This is part two of our mashup of recent surveys. This time we talk with Tom Tovar, CEO of Appdome about their comprehensive annual survey of consumer attitudes regarding security in digital technology. The good news is there is a groundswell of security "consciousness" regarding the subject. The bad news is the consumers are not confident that corporations even care.

This week, a two-parter. I’m still trying to make sense of all the surveys and studies sent to me. Between trying to figure out if they are plagiarized, use inadequate samples, are a lame attempt at self-promotion or are actually good data is almost a full-time job. Luckily I got a couple of good ones this month and am doing another mashup.

Today’s interview is with Frank Teruel, CFO of Arkose Labs. We are talking about a finding in their latest survey showing that managers and developers of apps are dealing with no small amount of stress I how to deal with adversarial AIs. Later this week, I hope to post a second interview of where consumers are in this mess. Then I’ll wrap it up next week with an article that looks into the potential of actually controlling the damage cause by AI.

Also, an abbreviated threat report from the folks at Fletch.ai.

This episode includes our weekly top cyber threats with help from Fletch and this week Cyjax, and a shot interview with cybersecurity contrarian James Bore, a consultant in the UK with a kindred spirit. The interview is introducing the theme for Cyber Protection Magazine next year. Put up or shut up.

The past decade has been filled with optimism in the tech sector about what they thought they could accomplish. Social media companies thought they could democratize the internet and provide a public square for free speech. Hardware companies thought they could, make computers so fast they could replace the human brain. AI companies thought they could make a computer program smarter than humans. And cybersecurity companies were positive that if every company would use their products they could stop cybercrime.

None of that is close to being true. In some cases it has proven to be absolutely false.

So we are going to spend a lot of time debunking assumptions and looking at what needs doing.

I received more than dozen studies and reports on the "state of cybersecurity" all with different foci depending on the company that was pushing the document. It seems like they are replacing press releases as a primary marketing tool.

But there was one thing that jumped out of me. Almost every one of them had a throwaway line that customers had #zerotrust in the effiicacy of the tools and services they bought to keep them secure. Of course that's what I went after.

We talked to executives from Keepit, Cogility, and Protegrity

Here's our top three threat reports for the week. Hackers are targeting gambling apps on mobile devices and obsolete Microsoft products. Thanks to the folks at Fletch for the info

Our friends at Fletch.AI dropped a bunch of threat reports this week, here's what we see as the top three.

I bet you never heard of FHE. Me neither. Then I got a pitch about it. Tried to ignore it because I had never herd of it, but they were insistent. Turns out to be interesting.

Fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, has been talked about for about five years but not it has its very own industry association and NIST is starting to take it very seriously. It doesn't eliminate quantum encryption standards, but it might be a better defense against nation state attempts to break the strongest modern encryption, although I still think that's more a fever dream than a potential reality.

One of the members of the new association with the unfortunate name of FHETCH, Niobium put me in front of the chief product officer, Jorge Myszne, to give me the lowdown on this tech.

After getting knocked for a loop with a dose of Covid I'm slowly crawling back to the desk and providing some timely advice regarding current and predicted threat reports from our friends at Fletch.

Quick, what is the biggest single category of cybercrime today?

If you said pig butchering, you get a gold star. (If you said ransomware you need to stop believe press releases). It's big. $75 billion in stolen funds, mostly cryptocurrency last year alone. And it wasn't from lonely elderly people.

We talked with Arkose Labs CEO Kevin Gosschalk about the growing phenomenon and how you can defend yourself. (Hint: don't be naive)

Firts, apologies for the sound quality. Tried out a new microphone and I definitely do not like it. Going back to the tried and true. But it stands as an example of what we are talking about today. When people from one discipline start talking about moving into another discipline where they lack expertise, things go haywire. Such is the case with the digital world and energy production.

The big news this week is Microsoft plans to open up Three Mile Island Nuclear power plant to power their planned AI datacenter. Joe Basques and I have a frank discussion about how the AI/Social Media/Internet industry just lacks the knowledge of how to do this right and with the current path, chaos is bound to reign,