The CyberCall Podcast

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What 997 Responses Say About CMMC’s Future Nov 02, 2026

Show notes

Jason Miller, Executive Editor of the Federal News Network put out a two-part investigation last week on the CMMC pause, and we are really glad he agreed to join The CyberCall, because he got access to DoD’s own RFI results and the task force summary.

When the pause was announced in July, we were told it was about cost, burden and not having enough assessors. Jason’s reporting looks at each of those against what industry actually told DoD. The average assessment cost respondents reported was around $47,000, not the $600,000 figure we heard. Assessment capacity was never more than about half used during Phase 1. And most of the cost people complained about traces back to implementing 800-171, which hasn’t gone anywhere.

Part two gets into the options the task force laid out, including restarting Phase 2 with a smaller group, moving to Rev 3, and fixing CUI marking.

So we’ll start with what he found, then get into where this is heading and what it means for the 2,400 or so companies that already have their Level 2 certification. Jason, thanks for being here.

Beyond the Fine Print: Contracting in the Age of AI Oct 26, 2026

Show notes

For years, MSPs have been working to clarify where their responsibility ends and their customers' responsibility begins. AI is complicating this distinction even further.

Your customers are deploying AI solutions, often without your knowledge. Your engineers are using AI to troubleshoot, automate, and support those same customers. And increasingly, the vendors you depend on are embedding AI into the platforms you use every day.

Here's the problem.

Just because you manage the technology doesn't necessarily mean you've agreed to manage the risk.

But does your customer understand that distinction? More importantly, does your contract reflect it?

Today we're joined by attorney Eric Tilds, whose firm represents more than 600 MSPs and Ken Ivey, CEO of TechSource.

We're going to examine the growing disconnect between AI adoption, customer expectations, and contractual responsibility. Not just what the law says, but what an MSP can realistically control, what it should be responsible for, and how to avoid discovering those boundaries for the first time during a lawsuit.

Two Critical PHP Flaws: What MSPs Should Do Before and After Today’s Patch Oct 21, 2026

Show notes

We put together a special Wednesday CyberCall after two critical PHP vulnerabilities, known as php2shell, leaked a day before their planned disclosure. John Hammond of Huntress and John Strand of Black Hills Information Security joined me to talk through what happened and what MSPs should be doing about it.

John Hammond explained why a flaw in PHP itself matters so much. It sits underneath WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, and many other platforms, and it can lead to full remote code execution on the server. He also shared why he took his own WordPress site offline until the patch was released. John Strand walked through the exposure numbers, with more than 230,000 internet-facing servers on PHP 7.x, 8.0, and 8.1 alone. He also explained how AI has shortened the time between a patch and a working exploit.

We also covered:

Whether coordinated disclosure still works when leaks happen this easily
Why “the website isn’t our responsibility” won’t hold up when a client gets breached
How to explain the risk to business owners in terms they care about
What to do with clients stuck on older PHP versions that won’t get a patch
Why you shouldn’t run the early proof of concept code that’s circulating online

If your clients have websites, ecommerce stores, or any software that runs on PHP, this is worth a listen before the end of the week.

Breaking Down the SkyKick Tenant Access Incident Oct 19, 2026

Show notes

Even if you've never used ConnectWise Cloud Backup, formerly SkyKick, this week's incident holds a lesson for every MSP. On October 15, a threat actor used a stolen credential belonging to that app to sign in to customer Microsoft 365 tenants. Huntress has confirmed more than 160 so far, and it believes the threat actor also abused several of ConnectWise's Cloud Management apps. ConnectWise has shut off Cloud Backup access while it investigates, so backups are paused for the MSPs and clients who rely on it.

What makes this one interesting is how the threat actor got in. They used a trusted app that already had broad access to client tenants, and all of us have apps like that in our clients' environments. In one tenant, Huntress also found a ConnectWise app that made itself a Global Administrator and then added new keys to two other apps, including Huntress's own. With Global Administrator rights, an app can reach a lot more than backups.

Today we're going to cover what we know, what we don't, and what MSPs should be doing this week, whether you were affected or not, including how to handle regulated clients.

Joining us are Andrew Brandt from Huntress, Kelvin Tegelaar from CyberDrain, John Strand from Black Hills Information Security and Antisyphon Training, and Eric Tilds for the legal perspective.

Unpacking Huntress’ Tragic Quadrant Oct 12, 2026

Show notes

Huntress just released what they're calling the Tragic Quadrant. Instead of ranking threats by how much press they get, it ranks them by two things: how often Huntress actually sees them, and how close they put a business to real damage. That's based on data from more than 5 million endpoints, 15 million identities, and nearly 300,000 organizations, and a lot of those are our clients.

What caught my attention is the top right corner, where the threats are both common and dangerous. That's RMM abuse, mailbox manipulation, and account takeover. If you're an MSP, at least one of those sits squarely in your lane, because the most common threat on the list is attackers using the same remote tools we use every day.

We'll walk through the quadrant, talk about what Jamie Levy's team is seeing, and get into what MSPs can do about it this quarter. Bring your questions as we go.

MSPs & AI: What’s Working, What’s Not Oct 05, 2026

Show notes

Today we're talking about MSPs and AI: what's working and what's not.

