read more »

PP117: Automating Firewall Rule Changes – A Real-World Case Study Jul 14, 2026

Show notes

Drew talks with Joao Soares, Lead IT Security Consultant, about a project Joao undertook to automate firewall rule changes. Firewall changes can be fraught in any environment, but Joao also had to contend with working in the highly-regulated energy sector. They walk through how the project went from proof-of-concept to being widely used in production,... Read more »

PP116: News Roundup—FortiBleed Reveals Password Cracking Is Alive and Kicking, Accenture Goes All-In on OT, and More Jun 30, 2026

Show notes

Looks like it’s going to be a long, hot cybersec summer. The latest news roundup covers how Microsoft 365 Copilot got turned into a data exfiltration tool, why the FortiBleed attack is about much more than compromised firewalls, and how North Korea exploited a single npm maintainer account to poison more than a hundred software... Read more »

PP115: Palo Alto Networks: Reality of 109 to 1: Securing Machine Identities and AI Agents (Sponsored) Jun 23, 2026

Show notes

Machine identities now outnumber human identities in the enterprise 109 to 1 — and most of them are running without the governance controls you’d never skip for a human employee. Service accounts, API keys, tokens, workload credentials, and a fast-growing population of autonomous AI agents: all of them need access, all of them can be... Read more »

PP114: MACsec Overview Jun 16, 2026

Show notes

MACsec (IEEE 802.1AE) encrypts Ethernet frames hop-by-hop at Layer 2 — before traffic even hits IP — making it one of the strongest protections you can put on wire. It’s been in the standards for years, hardware support is widespread, and yet most organizations aren’t running it. JJ and Drew dig into why: the hardware... Read more »

PP113: Patch Gaps, Pretexting, and AI Use for Crimes and Crimefighting: 2026 Verizon DBIR Highlights Jun 09, 2026

Show notes

The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) is a postmortem of a year’s worth of cyber incidents and breaches, and a snapshot of how well organizations are responding to actual threats. Drew and JJ share highlights from the 2026 installment, including: For the first time, vulnerability exploits top the list for initial access What a... Read more »

PP112: When You Look But Don’t Find: The Art of Knowing When to Stop Jun 02, 2026

Show notes

Starting an investigation—be it for troubleshooting, problem diagnosis, threat hunting, incident response, and so on—is fairly straightforward. There’s a question or thesis you’re pursuing, you have logs and data sources to check, and you have tools to deploy. But if you don’t find anything, does that mean there was nothing to find? Are you sure... Read more »

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