This episode of Crucial Tech is the beginning of a search for Holy Grail of cybersecurity: Products and services that actually make us safer without breaking the budget. There is no one company that delivers everything, but we found one that provides the crucial service of penetration testing that can give a small business a starting point for securing their data with both automated tools and enhanced with professional services cost below $100. Ronin Pentest offers an automated, web-based tool that can be used by anyone to go through the top 10 vulnerabilities as listed by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP).

For a journalist to decide what to cover and when takes some discussion and this week we decided to do our editorial meeting in a public setting so you can see how we pick what to report. In this episode, Joe Basques, Patrick Boch and Lou Covey look at the changing paradigm of Ransomware, the ethics of paying ransoms, Webscraping, Amazon Sidewalk and the state of security jobs. 

Cybercrime has been with us for a while, but the business world saw it as a minor annoyance. Luckily, the criminal world kept the cost low, requiring small ransom amounts and cash cards as a delivery mechanism. #Cryptocurrency kicked the demands up because it was easier to demand more money and easier to hide the money trail. Big ransomware demands hit the news and infrastructure was threatened. But in 2020 and 2021, law enforcement figured out some ways to track those criminals down. Extraditions began and ransoms were recovered. The gloves are coming off and CEOs find themselves squarely in the crosshairs of regulators and stakeholders along with the criminals. In September 2020, Gartner Research predicted that CEOs would be held criminally and fiscally liable for cyberattacks that harmed people physically if the company had not taken basic precautions to prevent it. We talk with Mathieu Gorge, CEO of VigiTrust and author of the Cyber Elephant in the Boardroom, about what CEOs need to be investing in to keep themselves out of jail.

This week the WomenTech Global Conference ( #WTGC2021 ) is happening on the web and we thought it would be a good idea to interview a leader in the security industry, Revital Libfran of OdiX about her career and opportunities in #cybersecurity. Plus it gives us a chance to plug this great conference. Sign up at www.womentech.net and learn more.

After several decades working in and with marketing professionals we've learned a couple of things about how marketing is done. One of the more important lessons is that marketers make their jobs much harder than it needs to be. And maybe one of the worst offenders is in the world of #cybersecurity. Patrick Boch, my cofounder of Cyber Protection Magazine, share some of our frustrations insights on how companies can promote their products and services more effectively. It really isn't that hard.

The potential of nuclear warfare is being eclipsed by the potential of cyber warfare as the ender of civilization, so I guess their is that upside. No, seriously, it's becoming apparent to rogue nations that cyber warfare is more effective, cheaper and has less chance for retaliation than a nuclear strike. We talk to cyber warfare experience Pano Yannakogeorgos from New York University about the potential devastation from cyber attack. A more in depth article on the subject is coming next week on Cyberprotection Magazine

When you peel back all the layers, digital marketing and consumer tracking on social media apps presents the most significant security flaw in our digital world. Apple's giving individual IoS users control over that decision is a big step forward into making us all safer. It also removes a lot of the hype and fraud that comes from unrestricted tracking. Joe Basques and Lou Covey answer a user question about the significance of the new feature.

Lithium-ion batteries are in almost all electronics, all electric vehicles and are expanding through the power grids worldwide to store energy during system outages. They are crucial to continued operation of “green” data centers. When you talk about renewable energy, you have to talk about where lithium-ion batteries fit in the discussion.

That’s not necessarily a good thing.

Lithium-ion technology is fraught with social, environmental, and security downsides. Forced child labor, the lack of effective recyclability, potential poisonous fires and explosions and complex, imminently hackable control systems are all aspects of the industry that just won’t be going away soon. But there is hope. There are alternatives.

This is the subject of this episode of Crucial Tech. We talk to Jack Pouchet, Vice President of marketing for Natron Energy, a company manufacturing a sodium-ion battery that lacks all the downsides of its lithium cousin and offers significant upsides that we need. The good news is that it looks like this technology will be going into large-scale production just before the Lithium-ion technology collapses under its own weight.

This interview with Warren Savage, guest researcher t the University of Maryland in IoT security is a follow up to an interview I did with him last year at the @DesignCon conference in Santa Clara. In the interview and his keynote at the show, he talked about how vulnerable the electronics supply chain was. A year later we are stuck in a semiconductor supply chain slowdown and one of the reasons is the inability to secure it. Things haven't gotten much better but Savage sees progress. This is part two of a series on supply chain.