When it comes to AI, our clients are moving fast. They're turning on Copilot, using ChatGPT and starting to run AI agents that can get into their email, files and financial systems. A lot of the time, they're doing it without telling us.

Most companies running agents don't have written policies for them, and almost half don't have a reliable list of what's running. Those are large companies. Our SMB clients are likely further behind.

The stakes are going up too. Last week the FTC opened an investigation into the major AI labs, and the FTC chairman has said the people who instruct these agents are responsible for what they do.

That's a lot of risk, but it's also a real opportunity for MSPs to step in and help.

Joining us today is Ryan Davis, CISO at New Charter. Ryan has led security at NS1 (an IBM Company) and Veracode, and now at one of the larger MSPs in the country, so he's seen AI from a lot of different angles. We'll get his take on what's working, where MSPs and their clients are running into trouble, and how we can turn this into a service.

EvilTokens Take Down & Copilot's Biggest Announcement Yet Sep 28, 2026

Show notes

Two big stories from Microsoft landed within days of each other.

First, EvilTokens. Last week, Nathan Taylor told us some of his co-managed clients were getting compromised through device code flow. Then Microsoft published a report showing just how big this got. EvilTokens is phishing sold as a subscription, and it uses AI at every step. It hit more than 12,000 inboxes across over 10,000 organizations, and the victims land on the real Microsoft sign-in page.

Second, Microsoft announced what Satya calls the biggest Copilot update yet: Home, Code and Autopilot. Autopilot is an agent with its own identity that works in your tenant around the clock. Code lets anyone build apps, and a lot of it runs on usage-based billing.

Put those two stories side by side. Attackers are stealing tokens at scale, and Microsoft is about to put autonomous agents with their own identities into every tenant we manage. That's a big opportunity and a big responsibility for MSPs.

To help us make sense of it, we've got the perfect guest. Dux Raymond Sy, Chief Transformation Officer at Avepoint.

Here's the story from Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/09/22/unmasking-eviltokens-getting-to-the-root-of-device-code-phishing/?_sp=f01b38e4-937e-48d4-b3ed-b1afe836185d.1790118273927

The AI Threat Hype vs. the BEC Reality Sep 21, 2026

Show notes

Everywhere you look right now, we're hearing about AI-powered cyberattacks and what attackers might be capable of next. But while we're preparing for the attack of tomorrow, what are MSPs actually fighting today?

Nathan Taylor at Sourcepass told me it's been non-stop business email compromise and Microsoft 365 hardening. And one attack in particular is exploding: device-code phishing.

What's concerning is that attackers aren't necessarily exploiting some new vulnerability. In many cases, they're abusing legitimate Microsoft authentication workflows, stealing sessions and tokens, and turning trusted identities against us.

So today I want to separate the hype from what's actually happening in the field.

How are attackers getting into M365 environments? Why isn't MFA always stopping them? What are MSPs getting wrong when hardening Microsoft 365? And what should we be doing differently right now?

Jensen Huang Says Cyber Fear Is a Sales Pitch. Is He Wrong? Sep 14, 2026

Show notes

Two weeks ago, OpenAI published an open letter, as we discussed, during the previous CyberCall. Over a hundred companies signed it, warning that AI enabled cyberattacks are about to get a lot worse. A week later, they announced Daybreak, their cybersecurity solution, along with a billion dollars in subsidized access to their own platform for water utilities, hospitals, and community banks. Around the same time, Bill Gates published his own essay saying the cybersecurity experts he talks to are genuinely scared about what's coming.

Then this week, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia stood on stage at a Goldman Sachs conference and said what we’ve been discussing, out loud. He said the reason everyone's talking about cybersecurity right now is that the industry is getting ready to launch some products. His words were, why not create demand by creating a problem.

So is the threat real, or is FUD the pitch deck? And either way, neither OpenAI's letter nor Daybreak mentions an MSP once. So where does that leave the people actually running security for these organizations?

Today we have Corey Nachreiner with us. He's CISO of WatchGuard, a company that sells entirely through the MSP channel. We will discuss these topics and the rise of Open Weight models and more.

Frontier Models Call for Collective Action on Cyber Defenses Aug 31, 2026

Show notes

Last week, OpenAI published an open letter and over a hundred companies signed on. CrowdStrike, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, AWS, Anthropic, basically every major name in cybersecurity and enterprise tech. The letter warns that AI-enabled cyberattacks are about to get faster and more sophisticated, and it specifically calls out hospitals, water treatment plants, and critical infrastructure as the places most at risk.

It lays out a plan: every organization needs to raise its security standards, cybersecurity companies need to build AI-powered defenses, governments need to fund the utilities that can't fund themselves, and frontier AI labs — the OpenAIs, the Anthropics — need to hand tools and support directly to the defenders who need it most.

I went through every name on that signatory list. Not one of them is an MSP. Not one of them is the company that actually shows up when a small-town water authority's systems go down at 2am.

So today on CyberCall, I've got Alan McDonald with me, as he runs an MSP that services a number of municipal water districts. And I want to find out: when the biggest names in cybersecurity write a letter about protecting critical infrastructure, where does someone like Alan actually fit in?

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